Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument

by Mike Parker Pearson

  For me a flash of insight came from sharing ideas with a colleague from Madagascar. Many archaeologists had assumed that the choice of materials—stone for Stonehenge and wood for the Durrington Walls timber circles—was of no particular significance. My colleague Ramilisonina saw things differently. When he visited the monuments of Wessexd with me for the first time, he explained that in his country, before the arrival of the missionaries, stone had been reserved for the tombs of the ancestors while timber was used for the houses of the living. Might not this be the case here in Neolithic Britain? Could the choice of materials be as important as the architecture itself?

  This was a radical idea. Some archaeologists thought it an exciting possibility but others greeted it with mild derision. It was a theory, but we needed to find out some crucial information. If Stonehenge and Durrington Walls really were contemporary, and if there were burials at Stonehenge and none at Durrington Walls, and if there were some way of showing how Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were physically connected, then there was a case for arguing that timber and stone symbolized the living and the dead respectively. A new idea wasn’t enough: We needed more information.

  This all seemed a lot to investigate. We knew there were cremation burials at Stonehenge, dug up in the 1920s but since reburied, but none had been dated so there was no certainty about how they fitted into the monument’s history. Before our project began, no evidence of any dwellings had been found at Durrington Walls by previous archaeologists, so it would be up to us to find out whether it was a place of the living or not. We suspected that the link between Stonehenge and Durrington Walls was provided by the River Avon, which flows past Durrington Walls and then meanders to the east of Stonehenge before heading toward the English Channel. This river is linked to Stonehenge by a long, linear pair of earthen banks called the Stonehenge Avenue. But no one had ever found any evidence of an equivalent avenue linking Durrington Walls to the river. We would have to do a lot of digging to get new information and start to answer our new questions about the two monuments.

  The results of our geophysical surveys and excavations were beyond our wildest expectations. The more we worked in the landscape in and around Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, the more we learned about how Stonehenge was part of a larger complex. We also came up with new evidence casting light on some of the more perplexing questions about Stonehenge. Ramilisonina’s insight about places of the living and places of the dead was just the first step on what would turn out to be a long journey of discovery, taking us far beyond the initial theory of stones being associated with ancestors.

  As for Stonehenge itself, we had to tackle some big questions about the date of the monument and its sequence of construction. Although Stonehenge’s big stones were put up around 2500 BC (4,500 years ago), archaeologists have known for a while that the circular ditch and bank around Stonehenge were constructed about five hundred years earlier, around 3000 BC. When we started work, nobody knew whether there had been any circles of standing stones or timber posts at that early date. Another really tricky problem centered on the stones themselves. Among the smaller standing stones at Stonehenge today are numerous “bluestones” of various types of rock that derive from the Preseli Hills, about 180 miles away in west Wales. What are these doing at Stonehenge, so very far from home? When were they brought to Wiltshire and when were they first erected?

  Another question—one that we never expected to resolve—was why Stonehenge is where it is. Salisbury Plain is covered with prehistoric monuments but most of these lie close to the rivers and streams that provided water for prehistoric farmers and their animals. So why is Stonehenge located over a mile from water, near the top of a rather desolate ridge? What was so special about that particular spot that prehistoric people brought stones here from so far away? And why did they expend so much effort—literally millions of man-hours—in quarrying, shaping, pulling, dressing, erecting, and lifting the huge stones to form a stone circle that imitated wood? Through a combination of carefully thought-through research hypotheses, tightly drafted research designs, very hard work by all concerned (and a modicum of luck), we have discovered new sites and made new interpretations of existing information; this book presents the results so far of seven years’ work in the field and in the laboratory.

  1

  THE MAN FROM MADAGASCAR

  __________

  In 1998—fourteen years ago at the time of writing—I was involved in the making of a BBC documentary, Stonehenge: Ancient Voices. The program’s producer decided to bring in and interview someone with experience of erecting standing stones. Malagasy archaeologist Ramilisonina knew all about such things: His family still follows ancient traditions of moving and raising large stones to commemorate the dead. So, in February that year, Ramilisonina braved the British winter and came to Wiltshire to take part in filming.

  Ramilisonina and I had already been working together for years. Previously he had taken me to lots of interesting tombs and monuments in the spiny deserts of southern Madagascar; now I took him to Avebury. Ramilisonina was transfixed by this stone circle, which stands about twenty miles north of Stonehenge. Its stones are bigger than anything he has ever handled—so huge that he had to ask me whether the people who erected them had used tractors. If not, he mused, they must have been put up by magic. I told him that the stone circle was more than four thousand years old—so no tractors—and that I honestly didn’t believe that stones could be moved by supernatural means.

  As we wandered among the Avebury stones in the fading afternoon light, I explained that we didn’t know what the standing stones were for. Now it was Ramilisonina’s turn to look at me in amused disbelief. How could I not know? To him it was obvious. It seemed that even after many seasons of fieldwork in Madagascar I hadn’t really grasped the significance of stone: It is an everlasting material with which one honors and commemorates the dead. There in Madagascar, perishable materials—wood, fabric, plant materials—are used only for the living, to clothe and house them during the brief span of human life, before they spend the eternity of death in a stone tomb. Stone monuments are for the ancestors—for Ramil, this explanation was self-evident.

