The Coneybury pit tells us something very important about the new way of life. Taking up farming had crucial advantages over hunting and gathering. Storage was now possible, either in granaries or on the hoof in terms of herds and flocks, to ensure survival through the lean periods of the year. Farmers could also produce more than enough food to go round; after key moments, such as harvest, they could go for long stretches of time without having to find food. They could also devote this over-production to supporting lavish feasts involving kin and neighbors in their hundreds or more—as demonstrated by Coneybury. In other words, the transition to agriculture presented the possibility of creating surplus. That surplus could be used to support individuals in large-scale projects, such as building the huge tombs that are a common feature of the British Neolithic. Since the people of Neolithic Britain might have been more reliant on the size of their herds and flocks than on the size of their wheat fields, their cattle, sheep, and pigs served as capital, currency, and commodities.
In bare economic terms, the possibility of building Stonehenge depended entirely on the ability to create a sufficient level of surplus production that could be harnessed and managed so that a large enough group—comprising many thousands of people—could be mobilized, fed, clothed, and supplied for long enough to enable the stones to be quarried, moved, and erected. For whatever reasons, it took a thousand years before these early farmers attained the requisite levels of organization and food-surplus production to make it possible. Why they chose to build Stonehenge, what they intended it to be, and how they managed to build it are rather more complex problems.
2
A BRIEF HISTORY OF STONEHENGE
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There are shelves and shelves of books about the history of research at Stonehenge. While I don’t want to trot out yet another version, I do think it relevant to include a brief thumbnail account, because much of what the Stonehenge Riverside Project has found out about Stonehenge itself has come from re-analyzing and re-interpreting the records made by previous investigators.
The most noticeable structure that we see at Stonehenge today is a circle of upright sarsens with some surviving horizontal lintels perched on top of them. The sarsens are large slabs of sandstone-like rock that were probably obtained from the Avebury area, in contrast to the bluestones, smaller stones of dolerite and other geologies that originated in west Wales. The sarsen circle encloses a circle of smaller bluestones, inside which are five large sarsen trilithons arranged in a horseshoe. A trilithon (meaning “three stones”) is a pair of upright stones with a lintel joining them. At the center of Stonehenge is a small, horseshoe-shaped arrangement of bluestones. Some of the stones of these various structures have fallen down, others have been broken up and taken away, and several have been re-erected since the seventeenth century. The sarsen circle is about 30 meters in diameter, but it sits at the center of a much larger circle, about 100 meters across, formed by the bank and ditch of an earthen enclosure.
People have been digging around in Stonehenge for at least 400 years, on and off.1 Its above-ground remains have also been surveyed, at differing levels of precision, many times. Yet a huge amount of research still remains to be done or has only recently been initiated. Only in 2009 did archaeologists carry out a detailed survey of the ground-surface contours of Stonehenge2 and, two years later, a laser-scanning survey of the standing stones. Only about half of the area within Stonehenge’s earthen enclosure has ever been excavated,3 and many basic matters of fact about its constructional sequence still remain to be established. Gaining permission to dig within Stonehenge is no easy matter, so the opportunities to resolve some fundamental problems may be a long way off in the future.
Plan of Stonehenge, showing the ditch, bank, Station Stones and Avenue.
Plan of Stonehenge, showing the numbering of the bluestones and sarsens.
In 1620 the Duke of Buckingham got his men to dig a big hole in the center of Stonehenge. We don’t know where his trench’s edges were; however, almost fifty years later the diarist and antiquarian John Aubrey reported that it was as large as two saw pits, and marked its center on a plan of the stones.4 Saw pits have to be deep enough for a man to stand in—this man being the “underdog,” as opposed to the “top dog” who held the upper end of the saw—so this huge pit must have been more than 1.5 meters deep. The duke’s workmen either dug through chalk bedrock, unaware that it would contain no finds, or dug into a filled-in pit from some earlier period (as we will later see, we have recently discovered that there is a large prehistoric pit in the middle of Stonehenge).
