Wanderer's Memorials
Vague references to the Stone Man, which today we cannot unravel, appear again and again among the inscriptions on each memorial. The route and degree of difficulty of each Wandering was chosen by the initiate himself (peaceful visits to enemy tribes, destruction of snakes' nests, and so on). These are depicted in the outer form and ornamentation of the finds in a number of cases. The parents erected the memorials in the course of rituals of which we have no knowledge.
Other researchers (the 'Barbarist' school) identify the phenomenon with the wandering madness (walkabout) which appears among members of the Australian aboriginal tribes. They assert that the memorials are erected by fathers agonised after long fruitless searches for their untracable lost sons. Elsewhere the memorials are explained as an expulsion motive, from when lepers were forbidden to enter the City, but this a view better dismissed.
