On the long barrow, our scaled-down plans allowed for a 10-meter-long trench into the 60-meter-long ditch on the barrow’s east side. We decided to place it immediately north of Julian Richards’s two-meter-wide trench into the ditch,15 reckoning that this would help to increase the odds of finding an antler pick. Excavation trenches are always refilled when a dig is over. The location of a trench remains visible on the ground surface for some years but, providing the backfilling and re-turfing are done well, it eventually disappears, becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding area. Julian Richards’s trench had been dug more than twenty years earlier, so we were relying on a plan to determine where it had once been.
As we started digging, we soon discovered a large rectangular pit. We had landed on the edge of Julian Richards’s trench. After some pleading with English Heritage and National Trust officials, who had to re-issue the excavation paperwork, we were allowed to re-site our trench to where it should have been and start again. The barrow ditch was massive, three meters deep and 3.5 meters wide. As we sieved every bit of soil and chalk, we became increasingly disappointed to find that there was nothing in the lower fills of the ditch. Then, right on the bottom of the ditch, Julian Thomas found what he was looking for: Just two meters from the edge of Julian Richards’s trench there was a broken antler pick. Its radiocarbon date was almost identical to that of the antler pick from the Cursus ditch.
The radiocarbon dates for the Cursus, Lesser Cursus and long barrow present us with a dilemma. The calibration curve forms a flat plateau for this period, meaning that artifacts cannot generally be dated more closely than 3600–3300 BC. Within this three-hundred-year period, all three monuments could have been built at the same time, or any one of them could have been earlier than the other two. From this dating evidence, we’ll never know for sure if the long barrow was built first, followed by the Cursus lining up on it, or whether the Greater Cursus replaced the Lesser Cursus. What we can say is that the long barrow would not have been an already ancient monument at the time the Cursus was built.
Are we any closer to understanding what these cursus monuments were for? There are more than 150 in Britain—and they are, like henges, a specifically British monument, not found on the Continent.16 Julian Thomas has dug on seven of them in England and Scotland, and probably knows more about them than anyone else. The Scottish ones are earlier, being built mostly before 3600 BC, whereas the English ones are from broadly the same date as the two at Stonehenge. There are certain recurring themes. Cursuses often have no identifiable access into them: There is no way in, or out, across their ditches and banks. As confirmed by our trenches inside the Cursus, there is generally no sign of activity within them. Many of them either cross a stream or have a watercourse close to one end. They are also often positioned close to one or more long barrows.
The longest of them is the Dorset Cursus, running for seven miles across Cranborne Chase, about twenty miles south of Stonehenge.17 This is actually two cursuses joined together, with groups of long barrows positioned at each end. The western of these two cursuses is aligned on the midwinter solstice sunset, framed on the horizon by one of the long barrows. The excavators Martin Green and Richard Bradley interpret it as a monumental avenue of the dead, linking the ancestors with forces of nature, such as springs and the sun. Back in 1947 J. F. S. Stone interpreted the Stonehenge Cursus as “the material embodiment of an attempted connecting link between the living and the dead.”18
Neither of the Stonehenge cursuses has a solstice orientation, but they do have relationships with long barrows. The barrow at the east end of the Greater Cursus is not much to look at today. Most of the long mound has been destroyed and what little of it survives is underneath a modern track. It must once have been very impressive, originally more than 60 meters long and standing perhaps three meters high. It was dug into in the nineteenth century by John Thurnham.19 He found no human remains in primary positions within the mound, but did recover an ox skull. Our own excavations recovered a stray Neolithic human arm bone.
One of the discoveries made by both Julians—at different times—was a line of pits that had been dug into the side of the mound, just next to the ditch. At some point after the mound was built (and not before, as the 1983 excavation results misleadingly hinted), someone quarried out chalk from these pits dug into the side of the barrow, perhaps to give the mound a makeover by spreading clean, white chalk across its surface. If the Greater Cursus is indeed a later construction than the barrow, then this chalk-digging might have been done when the Cursus was built, to give the impression of newness for both barrow and Cursus.