Plan of Stonehenge Stage 1 (3000–2920 BCE), showing the Aubrey Holes and postholes inside the ditch and bank.
Buckingham’s men found skulls of cattle “and other beasts” and noted great quantities of “burned coals or charcoals” within the stone circle and in several parts of “the court surrounding Stonehenge”—in other words, within its circular enclosure. Sadly for them, there was no treasure to be had.
We can dismiss Buckingham’s project as totally haphazard, or wish he hadn’t done it, but it was taken seriously at the time—Stonehenge was already something worth exploring. Others who were intrigued by this strange monument were William Harvey, the physician who discovered the human circulatory system, and Inigo Jones, the celebrated architect. Jones drew the first reasonably precise plan of Stonehenge.
Plan of Stonehenge Stage 2 (2620–2480 BCE), showing the sarsen circle and Q & R Holes.
In the early eighteenth century, the owner of Stonehenge, a Reverend Hayward, found more skulls of cattle and other animals. From 1719 to 1740 William Stukeley surveyed the monument, identifying its avenue and what he thought were holes along the avenue for standing stones.5 He dug into some of the Bronze Age round barrows around Stonehenge and had a trench dug against the middle of the recumbent stone known as the Altar Stone, which he discovered lay on solid chalk “which had never been dug.”6 The Altar Stone is made of Welsh sandstone and lies almost at the center of Stonehenge, pinned beneath a fallen upright from the great trilithon, the largest of Stonehenge’s five trilithons. Its shaped end shows that, at some point in Stonehenge’s past, it was probably a standing stone.
Plan of Stonehenge Stage 3 (2480–2280 BCE), showing the Avenue and re-arranged bluestones.
Barrow-digging went on all over Britain, a cross between a gentleman’s hobby, a sport, and serious research. In 1802 a famous barrow digger called William Cunnington dug a pit two meters deep by the Altar Stone, close to Stukeley’s trench.7 Halfway down he found Roman pottery but close to the bottom there were pieces of charred wood, prehistoric pottery, and pickaxes made from red-deer antlers. Without realizing, Cunnington too had blundered into the mysterious prehistoric pit in the middle of Stonehenge. In 1803 and 1810 he dug against the recumbent Slaughter Stone, establishing that it had originally stood upright.
In 1839 a naval officer, Captain Beamish, dug out an estimated 114 cubic meters (400 cubic feet) of soil from the front (northeast) of the Altar Stone, much of which was probably chalk bedrock.8 Captain Beamish’s big hole was probably the final blow for any prehistoric features—pits, postholes, stoneholes, or ephemeral hearths—that once lay at Stonehenge’s center. Whatever was there was almost certainly utterly destroyed by these early investigations.
Plan of Stonehenge Stage 4 (2280–2020 BCE), showing the bluestone oval and circle.
The famous Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie began his archaeological career with a survey of the stones between 1874 and 1877; he was keen to produce something accurate to improve on the plans produced by earlier antiquarians John Wood and Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Petrie’s main legacy was a numbering system for the sarsens and bluestones that archaeologists still use today.9 Petrie was a great archaeologist; he never dug at Stonehenge but was nevertheless the first to work out that the henge ditch and bank were constructed before the sarsen circle and trilithons. He also pointed out that the sarsen circle, with its ring of horizonta
l lintels resting on the upright stones, had possibly never been finished, because one of its stones (Stone 11) is too short—perhaps the builders couldn’t get enough large sarsens to finish the circle.
Plan of Stonehenge Stage 5 (1680–1520 BCE), showing the Y & Z Holes.