  My first reaction was to laugh. Contemporary Madagascar and prehistoric Britain are so disconnected, both geographically and historically, that it was surely a bit absurd to suggest that these two completely separate cultures could share any motivation for putting up megaliths. Nevertheless, at Stonehenge for the filming the next day, I found myself thinking about what Ramilisonina had said, wondering if it might not be so far-fetched. I knew that archaeologists had found many human burials at Stonehenge1—it certainly had some sort of association with the dead. And less than two miles away from the great stone circle there once stood the timber circles inside and outside the massive Durrington Walls enclosure.2

  As a student I’d been taught that these three timber circles in and near Durrington Walls pre-dated Stonehenge and were probably its prototypes. Some thought that they’d once been roofed to make giant circular buildings—and that Stonehenge was a stone copy made after they’d fallen into ruin. If Ramilisonina’s instinct was right, then the relationship between the stone circle and the timber circles wasn’t a question of prototypes, of one style replacing another. The wooden and stone monuments would have played different roles in the lives of their builders. Perhaps wood was juxtaposed with stone for a purpose, to create a complex of monumental structures associated with the transition from life to death. If the timber circles were monuments for the living, as opposed to stone monuments for the dead, then there should be evidence that these structures at Durrington Walls were actually contemporary with Stonehenge.

  If the stone and timber circles were all part of one system, then what joined them together? I knew without looking at the map that the answer was the River Avon. Stonehenge has an avenue, flanked by ditches and banks, that leads from its entrance toward the river;3 two miles upstream from Stonehenge, Durrington Walls lies very
close to the Avon. Perhaps this river was significant as a route between the circles of timber and the circle of stone, playing a part in a transition from life to death. Eighteen miles north of Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, the stone circles and avenues of Avebury,4 too, could have been designed as part of a larger wood-and-stone complex. Archaeologists had recently discovered the remains of a series of enclosures surrounded by wooden palisades along the River Kennet, a mile from Avebury.5 Maybe Avebury was also built as a place for the ancestors, separated by water from the land of the living.

  That day at Stonehenge, Ramilisonina answered questions for the cameras. By the dark and freezing evening, when we finally got inside the stone circle, I was already looking at it with new eyes. Could a link between wood and stone explain why Stonehenge’s builders had shaped the stones in ways reminiscent of carpentry?

  Back at home I discussed the archaeological evidence with Ramilisonina. Over the next three days we wrote an academic paper in which we described the meanings of standing stones in Madagascar and drew an analogy with Stonehenge and Avebury.6 All archaeology (and in fact all social and historical studies) relies on analogy. An analogy is an equivalence, or a parallel, and we use analogies all the time, even at the most basic level of identification—when we decide to call an ancient stone or metal object with a particular type of sharp edge an “ax,” for example, we are employing the simplest sort of analogy. In more complex attempts to deduce the motivation behind people’s actions, we draw on analogies to explain what we see and find.

  The problem with analogy is that we must have a broad range of possibilities with which to draw comparisons. If we limit our horizons to our own lived experiences, in the urbanized Western world, we risk imposing our own preconceptions on what we find, and can even fail to recognize the most simple of objects if they are beyond our personal frame of reference. For archaeologists it is essential to draw on as wide a knowledge as possible of cultural diversity and the different ways of explaining human action.

  As we wrote, Ramil and I talked about “materiality”—the use of physical materials to express intangible meanings. I explained to Ramil that even in Britain today we have complex material symbolism associated with death. The funeral itself often involves impermanent, perishable materials—displays of cut, dying flowers, for example, and the marking of a recently dug grave by a wooden cross, perceived as temporary. For us, the funerary process requires stone to reach its conclusion: A gravestone is erected months after an interment, to ensure the permanent memory of the dead. We regard such things as practical, pragmatic actions, but there’s usually much more to human behavior at such important moments.

  At various times and in many different places around the world, architecture has been used to express notions of permanence. Building in stone communicates solidity and eternal values, often invoking the words or deeds of ancestral figures. An illustration of this can be seen in Washington, DC, which has striking ceremonial architecture. Here colossal edifices house awe-inspiring images of such national ancestors as Lincoln and Jefferson; the overwhelming scale of the statues in their temple-like buildings embodies the immensity of their meaning for the nation—these are monumental figures, in both the precise and the metaphorical senses. The materials with which we surround ourselves can and do affect us. As Winston Churchill once observed, first we build the buildings and then they build us.

  The permanence of stone can be used to express concepts of eternity in contrast to life’s temporality, as seen in ancient Egypt, ancient China, and many other civilizations. The sixth-century BC sage Lao Tzu expressed the concept clearly in Tao Te Ching:

  A man is supple and weak when living, but hard and stiff when dead. Grass and trees are pliant and fragile when living, but dried and shriveled when dead. Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death; the supple and the weak are the comrades of life.