The Lesser Cursus has a line of Bronze Age round barrows and an undated pit circle off its west end, all of which were most probably built later than the Lesser Cursus itself. However, one of the barrows is a small long barrow—in this case the long barrow lies at the west end of the linear cursus as opposed to the east end, as seen at the Greater Cursus. Perhaps we have a situation not dissimilar to the two Dorset cursuses: The two Stonehenge cursuses might have been constructed as a pair, with the Greater Cursus leading east to the Amesbury 42 tomb, and the Lesser Cursus leading west to its own associated tomb.
Julian thinks it is most likely that the Stonehenge cursuses were monuments to former processional routes, whose antiquity could have gone back to the Mesolithic. Their position, straddling the watershed between the Avon and its tributary, the Till, occupies a natural routeway for people and animals crossing from one valley to another. We know that the upper waters of the Till were an important place for Early Neolithic people: Many of its coombes and valleys are overlooked by long barrows. Similarly, there is a significant group of Early Neolithic long barrows to the east, around what would become Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. Perhaps the ditches and banks of the cursuses demarcated routes that had once been used by the ancestors, moving back and forth between the settlement areas in the two valleys.
Julian also has an idea about how the Greater Cursus was laid out. Starting at its west end, the southern ditch runs almost due east, heading for the major landmark of Beacon Hill. For anyone crossing the watershed from west to east, this would have been the skyline feature to head toward. After a few hundred meters, the Greater Cursus ditch then shifts orientation northward to head for the large long barrow (Amesbury 42). The north side of the Greater Cursus is strangely irregular, as we found when digging our trench into it. Most likely, the Neolithic surveyors used the kinked southern ditch as their baseline and then took offsets to establish the line of the north ditch.
Two important points can be made about the Stonehenge cursuses. The first is that they mark not the entire route from the places of the living—down in the valley—to the abodes of the dead, but rather just the second half of that journey to the tomb, a journey that could have started at the riverside. Perhaps the campsites where the living gathered lie in the valley bottoms awaiting discovery. The second point is that there are more than fifteen Neolithic long barrows in the Stonehenge area but only two of them were considered suitable for the huge labor investment of digging cursus ditches. Was this a time when certain people’s ancestors became more important than others?
Like the causewayed enclosure of Robin Hood’s Ball, the cursuses’ ditches were dug in segments. In both cases the segments are much shorter than those of the Durrington Walls henge, so the sizes of the work gangs need only have been tens rather than hundreds of workers. Nonetheless, many hundreds of people were involved in digging and building the Greater Cursus. Perhaps this was the beginning of the complex social arrangements that would culminate in the huge workforces needed to build Durrington Walls and Stonehenge.
The Cuckoo Stone
The Greater Cursus is frequently used as a flight path by the British army’s helicopters as they swoop around the Salisbury Plain Training Area. As they fly eastward along the line of the Greater Cursus, they pass the Amesbury 42 long barrow and continue toward Woodhenge. The pilots probably don’t notice the
Cuckoo Stone, halfway between the two. This misshapen lump of sarsen lies in a field southwest of Durrington Walls and west of Woodhenge, generally unvisited and largely unknown. Its name may derive from “cuckold”—for reasons entirely lost to us—and a few centuries ago the stone is supposed to have been standing erect.20 It would have been a rather stumpy and unimpressive standing stone, as the recumbent sarsen is not much longer than it is wide, about 1.5 meters at its greatest dimension.
In 2007, Colin Richards dug an area around the recumbent Cuckoo Stone to find out where and when it was once erected. Did this small standing stone have something to do with the Cursus, whose axis passes through it, in a line with Woodhenge? Colin had been told that the Cuckoo Stone might have been moved from its original location, so he needed to open a large trench to be sure of finding the hole in which the stone had once stood. In fact the stone has not been moved at all and is lying right next to its stonehole. Colin realized that this pit was cut into a larger depression, a solution hollow that had formed beneath the stone before it was erected. The Cuckoo Stone is therefore a naturally occurring sarsen and has always been here.
