Stonehenge a New Understanding (52 page)

Josh has noticed that the timber structures he excavated immediately south of Woodhenge are different in plan to the post settings within the house enclosures and of the Northern Circle within Durrington Walls. Instead of having circular perimeters, the structures south of Woodhenge are oval and slightly irregular. The holes for the large central posts in the structures south of Woodhenge are also anomalous; although they are the same size as other large posts at Durrington Walls, they have no ramps with which to ease the posts into their holes.

Perhaps the two groups of timber monuments—the Woodhenge set and the Durrington Walls set—were constructed by two different groups of people. If so, there may be a clue as to which group was which. The sarsens that stood along the Durrington Avenue may be associated with the Southern Circle, showing a local ancestry for the builders and users of these sites. One of the stoneholes at Woodhenge probably held a bluestone rather than a sarsen, so perhaps the Woodhenge complex of structures indicates an association with Welsh ancestry for a second, separate group of people. There is no way of knowing for sure but we should learn more in the coming years from aspects such as the origins of the cattle brought to Durrington Walls and Woodhenge.

We now know a lot more about Stonehenge. We know that it was a place of burial for a long period of its use, that it was built on the end of a geological feature coincidentally aligned on the solstice axis, and that its first two stages date to around 3000 BC and 2500 BC. Around the same time as that second stage of construction, when the trilithons and then the sarsen circle were erected, people were building comparable
circles in timber at Durrington Walls, within a large settlement, to which people and their herds came from many miles away for seasonal feasting in winter and summer. While Stonehenge was a place for the dead, Durrington Walls was occupied by the living, whose houses reveal many aspects of their daily lives. This short-lived and seasonal settlement may well have been the builders’ camp for Stonehenge.

Ultimately, the Stonehenge of 2500 BC is unique, without any evident predecessors in northern Europe. But could the people of Neolithic Wessex have built it without outside help? Previous generations of archaeologists, including Richard Atkinson, had a pretty low opinion of the Stonehenge people. As far as Atkinson was concerned, “these men were essentially barbarians.”
⁴⁵
Since this society had no architecture (as distinct from mere construction), he claimed, they would not have been able to build Stonehenge without the assistance of a superior civilization. A lot has happened since 1956, and our knowledge of these “barbarians” and their abilities has mushroomed. Atkinson knew very little about the sophisticated timber architecture of the many British henge complexes, since most of them have been found since his time. He also belonged to an era when people talked about “primitive societies” rather than “societies with primitive technologies.”

Stonehenge’s architectural plan and design owe nothing to very distant lands and cultures. Yet the scale of moving, shaping, and lifting its sarsens puts it in a league of its own, beyond anything else in Britain at that time. Only Avebury comes close, but even that major achievement in stone lacks the elements of dressing uprights and raising lintels.

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Stonehenge is not one monument, built at one moment in history, but many monuments built over many centuries. To try to study the stone circle in isolation is to be doomed to failure and error. Understanding Stonehenge requires knowledge of the Early Mesolithic use of Salisbury Plain, the subsequent arrival of farming communities there as well as across Britain, and the wider developments in Late Neolithic society.

Long-distance patterns of mobility and trade, and widespread architectural developments and funerary customs are an essential key to making sense of the development of the first Stonehenge as a stone circle and cremation cemetery. Understanding its transformation around 2500 BC requires knowledge of its landscape context, to grasp how it formed part of a larger complex centered on the River Avon. We can also now consider the social and economic forces that led to Stonehenge’s decline.

Before doing so, it is worth summarizing how the discoveries of the Stonehenge Riverside Project have changed the way that we think about Stonehenge.

• Firstly, we now have several instances where prehistoric people adapted pre-existing natural features into their cultural designs. The most significant of these is the series of three chalk ridges aligned by geological accident on the midsummer sunrise/midwinter sunset axis. On top of these, Neolithic people constructed the first stretch of the Stonehenge Avenue. This natural landform’s solstitial alignment, on
  the end of which Stonehenge was constructed just after 3000 BC, seems to have set the blueprint for solstitial alignments in the monuments of the immediate locality, not only at Stonehenge but at four of the timber circles at Durrington Walls, and Woodhenge as well. It’s interesting that no certain solstitial alignments have been identified at the other great henges of Wessex, such as Avebury, Marden, or Dorchester. Maybe this was a particular feature of celebrations at Stonehenge.
  