  Even earlier, from the eighth century BC, we have a written reference to the souls of the dead being set in stone:7 Archaeologists working in southeastern Turkey in 2008 found a stele—a carved and inscribed standing stone—commemorating the death of a man named Kuttamuwa. This is thought to be the first written reference to the soul, and the inscription also includes the words “my soul that is in this stele.”

  In our article Ramil and I pointed out that this association of stone with the eternal was neither shared just between contemporary Madagascar and prehistoric Britain, nor an innate human universal found in all times and all cultures. Our cultural metaphors change as our surroundings change: Today we commonly draw upon technology to provide metaphors—comparing the human brain with a computer, for instance—but such analogy was simply unavailable to any earlier culture. Stone has no inherent meaning that identifies it with the eternal, the dead or the ancestors. Instead, its meanings are always historically contingent and subject to change according to social context. Even so, the cultural association of stone with permanence, and perishable materials with transience, seems to have been a commonly followed strategy in many different times and places, drawing on some of the most basic metaphors of human life and death.

  In prehistoric societies working with stone and wood, these material properties of permanence and perishability would have been self-evident. But of course, the meanings ascribed to the materials cannot be assumed to be the same as ours. I wondered how one could find evidence that stone and wood incorporated meanings that invoked permanence and transience, or life and death, for the people who built Stonehenge.

  Our idea that Stonehenge was built as a place of the ancestors was not entirely new. In the late nineteenth century, two of the finest archaeological minds of the time had come to similar conclusions. In 1880, William Flinders Petrie, later the greatest Egyptologist of his era, declared Stonehenge to be more monumental and sepulchral than religious or astronomical.8 Five years later, Arthur Evans, the excavator of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, wrote that Stonehenge was built to honor the departed ancestors of a whole prehistoric tribe.9 In 1957, the prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe wrote in the sixth edition of his masterwork, The Dawn of European Civilization, that Stonehenge was built as a monument to the establishment of peace and unity. These interpretations had, however, been forgotten or ignored by most archaeologists.

  During the late 1980s and 1990s, similar ideas began to resurface. In 1987, in his book The Stonehenge People, Aubrey Burl wrote that Stonehenge was a house of the dead.10 Ten years later, archaeologists Barbara Bender, Alasdair Whittle, and Josh Pollard were all putting new ideas into print about the importance of the Stonehenge builders deliberately having chosen stone to signify permanence.11

  As a break from thinking about Stonehenge, I took Ramilisonina to my other research area, in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. Even in summer the rain and wind can be extreme and, that February, it was predictably stormy. Although he admired the farming lifestyle, accompanied by all the modern conveniences that are still lacking in most of Madagascar, Ramilisonina found South Uist appallingly cold and wet. As a storm blew in from the Atlantic and threatened to rip the roof off our rented caravan, he was convinced that he was about to die and would soon be joining his ancestors.

  Four months later our paper was published in the academic journal Antiquity and caused a bit of a storm of its own. Some scholars thought it was just the kind of fresh thinking needed to explain Stonehenge and its surrounding monuments. Others thought it was just terrible. (One postgraduate student even asked whether I’d had a particularly bad day when I wrote it.) There were those who didn’t like the use of analogy—arguing that Neolithic Britain was a unique society so any comparison was inadequate. Others still said the article was mechanistic and structuralist—that binary oppositions (such as stone:wood) were too simplistic to explain the complex actions and events surrounding Stonehenge’s construction and use.12

  We wrote a reply, setting out predictions of what archaeologists should find in the Stonehenge landscape if the theory were va
lid, and where to look.13 If the theory was on the right track, we said, the timber circles at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge should be associated with a “domain of the living.” The burials at Stonehenge should be part of a “domain of the ancestors,” not just a fleeting and temporary moment of use of the site as a cemetery. If we were right about the role of the River Avon in linking two parts of a ritual landscape, there should also be the remains of an avenue leading from Durrington Walls to the Avon, in the same way that the Stonehenge Avenue leads from the Avon to the stone circle.

  The debate went round and round, and it was all about theory. For some academics, what mattered was theoretical correctness—structuralism had been fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s but had been replaced by post-modernism. Others felt that archaeology simply couldn’t answer such questions. No one seemed particularly interested in going out and collecting new evidence to see if our idea could be challenged and rejected. All any of us had to work with were some poorly recorded data from old excavations by dead archaeologists. Trial by theory was not a satisfactory resolution—someone needed to get out there and find out whether our predictions had any reality on the ground. If the ideas didn’t hold up, then the theory was flawed and we could all move on, and try some different explanation of what Stonehenge is all about.

  It often surprises people to learn just how little archaeological investigation has been done at and around Stonehenge. Whenever a new discovery is made there’s general amazement that there is anything left to find. Yet the truth is that most of Stonehenge and the land around it have never been investigated. Even the twentieth-century digs within Stonehenge itself explored only half of it. There are also problems with the records of these previous excavations.