Mongolian Deer Stones,European Menhirs,and Canadian Arctic Inuksuit: Collective Memory and the Function of Northern Monument Traditions

Northern peoples and those living in the Arctic and environments with broad vistas created cultural landscapes with distinctive monument traditions that supported their cultural and political systems. This paper explores three societies in different geographic regions and time periods during the past 10,000 years that used stone monuments to humanize their landscapes and invoke or honor gods or spirits, mythological ancestors, or deceased leaders. Canadian and Greenland Inuit and their predecessors of the past thousand years marked their lands with abstract human figures known as Inuksuit; Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans built megaliths, henges, and passage graves; and Mongolian Bronze Age nomadic pastoralists populated the central Asian steppe with burial mounds (khirigsuurs) and anthropomorphic deer stone monuments. Each tradition contributed in different ways to shape and perpetuate the society’s values by invoking spirits, ancestors, or heroic leaders. The enduring presence of these creations reinforced cultural or ethnic identity through ritual, group ceremonialism, landscape values, communal enterprise and labor, and collective memory. This paper identifies commonalities and differences between these traditions and how they functioned. We also see how successive societies perpetuate, change, reinterpret, or invent new uses and meanings for ancient monuments and their landscape settings to create new ethnicities and histories for their own times.