In 1877, Charles Darwin took his family on a picnic to Stonehenge.10 He and the children dug two small holes, one against the fallen upright of the great trilithon and the other against another fallen sarsen, not to look for finds but to investigate the power of earthworms to move huge stones. Darwin had realized that earthworms not only convert organic material into soil, but also sort the soil so that even large stones, as well as small components, are moved vertically downward. When we look at a soil profile that has not been disturbed by plowing for many centuries, we can see the effects of worm-sorting because the stones and pebbles lie at the bottom, beneath a layer of fine earth. In 1881, Darwin published his findings in his other great book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with observations on their habits. Although he was not particularly interested in archaeology, Darwin’s work on earthworms still has relevance for anyone excavating at Stonehenge today.
The first director of excavations at Stonehenge in the twentieth century was William Gowland, a professor in his sixties, who dug around the base of the surviving upright of the great trilithon (Stone 56).11 He did this as part of an exercise to re-set the sarsen monolith, which was leaning heavily and likely to fall down. Although a mining engineer, chemist, and metallurgist by training, Gowland had a background of amateur archaeological research in Japan, where he had excavated more than four hundred ancient tombs. The work on the great trilithon was carried out in 1901, and the results published promptly and in great detail the next year. Though his trench was only small, Gowland found more than a hundred artifacts—mostly worked flints and sarsen hammerstones. His recording was meticulous—sectionsg were drawn of the stone sitting in its stonehole, a plan was made of the trench, and the major finds were plotted in three dimensions. He could have had little idea that his records would be essential for working out the chronology of Stonehenge over a hundred years later.
In 1918, Stonehenge was given to the nation.12 The Office of Works realized that more stones were leaning dangerously and that there would have to be a modest program of restoration. Gowland was too old to carry out the excavations that the repairs would necessitate, so the job was given to Lieutenant-Colonel William Hawley. Petrie had wanted to excavate Stonehenge himself—with this in mind, he had even intended to buy it from its last private owner, Cecil Chubb—but Hawley was director of the Society of Antiquaries, the archaeological body advising the Office of Works, and got the job. Over the next eight years Hawley excavated not just the holes of the stones to be restored but almost half of the entire monument.13 Many archaeologists have since bemoaned this twist of fate. Petrie was the greatest archaeological excavator of his age, whereas Hawley’s abilities were later described as regrettably inadequate.14
Professor William Gowland (kneeling center) supervising excavations at Stonehenge in 1901.
Hawley had served in the British army and was a keen amateur archaeologist who had dug at Old Sarum (the old medieval town of Salisbury, nestled within the ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort). Already widowed, Lieutenant-Colonel Hawley was sixty-nine when he started work on Stonehenge in 1919.
Apart from during the stone repairs, which were carried out by workmen employed by the Office of Works, Hawley mostly worked alone over long annual seasons, between spring snowstorms and autumnal gales, occasionally helped by Robert Newall, a local enthusiast. Most days he walked the five miles from his lodgings in the old mill at Figheldean, and occasionally lived on site at Stonehenge in an Office of Works hut.
He and his team dug trenches in various areas, from Stonehenge’s external ditch to the central settings of sarsens and bluestones. Across much of the interior he found nothing but bare chalk. However, the ditch that encircles the stones was full of Neolithic deposits. Inside this ditch there was once a bank of soil standing two meters high (now less than a meter high). Just inside the bank, Hawley found a circle of fifty-six pits, known as the Aubrey Holes. These are named after the antiquarian John Aubrey. Hawley excavated thirty-two of these Aubrey Holes, digging out the soil and artifacts that filled them. In both the surrounding ditch and in this circle of pits he found lots of cremation burials—small heaps of burned human bones that, he surmised, had been deposited in long-since rotted leather bags. Hawley dug every year at Stonehenge from 1919 to 1926 (by which time he was seventy-six years old). His methods were thorough and he recorded his observations daily in a notebook. At the end of each season he delivered a lecture on his findings to the Society of Antiquaries, which published it in its annual journal. Although Hawley lived to a ripe old age (into his nineties), he never published an overall account of his work; today Salisbury Museum takes care of his notebooks.
