From a pliosaur skeleton now known to Australian museumgoers as Eric to the basalt that built Robert Smithson’s almighty Spiral Jetty, these are stones that really speak
French schoolchildren used to be taught that they were descended from the Gauls, a tribe that emerged around the fifth century BC. It is a common conceit of 19th-century nationalism that citizens of modern nation-states can trace their national origins back to a remote past. Not so long ago, a Japanese professor maintained that “Japanese values” were already in evidence more