• Stonehenge was inspired by fashions of building monuments and houses locally within Britain, not by distant civilizations in the Mediterranean. Its first two stages were, in fact, constructed during a period of cultural isolation from the Continent, when the people of Britain were increasingly unified by sharing pan-island styles of material culture (pots, houses, burial practices) despite their diverse genetic ancestries. Stonehenge can be understood as a monument of unification, integrating the cosmological aspects of earth, sun, and moon into a single entity that also united the ancestors of the people of Britain in the form of Welsh bluestones and English sarsens.
  
• The Durrington Walls Avenue is a Neolithic structure whose existence was entirely unknown and unsuspected. We went out to look for it on the basis of a theory, not because of any evidence on the ground. Not only does the newly discovered Durrington Avenue link the Southern Circle to the River Avon, but this solstice-aligned feature also sits on top of a natural precursor, in this case a geologically formed surface of broken flint, that had collected in the bottom of the valley. The Durrington Walls Avenue’s midsummer sunset orientation provides a counterpoint to the Stonehenge Avenue’s midsummer sunrise axis, while the Southern Circle’s view toward midwinter sunrise contrasts with Stonehenge’s midwinter sunset axis.
  
• What started as a hypothesis—that Durrington Walls was a place of the living—has now become something we recognize as fact. When we started work nobody knew that Durrington Walls was a Neolithic settlement. We found evidence for a large village, with the remains of many houses being well-preserved beneath the henge banks. The discovery of just three human bones among eighty thousand animal bones found at Durrington shows that the activities that took place
  here were the complete opposite of what was happening at Stonehenge, where the bones of
  Homo sapiens
  are more common than those of any other species.
  
• Our identification of Stonehenge as a place of the dead has also been confirmed, not only by dating some of its sixty-three cremation burials to show that they span the monument’s use during the third millennium BC, but also by showing how Stonehenge started not as a unique site but rather as one of several enclosed cremation cemeteries well known across Britain.
  
• The animal bones from Durrington Walls and the lipids from within the pots point to midwinter and summertime gatherings, suggesting that the solstitial and lunar alignments at Stonehenge are not part of an abstract astronomical calendar but marked key moments of the year when people gathered here and celebrated.
  
• Within Stonehenge, the identification of mistakes made by Richard Atkinson has enabled us to refine the monument’s chronology and phasing. Drawing from the analysis of existing records, and from Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright’s new excavation results, we can place the sarsen trilithons, bluestone Q and R Holes, and sarsen circle in a single phase. We can also date that stage to around 2500 BC, about five hundred years after the initial construction. In that initial stage, we can now confidently place the Aubrey Holes and identify them as stoneholes for bluestone monoliths.
  
• Our review of old excavations at Durrington Walls and Stonehenge has identified a previously unrecognized type of Neolithic building with a D-shaped, or horseshoe-shaped plan. These large houses were probably for public gatherings. Their D-shaped plan formed the model for the central settings of the Southern Circle’s Phase 2 and the Stonehenge trilithons. Woodhenge and Stonehenge’s bluestone oval appear to be modeled on face-to-face pairings of opposed D-shaped structures.
  
• Finally, down by the River Avon, at the end of the Stonehenge avenue at West Amesbury, we have found a previously unknown henge. Its small circle contained about twenty-five bluestones that were removed around 2400 BC, perhaps to be taken to Stonehenge. Just when this stone circle was constructed is not certain but it was well before 2500
  BC. The discovery of Bluestonehenge, together with new timber monuments upstream, south of Woodhenge, has established the central importance of this stretch of the Avon.
  

By 2500 BC, the Avon had come to link two separate but contemporary monument clusters, each with an avenue leading to and from the river. Upstream to the northeast were the timber circles of Durrington Walls, surrounded by the houses of the living. Downstream to the southwest were the stone circles of Stonehenge and Bluestonehenge, set within an area largely or entirely devoid of settlement.

