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

by Mike Parker Pearson

  The hollow was full of small chippings of sarsen, broken flints, and flint-knapping debris, forming a small cairn in the top of the hole. Beneath was an arrangement of four stakeholes, perhaps the remnants of efforts to remove the recumbent stone. Neither the stonehole nor the hollow provided any clue to the date when the stone was raised, but Colin did discover that it had been encircled by the ditch of a small round barrow, long since plowed flat. Round barrows are circular burial mounds of the Early Bronze Age (2200–1500 BC), formed by heaping up turf and soil, with a circular ditch dug around the mound.

  There was a burial pit beneath the center of this barrow, just over a meter to the northeast of the hole for the standing stone. Three adults had been buried here, or at least parts of three adults had. Two burials consisted of the cremated bones of adults and the other individual was represented by a handful of unburned bones. The grave goods (the provisions for the dead) within the pit included some of the most unusual ever found in Wessex.

  Against the eastern wall of the burial pit the mourners had placed three antler spatulae (thin strips of antler, perhaps for pressure-working flints), a group of flint flakes, then a group of flint knives, barbed-and-tanged arrowheads, and a fabricator (a flint for striking sparks) as well as a hollowed piece of iron pyrites, worn from being used to make sparks for fire lighting. Then someone had added a small, carved limestone block about 15 centimeters high. Imported probably from the Cotswolds or Mendips (the nearest sources of limestone, almost thirty miles west), it has been carefully squared like a miniature Stonehenge sarsen. It looks like the sort of souvenir that you would have bought from a Bronze Age version of the Stonehenge gift shop! The group was completed by a small Food Vessel.

  This main grouping of grave goods was flanked by other items. On its west side lay a pendant made from a wild boar’s tusk. On its south side, someone had placed a piece of clear rock crystal. This beautiful piece of stone has been flaked from a larger block, part of whose surface has been polished. Archaeologists sometimes find polished rock-crystal pendants in burials of the Migration Period (the sixth to seventh centuries AD, after the Romans) in Britain. This seems to be the only one from British prehistory. It might well have come from the Alps, but we cannot rule out the possibility of more local sources in western Britain.

  After all of these objects had been carefully placed in the burial pit, it was filled with soil and some pieces of tabular flint were placed over the grave goods. Then one group of cremated bones, probably from the same person, was put in the center of the pit and a smaller group was placed in its southwest corner and covered with flint nodules. Then a small hole was dug in the west end of the pit, into which was placed a second cremation burial and a large Food Vessel; this was then packed in place with slabs of tabular flint. When this pot was carefully excavated in the lab, it was devoid of finds inside except for a pebble.

  The Food Vessel burials at Bulford date to about 1900–1750 BC, so they are from the same period as the Cuckoo Stone’s Collared Urns.23 Yet this was a very different burial—at the Cuckoo Stone, Colin found only the urns, without any other grave goods. Here at the Tor Stone, not only were there thirty-two grave goods—some of them extremely unusual—in a single grave, but also the remains of three people, two of them buried together and the third added later.

  The large Food Vessel was not the last deposition. An oval hole was dug against the northern edge of the grave pit, and finally some more cremated bones were buried in what must have been an organic container of which no trace survives. This was the culmination of four acts of deposition in the same spot. Had there been an above-ground marker so that returning mourners knew where to dig? It is very unusual to find an Early Bronze Age cremation burial returned to again and again, so why did this grave get re-used in this way?

  The Bulford burial is unique, but it does share certain similarities with another burial on Salisbury Plain, from under a round barrow at Upton Lovell, about ten miles west of Stonehenge.24 This was excavated two hundred years ago by Richard Colt Hoare, who found two skeletons, one of which was buried in association with about eighty grave goods. Most of these were bone points, many of them perforated, as were a number of boars’ tusks. There were also shale beads and a shale ring (from the Dorset coast), as well as ornaments of bone.