People often assume that all the sarsens at Stonehenge and in the surrounding area were quarried elsewhere and moved from their original position. Today most natural sarsens that still remain in the landscape are effectively restricted to the Marlborough Downs, in the area east of Avebury about twenty miles north of Stonehenge. Here some valley bottoms are filled with rivers of stones. The original extent of this geological formation has been reduced by thousands of years of stone quarrying and removal, so what we see today is not the original distribution of sarsen. There are records of sarsen stones being found across Salisbury Plain, so it is likely that, during the Neolithic, natural sarsens were found as far south as—and possibly beyond—Stonehenge.
After the Cuckoo Stone had been pulled out of its hollow, the prehistoric megalith builders then erected a wooden post in the hollow, rather than raising the stone upright immediately. We could not tell whether this post was later removed or left to decay in situ, but its central position in the hollow shows that it was certainly not a scaffolding post or other such construction device. Mike Pitts reckons he found the same thing happening at Stonehenge, in the hollow beneath his stonehole (Stonehole 97) next to the Heel Stone: The recumbent stone was removed, a wooden post was put up, and then the stone was erected. Was this a symbolic rather than practical act, to “reanimate” the stone by making it go through the life process of growth, decay, and eternal durability, with stone following wood, to mimic the process from decay to permanence?
The Cuckoo Stone’s hollow and the two features cut into it—the posthole and the stonehole—were devoid of artifacts; the only finds were flint nodules that had been used to pack the stone upright in its hole. There was no way that we could date the putting up of the post or the stone itself. But there were clues about what happened around the standing stone. Immediately north of the stone, Colin found two pits. One of these contained a roe-deer antler, some cattle bones, worked flints, and a piece of Early Neolithic pottery from the time of the Cursus or even before. At some point this stone, whether still recumbent or raised upright, had clearly been a recognized location in the landscape of the Cursus builders.
The second pit contained animal bones and worked flints, as well as an antler pick and a shovel made from the scapula (shoulder blade) of an ox. The tip of the pick was far more worn than it should have been had it been used only to dig the pit in which it was left. Colin wonders if it had first been used to dig the socket in which the stone was set upright. If so, then the pick’s date of around 2900 BC gives us the moment when the stone was erected, a few decades after Stonehenge’s first phase.
The Cuckoo Stone continued to be a special place. In the Early Bronze Age, after 2000 BC, people brought urns—large ceramic pots—containing the ashes of their dead to bury next to the stone. Early Bronze Age pots are easily recognizable from their very distinctive forms, and antiquarians and early archaeologists gave the different types names that are still used today: Food Vessels, Collared Urns, Cordoned Urns, and Biconical Urns. These names will never be changed—again, they are very useful archaeological shorthand—but they don’t really fit with what we now know the pots were used for. All four types of pot were used for cooking and storage (not just the Food Vessels); after being used in the kitchen, they were then used as containers for cremated bones. So Bronze Age grandma’s ashes were buried in the equivalent of a saucepan. It seems pretty peculiar to us, but was evidently normal to the people of the time.
A new study by geochemist Lucija Šoberl at Bristol University has found that such Bronze Age pots were used mostly for cooking dairy products, with a small percentage used for cooking pork and other meat. Two of Colin’s three pots from the Cuckoo Stone are Collared Urns dating to the period 1900–1700 BC. Both are about 30 centimeters high; this style of pot widens out from a narrow base to a rounded belly, with a rim that looks as if it has been folded back on itself to create a wide collar at the top of the pot. The third pot is a Biconical Urn, buried there in the period 1420–1260 BC. The three Cuckoo Stone pots were included in Lucija’s study and she found that one had been used to cook either beef or mutton. Placed within the pots were the ashes of three adults.
A Collared Urn (1880–1670 BCE) from the Cuckoo Stone. This pot was carefully lifted from the ground so that its contents could be excavated in the laboratory.
