cursūs

English

Etymology

From Latin cursūs.

Noun

cursūs

1. (rare) plural of cursus
   • 1979, J[ohn] M[orton] Coles, A[nthony] F[ilmer] Harding, The Bronze Age in Europe: An Introduction to the Prehistory of Europe, c.2000-700 bc, London: Methuen & Co Ltd, →ISBN, pages 254 and 562:

     Fig. 89 Distribution of barrow cemeteries around Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments: 1. round barrows, 2. long barrows, C. the Cursus, LC. Lesser Cursus, S. Stonehenge, A. Avenue, DW. Durrington Walls, W. Woodhenge. […] Cursūs, 89

   • 1980, Colin Burgess, The Age of Stonehenge (History in the Landscape series), London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, →ISBN, pages 23, 170, 332, 339, and 344:

     Thus the building of long tombs and causewayed enclosures ceased and the emphasis switched to round burial mounds, such as passage graves, and new ‘public’ monuments, including enclosures, cursūs, henges and stone circles. […] Further north the vast field systems of the Fen Edge in eastern England imply great order and organization, and here, too, there are causewayed enclosures, henges and cursūs, and now the rich grave group from Barnack. […] The function of the Avenue is as obscure as that of the cursūs, and although it looks very much like a processional way, it would be very difficult to prove this. […] Some cursūs pass by or incorporate round barrows in much the same way, as at Aston-on-Trent, Derbyshire, or have round barrows at their ends, as at Scorton in north Yorkshire, but these relationships cannot be worked out as easily. […] Among the earlier cursūs may be that at Maxey, which was earlier than circles of pits producing Fourth Millennium pottery of Mildenhall style; […] It may be that these avenues took over some of the functions of the cursūs.

   • 1996, Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain from the Air: A Study of Space, Time and Society, Cambridge, Cambs.: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 203:

     Related perhaps to avenues and even the earlier cursūs, stone rows simply involve more or less regular lines of upright stones.

   • 2000, Raimo Anttila, Greek and Indo-European Etymology in Action: Proto-Indo-European *aǵ- (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory; 200), Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, pages 21–22:

     If one interprets the cursūs at Stonehenge (and elsewhere in England) within Indo-European heritage (see e.g. Stover & Kraig 1978:89-90, 164, 169), there is concrete evidence for an early importance of sports, funeral or otherwise.

   • 2002, Timothy Darvill, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 111, column 1:

     cursus (pl. cursūs) [MC]. A kind of Neolithic ceremonial monument comprising a rectangular enclosure defined by a bank with external ditches. The longest example is the pair of end-to-end joined cursūs known as the Dorset Cursus on Cranborne Chase, Dorset, which together run for more than 10 km across the grain of the landscape. More typically, cursūs are between 500 m and 3 km long and up to 80 m wide.

   • 2010, David Ride, The Ancient Symbolic Landscape of Wessex, Stroud, Glos.: Amberley Publishing, →ISBN, page 12:

     Notable examples of ritual landscapes in Britain include Stonehenge and its environs, its barrows and cursūs clustered in expanding ripples about the earthen and stone circles of the central monument, and the associated earthwork of Durrington Walls.

   • 2011, Frances Blore, Frances Healy, “The Southern Enclosure”, in Jan Harding, Frances Healy, editors, A Neolithic and Bronze Age Landscape in Northamptonshire (The Raunds Area Project), volume 2 (Supplementary Studies), Swindon: English Heritage, published 2012, →ISBN, SS1 (Structural evidence: Landscape Unit reports), pages 123–124:

     The dearth of cultural material, the size, and the plan (as far as it is known), are all echoed in linear monuments such as cursūs and shorter subrectangular enclosures like the ‘long mortuary enclosure’ at Brampton, Cambridgeshire (Malim 1999, 80–83) or the long enclosure (site VIII) cut by the cursus at Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (Whittle et al 1992, 148–52), as well as the Long Enclosure a kilometre or so to the north (SS1.5).

   • 2012, Richard Morris, Time’s Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination‎^[1], London: Phoenix, The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, published 2013, →ISBN:

     A colleague in 1949 reflected that Allen had ‘virtually created’ the cursūs as a class of site. […] Perhaps significantly in this context, just as the making of causewayed enclosures came to an end in the thirty-sixth century cal bc, so did the making of cursūs – those inscrutable parallel-sided features discovered by Major Allen in the 1930s – begin. […] That complex of cursūs and rings photographed by Major Allen at Dorchester-on-Thames adjoined the site selected in ad 635 for the mother church of an Anglo-Saxon diocese. Over four thousand years separated the creation of the cursūs and the cathedral; […] Archaeology seemed to confirm this, showing that monuments like cursūs and henges had fallen from use millennia before the onset of Christianization.

   • 2020, Alison Sheridan, “Structure, metaphor and funerary practices in Neolithic Scotland”, in Alistair Barclay, David Field, Jim Leary, editors, Houses of the Dead? (Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers; 17), Oxford, Oxon, Havertown, Pa.: Oxbow Books, Casemate Group, →ISBN:

     While the rationale for undertaking such vast constructions (and the subsequent burning down of timber cursūs) may well have been to honour and commemorate the dead, arguably the most important aspect of these projects was the bringing together of considerable numbers of people – a whole tribe, perhaps, if they self-identified in such terms – to work communally, thereby deepening their sense of belonging to a large social group.

   • 2020, Alison Sheridan, Rick Schulting, “Making sense of Scottish Neolithic funerary monuments: tracing trajectories and understanding their rationale”, in Anne Birgitte Gebaer, Lasse Sørensen, Anne Teather, António Carlos Valera, editors, Monumentalising Life in the Neolithic: Narratives of Continuity and Change, Oxford, Oxon, Havertown, Pa.: Oxbow Books, Casemate Group, →ISBN:

     Space does not permit a detailed discussion of these monuments here; suffice it to note that cursūs may be scaled-up versions of the rectangular mortuary enclosures of the early 4th millennium, while bank barrows and the Cleaven Dyke mound could be scaled-up versions of long barrows.

   • 2023, John Scheid, translated by Jake Wadham, “The Priest and the Magistrate: Reflections on the Priesthoods and Public Law at the End of the Republic”, in J. A. North, editor, The Religious History of the Roman Empire: The Republican Centuries (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies), Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, section I (Early Rome), page 67:

     It is interesting to note in this context that during the Empire the epigraphical cursūs use two procedures to celebrate the priesthoods of the honoured figure: one traditional, placing side by side at the head of the cursus itself the magistracy (the consulate) and the priesthood, the other in keeping with the new mindset, inserting the religious function within the cursus in its chronological place.