The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island, and Other Ancient Monuments

In this intriguing, if not entirely persuasive, book, Australian science writer Kelly (Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies) links many prehistoric sites of monumental architecture to the need of preliterate cultures to memorize vast numbers of important facts. She begins by examining the techniques currently or recently in use that allow memory keepers among the Australian Aboriginal people, Navajo, Dogon, and others to retain information on hundreds of animal and plant species as well as culturally significant topics such as genealogies and customs. This is accomplished through the technique that the Greeks referred to as “the method of loci,” encoding knowledge to physical or mental spaces. Kelly describes her own use of these techniques, but not in enough detail for her work to truly be useful as a primer. She devotes the bulk of the book’s second half to linking such specific monumental sites as Stonehenge to her idea that a wide range of these sites were used by their creators as memory-encoding spaces. Kelly’s arguments are plausible—and persuasive where links exist between current cultures and predecessors, such as the Pueblo and the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon—but her certitude is troublesome, and the conclusion that “the method of loci is the universal driver” is not supported by this work. (Feb.)