At the bottom of the henge bank we also found a rubbish pit that had been created by digging into a very large hole left by the falling of a huge, ancient tree. This hole had slowly filled up with soil; in the turf on top of it we found a leaf-shaped arrowhead from the fourth millennium BC. The tree had been standing perhaps a thousand years earlier, before the first farmers. Long after it had fallen, around 2500 BC, the hollow left by its toppling seems to have been used as a boundary marker between two different groups within the village.
When examining the finds from Durrington Walls, one of the things we’ve looked for is any supporting evidence for the village, or the ditch-digging, having been divided into distinct zones, or groupings. The potshards do show a particular distribution pattern. The Grooved Ware pottery from the middens (rubbish heaps) on the south side of the avenue has an unusual style of decoration, in which the grooves form spiral patterns. Though we have found much more pottery north of the avenue, there is not a single piece of spiral decoration from that area.
Spiral-decorated pots were also found in the lower layers of the henge ditch on the south side of the avenue, so this type of pot was in use in the area south of the avenue both before and after the ditch-digging. More intriguingly, the spiral motif is also found on pots deposited into the pits dug into the decayed posts of the Southern Circle almost two hundred years later, but only in its south quadrant. If spiral decoration was used by one particular group, this raises the possibility that a group specifically associated with one area of the village (and one segment of ditch-digging) might also have been associated with a particular segment of the monument, such as the Southern Circle. Perhaps this also happened at Stonehenge, with different groups responsible for separate sectors—a portion of the outer ring of sarsens, say, and a trilithon or two.
If the ditch-digging was indeed done by gangs working simultaneously, then we have a window into Neolithic labor organization. This helps us think about how Stonehenge itself could have been built. At the ground level were fairly large groups, perhaps organized and coordinated by a middle level of “management.” At the top, decisions must have been taken by a council, or even by a chief and his associates.
Choosing the right vocabulary is difficult when talking about prehistoric social organization. In normal usage in anthropology, a tribe usually numbers thousands of people, as does a clan. It is more precise to use the less familiar term “lineage group.” By this I mean a community that defines itself as the offspring of a single founding ancestor going back five or six generations (about 150 years). That is, your grandparents’ grandparents’ parent or grandparent. If the first and each subsequent generation produces four children per family, who themselves all reproduce at the same rate, numbers soon grow. The second generation has four new members, the next generation adds sixteen new members; such a lineage has over 250 members by the sixth generation.
Considering the logistics needed to keep our own fieldwork running smoothly, we could easily see that the Neolithic builders of Durrington Walls, and those of Stonehenge, would have had to have been well-organized. We had a digging team of 160 to 180 people, equivalent to one Neolithic ditch-digging work gang. Keeping the team functioning was a huge undertaking: We had six directors, a team of supervisors and their assistants (they called themselves “middle management”), a back-up crew running domestic affairs and finds analysis at our campsite, and a public-outreach team. Imagine another twenty such teams all involved in the same project.
One of the mysteries of Durrington Walls has always been where everybody lived while they constructed the henge ditch and bank. Although we discovered a previously unknown village, all the settlement areas that we’ve found were in use before the ditch was dug. Perhaps the ditch-diggers lived somewhere else entirely, or perhaps they set up camp further out, beyond the perimeter of the old village. A few years ago archaeologists found a number of Neolithic pits while monitoring the installation of a water pipe along the modern road north of Durrington Walls.8 Perhaps these pits were part of this later, henge-builders’ settlement.
Although the enclosure of the henge covered the houses of the old village under the new ditch and bank, the central enclosed area was still used after the ditch and bank had been built. Although the new bank partly blocked the old avenue, encroaching onto its southern edge, there was continued use of this routeway too, even as its flint surface became overgrown and buried under a thin layer of soil. Around 2400 BC or later, new styles of pottery—known as Beakers—were deposited at the front of the decaying Southern Circle and in the nearby hollow where the large D-shaped building had once stood. We know from scientific analysis that Beakers in many parts of western Europe, including Britain, were used for alcoholic drinks, such as mead or ale. Research by chemist Anna Mukherjee has shown that the Durrington Walls Beakers contained lipids (fatty acids) deriving from dairy products.9 These could have been milk, butter, or curds and whey; we cannot rule out the possibility that they were fermented to make an alcoholic drink.
Beakers were first used in Britain about fifty to a hundred years after the Southern Circle was erected, but Grooved Ware remained in use. In about 2300 BC—at least 150 years after the posts were erected—the holes of the Southern Circle’s decayed posts were dug out so that special deposits of Grooved Ware pottery (together with a few Beaker shards), worked flints, bone tools, and animal bones could be put in each of them. Some of these new pits were quickly filled in but others, such as the one with two human skulls, took hundreds of years to fill.
A Beaker pot from a site called Naboth’s Vineyard near Cowbridge in Wales. In both shape and decoration, it is like those found at Durrington Walls.