A few thousand years after it was erected, the Cuckoo Stone became incorporated into a small Roman village. Toward the end of the Roman period, someone buried two hoards of coins here (later dug up and now in Salisbury Museum). Thanks to volunteer metal detectorist Lee Smeaton, we found another fifteen or so coins in the area. These are different in date to the coins in the two hoards, and probably ended up here among the rubbish thrown out from adjacent Roman farmhouses. There was the Roman burial of a child, too, accompanied by the skull of a dog. Colin also found the footings of a large rectangular Roman building with a colonnade of posts along its front.
The Roman village that engulfed the Cuckoo Stone had once been substantial. In the same field, cropmarks to the east reveal the presence of farmsteads, trackways, and field boundaries. There was a Roman burial ground further east, cut into a Bronze Age barrow, where Josh and California Dave were digging south of Woodhenge. To the north of the Cuckoo Stone, Geoff Wainwright excavated a much larger area than ours in 1970, and found Late Roman buildings, a corn drier, ditches, and pits, close to the southwestern edge of Durrington Walls.
Although Colin and Josh located Early Neolithic features in our Cuckoo Stone and Woodhenge trenches, none were found in 1970 in Geoff’s much larger areas of excavation just to the north. He found four pits with Late Neolithic Grooved Ware, but nothing from the same early period as the Cuckoo Stone pits. Consequently, we can be fairly confident that the Cuckoo Stone pits were definitely associated with the stone, rather than spread randomly across the landscape. Given the Early Neolithic dates and the pits’ positions on the extended axis of the Cursus, it’s also possible that they once formed part of an access route east-west across the high ground between the Avon and Till, as Julian Thomas had predicted.
The Bulford Stone
Colin’s main interest these days is in the origins of standing stones—quarries and access routes have never been well-studied, and Colin’s work around the world, from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Easter Island in the South Pacific, is focused on finding out how and why megalithic monuments got to where they are. He was keen to chase up the historical records of large sarsen stones in the Stonehenge area.21 In the early eighteenth century, William Stukeley noted a stone in the River Avon at Bulford, and a pair of standing stones in Luxenborough Plantation on Coneybury Hill, to the southeast of Stonehenge. He could well have been referring to Coneybury henge, later excavated by Julian Richards. A late-seventeenth-century engraving of Stonehenge by the artist David Loggan shows a standi
ng stone in the distance, somewhere around the east end of the Cursus, but who can say whether its presence in the picture is pure artistic license?22 Colin also found many sarsens marked on the Ordnance Survey map from 1887. All of them have now gone, except for one. This lies in a field southeast of the village of Bulford, on the east bank of the Avon.
Colin went off to look at the stone. It is another recumbent stone, but its tapered ends and large size—4.6 meters long and 1.7 meters wide—are sure signs that it was once a standing monolith. The stone had no recorded name, so Colin had the privilege of choosing a name for the site. He decided to call it the Tor Stone, in honor of Chris Tilley’s dog.
The Bulford Stone now lies close to where it once stood, in a field east of the River Avon. Each alternating color of the black-and-white photographic rods indicate half-meter intervals.
We are lucky that the Tor Stone is still there. It is not a scheduled monument (that is, it is not protected by law from damage or interference) and, some years ago, it was removed from its original position to the edge of the field. Then the farmer tried to bury the stone in a pit in the corner of the field. Fortunately, he didn’t go through with it and the stone was subsequently dragged back to where it had come from.
The farmer was happy for us to investigate the area (it had been a good summer and the crop was already harvested) so, in 2005, Colin cleared an area around the stone. From Durrington Walls we could see his team at work in the distance, with Beacon Hill looming above them. Close to the stone itself was a stonehole that contained a row of ten small stakeholes along its western edge. Josh had seen similar features during his excavations of stoneholes at Avebury; these were anti-friction posts, used to form a barrier for the bottom of the stone to rest against as it was raised upright. Close to it, Colin found a solution hollow the same size and shape as the stone. By making a cast of the hollow (fieldwork ingenuity led him to use No More Big Gaps foam filler, in huge quantities), he was able to show that the recumbent stone fitted this hollow perfectly. Here was another instance in which a natural sarsen had been raised as a monolith.
Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument Page 15