Lieutenant-Colonel William Hawley (seated right) with his team of workmen at Stonehenge in 1919.
There’s no doubt that Gowland and Petrie were better excavators: Hawley failed to draw many of the plans or sections that we would expect from modern excavations, and his section drawings in particular are often too schematic to be of much use. And not only did he fail to publish a book on his discoveries but also he seemed never to develop any working hypotheses or research questions to test in his excavations. At the end of his work he admitted to being at just as much of a loss about the purpose of Stonehenge as he’d been when he began.15
In some ways, however, Hawley has had bad press. We know what he found and roughly where he found it. Between his diary and his interim reports, there’s enough to be able to re-explore and re-interpret some of the more tangled problems created by his digging. There are some very detailed accounts in the fillings in the Aubrey Holes and the Stonehenge ditch, for example. Working through his reports has proved to be an exciting armchair excavation, almost as much fun as carrying out the excavation itself, discovering important clues that have been missed by previous researchers.
After the Second World War, a group of three archaeologists—Atkinson, Piggott and Stone—agreed with the Society of Antiquaries that they should write a full report on Stonehenge and carry out some limited excavations to resolve some of the problems thrown up by Hawley’s work. In 1950 they began with two Aubrey Holes. By 1964 their “limited program of fresh excavations” had turned into more than forty trenches within Stonehenge and its avenue.16 (Professor Richard Atkinson returned in 1978 for a final season with a Cardiff colleague, environmental archaeologist John Evans, and Alexander Thom.
When he began working at Stonehenge, Atkinson was a young and dynamic lecturer at the newly created archaeology department of Cardiff University, and his methods were revolutionary, using skilled archaeologists working with trowels and making careful observations of soil and stratigraphy. Even as late as the 1950s the actual digging in archaeology was usually left to unskilled laborers; in his textbook on field archaeology, Atkinson not only outlined a better way of going about things but he also put it into practice.17 From his first dig of two Aubrey Holes in 1950 to his last excavation (of the circular ditch in 1978), he brought into common use new methods and skills.
Atkinson was helped in the Stonehenge excavations by Stuart Piggott, professor of archaeology at Edinburgh University, and by J. F. S. ‘Marcus’ Stone, an amateur archaeologist who worked nearby as a scientist at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence research center. Atkinson published his team’s Stonehenge excavation results in 1956, and in 1979 he added a few pages to a new edition of this important book on Stonehenge, but he never published the full details of his findings, so it has been hard for others to evaluate his work and results.18 Paradoxically, he criticized Hawley’s work for the same reasons: “A regrettable inadequacy in his methods of recording his finds and observations and, one suspects, an insufficient appreciation of the destruction of archaeological excavation
per se, has left for subsequent excavators a most lamentable legacy of doubt and frustration.”19 Unlike Hawley, Richard Atkinson seems not to have written much at all in the way of field notes.
In any archaeological project, excavation is the quickest and easiest part of the process; the post-excavation work on finds and plans takes years to complete, often without any funding or dedicated research time. In his later years, Atkinson was distracted from writing up his excavations by administrative duties and illness. He died in 1994, and it seems that little in the way of excavation records was found when his papers were cleared out. Atkinson’s students remember him saying that everything was in his head and today no one knows what records he kept of his fieldwork. Stuart Piggott certainly put some things down on paper: He was an accomplished draftsman and drew many of the plans and sections during Atkinson’s excavations.
In 1956, Atkinson published his book on Stonehenge, describing the monument in detail and setting out what seemed to be a likely sequence in which it was built.20 He worked out that the first phase of construction was the circular bank and ditch, and the ring of pits called Aubrey Holes. Then, he thought, a semicircular arc of bluestones was added. This was followed by the erection of a circle of upright sarsens, all joined together by lintels, and the trilithons inside the circle (with the bluestones being rearranged, also inside the sarsen circle).
Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument Page 4