The radiocarbon dating results show that Durrington Walls in its various stages was in use for three centuries, from about 2600–2300 BC (not including some ephemeral traces of activity in the area during the previous millennium). What particularly interested us was the brief period of probably less than forty years (within 2500–2460 BC) during which it was the largest settlement anywhere in northwest Europe. Why did so many people come here? Where did they come from? Did they live here full time or did they come just for short stays at different seasons of the year?
We knew we could answer these questions if our excavations produced the right materials to analyze. The bones and teeth of the human skeleton, for example, preserve a record of our lives. Our diet can be reconstructed from microscopic wear-marks on our teeth, and from levels of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in our bones.10 Our tooth enamel forms in childhood: For the rest of our lives we carry in our teeth (until they all fall out) the traces of the geology and environment in which we lived when we were very young. By measuring levels of strontium, sulphur, and oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel, we can find out if people moved from one region to another after childhood, and sometimes where it was that they moved from.
We would be able to do similar analyses on the bones and teeth of the animals that the inhabitants of the Durrington Walls village had eaten there. In certain cases our specialists in animal bones—faunal analysts—could tell us at what time of year the herds were culled. By studying the range of foods consumed and their seasonality, we could also work out whether this was a full-time or seasonal settlement.
All the human bones that Geoff’s team found in 1967 have been radiocarbon-dated and have turned out to be much later than the time of the settlement. Our own excavations produced about eighty thousand bones but of all these, only three are human. A broken femur (upper leg bone), a skull fragment, and a toothless jaw date to the occupation of the village. The femur, belonging to an adult male, has two deep nicks in it.11 Our human bone specialists, Andrew Chamberlain and Chris Knüsel, have identified these as arrow wounds received around the time of death.
To suffer one leg wound in which the arrow went right to the bone was unfortunate, but to get two was really unlucky. I wondered how many other arrows had struck this individual—perhaps he’d been pierced like a pin cushion, a ver
itable prehistoric St. Sebastian. Had he been executed by firing squad? And where was the rest of him anyway? Like the human skull and the mandible, but unlike the animal bones, this battered leg bone had been kicking around for a very long time. Perhaps it was somebody’s trophy, kept for years until it was left in a pit with cow and pig bones and other food waste.
Archaeologists are never surprised to find stray fragments of human bone in pits and other contexts on prehistoric sites. It may seem strange to us to keep a bit of human body lying around the house—nowadays we take great care to dispose of bodies as definitively as possible, by burying them or scattering cremated ashes, and find it hard to imagine deliberately chopping bits off to keep. It was definitely different in prehistory. From the Neolithic to the Iron Age, odd pieces of bone and skull turn up in contexts that have nothing to do with burials and funerals, often in rubbish pits and ditches, along with domestic waste and animal bones. Human remains must have been scattered on the ground around houses and villages. Some of these bones do seem to have been kept as special objects, especially skulls and long bones. Human bones weren’t “sacred” in our terms, though they had some sort of meaning for prehistoric people. To find just three human bones from among eighty thousand animal bones is surprising. It is actually a very low number for a prehistoric settlement.
Our faunal specialists, Umberto Albarella and Sarah Viner, have much more data to work with. Umberto has gone through the 1967 finds and discovered that most of the young pigs were killed at around nine months old. He can tell this by measuring the growth and wear on the teeth within the mandible. Reckoning that, like today, pigs farrowed only once a year in Britain’s temperate climate (during the spring), Umberto has deduced that since the young pigs were killed at nine months, they were therefore killed in midwinter. To his surprise, when examining the faunal remains, he found the tips of flint arrows embedded in pig bones: At least some of these animals were shot with arrows.12 Then the pigs were barbecued or roasted—the ends of many of their limb bones were scorched by flames while the meat was cooking.
Such arrow injuries might be expected were the pigs in question wild boar, but there wasn’t a single wild pig among the 1967 bones—all were domesticates. Umberto knows that in some parts of the world—New Guinea, for example—domestic pigs are shot with arrows at point-blank range when a tribe or village is putting on a feast. His results don’t tally with this possible scenario, however, because the wounds on the Durrington pigs are located in all parts of the skeleton, including the limbs and feet. This suggests that perhaps these pigs were shot from a distance. Maybe archers demonstrated their skills by bringing down squealing ranks of porkers in front of a crowd ready and eager for a huge pig-roast.
There is another curious feature of the animal-bone remains. None of the animals was very young—no piglets and no calves. Umberto and Sarah have looked at animal bones from many different places and periods, and know that bones of newborns are frequent finds in prehistoric settlements. Such very young animals are not only more likely to die of natural causes, but also provide tender meat—in the form of suckling pig, for instance. This absence of newborns (or neonates) can only mean that there was no year-round stock-breeding at Durrington Walls. The animals were brought in already grown and did not give birth here. This was a “consumption site,” a place for eating but not for raising animals.
Isotopic analysis of the animals’ teeth can confirm this and tell us where the livestock might have come from. Together with isotope scientist Jane Evans, Sarah and Umberto have tested the teeth in 175 cattle mandibles.13 Given that Durrington Walls and Stonehenge are surrounded by chalkland in every direction for at least twenty miles, they expected the cattle to have values consistent with their having been reared on chalk soils.