Just what happened in the next few centuries after 2500 BC is of crucial importance for understanding the decline of Stonehenge, or rather the decline of the Stonehenge–Durrington Walls complex. One of the big problems we face in trying to understand the changes is how to date events within the period 2470–2280 BC. The calibration curve flattens out at this point in time, so it is generally impossible to get a single date any more precise than this broad 190-year period. This makes understanding this period—the Copper Age, or transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age—very difficult: Although we know a lot happened, we cannot be certain of the order in which it happened. It’s the equivalent of trying to work out the sequence of events of the last two centuries without knowing any precise dates.

In a rare instance, it is possible to be more precise. Where we have a stratigraphic sequence of dated layers, we can apply Bayesian statistics to narrow the probable date range. This has been achieved for Silbury Hill, at Avebury, with its construction now dated to within fifty years either side of 2400 BC.
¹
We still don’t know what this giant mound was for, but we do know when it was built.

The biggest event after 2470 BC was the arrival of the Beaker people, and the gradual increase in their numbers. Beaker pottery may have been in use in Britain before this date, but the distinctive burial rite in which a Beaker accompanied the corpse did not appear until after 2470 BC. Similarly, copper metallurgy might have arrived before the Beaker burial tradition; many such burials contain equipment for working gold as well as copper. A Beaker in a grave at Ashgrove in Scotland contained pollen indicative of a mead-like drink;
²
archaeologists have thought that
the Beaker people also introduced alcohol to Britain, although it was probably already widely in use in the form of beer and possibly cider. So far, the earliest bones of domesticated horses in Britain are from the Beaker period,
³
so these people may have introduced horse-riding. They certainly brought entirely new attitudes to monuments and to the dead.

The Beaker people came from parts of continental Europe—the Rhine valley from the Netherlands to the Alps—that had no traditions of large-scale monument-building. There are a few small standing stones and stone monuments from Switzerland and the Alps during the third millennium BC, but they are on nowhere near the same scale as Stonehenge, Avebury, and the many other monuments found in Britain. The Beaker people brought to Britain a new funerary rite, burying the dead in graves within small cemeteries. There was no strong sense of separating the dead from the living in a geographical or topographical sense. The living might occupy the same spaces as the dead, except that the dead were below the ground.

The Beaker people were similar in economic lifestyle to the indigenous population of Britain, being semi-mobile cattle pastoralists and cereal cultivators. It’s likely that indigenous Britons adopted the new way of life from a small number of immigrants, learning to make the fine Beaker pots and acquiring the new trinkets in gold and copper, adorning themselves with these and other personal ornaments.

Monuments were still built during this period, but they seem to have been something of a swan-song, or a final attempt at a statement of power. At Stonehenge, a large and unexplained pit was dug against the inside edge of the great trilithon and was then filled back in. Its avenue ditches and banks were constructed, while Bluestonehenge was dismantled and enclosed within a henge ditch. Woodhenge’s decaying posts were enclosed within a henge ditch at this time. At Durrington Walls, the avenue continued in use but the henge ditch was constructed over the ruins of the village by 2460 BC. The Southern Circle’s timbers decayed, and pits were dug into them around or after 2300 BC. All of these pits, ditches, and boundaries give a sense that these places were being cut off and closed down, marked as separate from everyday life.

Most of the Avebury monuments are not closely dated, but the two events in that area that definitely fall within this period of the Copper
Age at the very end of the Neolithic are the building of Silbury Hill around 2400 BC and the blocking with large sarsen slabs of the entrance to the filled-in chamber of West Kennet long barrow. The settlement at the West Kennet palisade enclosures might also have been occupied in this period. Building Silbury was a massive project, moving many thousands of tons of chalk from huge quarries around the base of the hill. Back in 1967, when Richard Atkinson excavated a shaft into the center of the mound, the scale of its building was compared to every person living in the UK in the 1960s each carrying a bucket of chalk.