The results are fascinating. Very few of these animals had lived on chalk and the others lived fairly eventful lives—for cows. Some were reared in the far west, either in Devon and Cornwall, or in west Wales. The others were from the lowlands, either west of Wessex or to its east. By slicing the tooth enamel more finely, Jane tracked their movements as young animals. Many had different histories, coming from different herds.
A similar picture is emerging with the enamel on the pigs’ teeth. Although we initially thought that pig-tooth enamel is not strong enough to have remained uncontaminated by the chalk soil in which the animal remains lay, researcher Richard Madgwick, working at Cardiff University, found that some of the Durrington pigs were also raised off the chalklands. Herding pigs is never an easy business, but these had traveled at least twenty miles to Durrington.
The results so far have been so unexpected and so revealing that we’ve started a project to look at more of the pig teeth, and the results should be available in a couple of years’ time. In the meantime, we can conclude that the Durrington Walls village was the hub of a network that stretched across southern Britain to provide supplies to feed an army-sized population, possibly bringing some animals from as far away as Scotland. The inhabitants of Durrington Walls would have required huge quantities of resources: antler picks to dig the holes, massive tree trunks for building the timber circles, as well as wood and reed thatch for their houses, ropes for maneuvering timber posts into position, flint for tools, clay for making pots, reeds and withies for making baskets, skins for making bags, and meat and vegetables to feed everyone.
Some of these could be found locally. Reeds grew in beds along the river, clay could also be found along the river margins, and ropes were made out of linden bast, honeysuckle, or twisted animal hides. Local flint mines north of the henge provided nodules of top-quality flint, but other items had to come from further away. Red deer were more numerous in Neolithic Britain than they are today, but the number of antler picks required must have been in the thousands. The vast majority were naturally shed—red deer lose their antlers in spring—and would have been collected from the hills where the deer roamed.
We know that there was a certain amount of woodland in the Avon valley at the time that Durrington Walls was inhabited,14 but not the huge numbers of tall, mature trees needed to build the timber circles. These grew in canopy woodland where dense stands of oak, elm, ash, and linden competed for light by growing long, straight trunks that branched out only toward their tops. Such woodland would have been found to the north, in the Vale of Pewsey, or further south along the Avon valley. Most of the larger trees must have been brought from at least ten miles away, whether floated down the river or hauled overland.
While pork, beef, and dairy products provided animal protein, the Durrington population also ate a variety of vegetable crops. Prehistoric plant remains can survive for thousands of years but are hard to recover; they survive only in heavily waterlogged places (where they haven’t been able to rot) or if they were charred by fire in prehistory. Such remains are usually too small and fragile for the digger to retrieve directly from the soil. They are usually found by “flotation”: Like the wet-sieving for small artifacts and bone fragments, soil samples are washed through sieves (with very fine mesh sizes of 1 millimeter and 300 microns) to catch seeds and other fragments.
Ellen Simmons, the project’s specialist in carbonized plant remains (paleoethnobotany), has found burned fragments of apples, hazelnuts, and tubers on the Durrington house floors and in the yards. The apples would have been small and sour—more of a crab apple than a Cox’s Orange Pippin—perhaps best used for making cider. Hazelnuts are found in virtually all Neolithic settlements; they were evidently a dietary staple and might well have been managed in coppiced woodlands as an autumnal crop. Various wild plants, such as pignut, silverweed, dandelion, and burdock, have edible tubers and would have been easily collectible and relatively simple to store and transport.15 Ellen has also discovered the burned remains of a starchy “cake,” probably made from crushed fruits of wild species, such as hawthorn.
Ellen found burned grains of wheat within the village. They are from southwest of the avenue; none are from the house f
loors or yard surfaces on the northeast side of the avenue. Does this restricted distribution of cereal remains mean that wheat was hardly used at Durrington Walls?
More than twenty years ago, archaeologists noted that many Neolithic sites in Britain had much more evidence for wild-plant use than for domesticated cereals.16 They concluded that cereals were not common and, in this period, people still mostly relied upon wild-plant foods, just as their hunter-gatherer forebears had. Other archaeologists then pointed out that this was all to do with bias of recovery: Hazelnut shells are very likely to have been thrown in the fire, with some of them becoming carbonized, but cereals get burned only by accident. So it is only in extraordinary circumstances that we find carbonized prehistoric cereal grains. The state of knowledge at present is that well over a hundred Neolithic sites in Britain have now yielded carbonized cereal remains, so they are not as rare as previously thought.17
The rarity of such crop remains on a site such as Durrington Walls that has been so carefully sampled, with thousands of liters of soil sent off for flotation, is still not unusual compared with other Neolithic settlements. It probably reflects the poor survival of cereals (with few of the precious grains ending up burned on the fire) for the archaeologist to find. Cereals might well have been more common at this village than appears to be the case.
Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument Page 12