  Recent re-excavation of Upton Lovell, by Colin Shell and Gill Swanton, has confirmed that the individual buried here was a man who had also been provided with a bronze awl and a strange array of stone tools: stone battle-axes, polished flint axes, a grooved whetstone, stones for rubbing materials, a cushion stone for fine metalworking, a geode (a hollow nodule with crystals inside), and a rounded stone of white quartz. He has come to be known as the Upton Lovell shaman, an Early Bronze Age ritual specialist whose collection of four antique polished axes—they would have been at least five hundred years old when they were buried with him—and the other peculiar stones were part of his equipment. The bone points might have been worn as part of a costume that would have jangled as he danced. The white quartz stone has been considered as his crystal ball.

  Perhaps the people buried at Bulford were shamans as well, with a magic crystal of see-through rock, a perforated boar’s tusk, and a mini-monolith. Both the Upton Lovell and the Bulford graves date to some five hundred years after Stonehenge’s heyday in the mid-third millennium BC, so if these people had any part to play at Stonehenge it was long after the stones had gone up.

  Colin’s discoveries at the Cuckoo Stone and the Tor Stone made us think again about this landscape. How many more standing stones had there once been all around this area? We also found stoneholes within Woodhenge and along the Durrington Avenue, where no one had suspected there to have once been standing stones. Perhaps there were many more stone circles and standing stones around Stonehenge than anyone had realized. What has happened to all these stones that were moved in prehistory? Where have they gone? Perhaps there was frequent moving and repositioning of stones, incorporating them from old sites into new locations. Stonehenge may just be the one stone circle that has happened to survive fairly intact.

  9

  MYSTERIES OF THE RIVER

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  One of the main strands of our investigations was to try to understand the role of the River Avon in this landscape of monuments. We lacked some basic information about how much the river has changed its course since the time of Stonehenge, so we asked Mike Allen and Charly French to find out. Using a hand-powered auger, they drilled small holes all over the floodplain to find the routes of ancient river channels, known as paleochannels.

  Over tens of thousands of years, the Avon has cut its own mini-gorge through the chalk plateau of Salisbury Plain. Its path in more recent millennia has been confined to its floodplain, flanked on either side by chalk cliffs. Mike and Charly were able to locate its prehistoric channel to the north of Durrington Walls, west of the present river course. It then flowed directly across the path of the modern river, where the Durrington Avenue is likely to have met it, and curved eastward south of Durrington Walls. Here it widened to about 60 meters, with a depth of 1.5 meters (today it is only about 10 meters wide and half a meter deep along this stretch). On its west side is the long north–south river cliff on which Woodhenge sits.

  The river then enters more of a gorge near the Countess roundabout (where today it’s crossed by the A303 trunk road). It flows west at the foot of the huge chalk cliff of Ratfyn and then meanders through the town of Amesbury until it reaches the high prominence of Vespasian’s Camp, an Iron Age hillfort,1 which it skirts around to the south. Recent investigations by the Open University have revealed that the natural spring close to this hillfort’s northeast side may have been used as a shrine in the Roman period. Just a little further downstream is the point where the Stonehenge Avenue approaches the river. Here the river channel used to run slightly south and east of where it does today; the river has subsequently encroached upon its ancient north and west banks but, as we were to fin
d when we dug in this area, not so much as to have destroyed what lay at the end of the Stonehenge Avenue.

  Chris Tilley decided he should float down the Avon from Durrington to Stonehenge Avenue, to try to experience the impact that this journey would have had on Neolithic people. On a trial run, he launched his Indian canoe off the end of the Durrington Avenue. On board were Chris, his colleague Wayne Bennett, Colin, a student, and the dog. The canoe was low in the water and those of us waving them goodbye were convinced that disaster lay ahead. In fact, all went well, though crossing the various weirs along the river made progress slow. The whole trip from Durrington Walls to the Stonehenge Avenue took less than four hours.

  A few days later Chris, Wayne, and the dog gave it another go, this time floating south past the end of the Stonehenge Avenue—right into the heart of English upper-class country living. There are some very exclusive riverside properties south of Amesbury, guarded by electronic security alarms and large, short-haired men. On encountering two of the latter, Chris bridled at being told that he was trespassing on private property—the boss, he was warned, owned not only this stretch of riverside but also this section of the river itself. Chris wanted to know just how anyone could claim to own flowing water that eventually ends up in the sea. Unmoved by this clear-sighted logic, one of the guards addressed Wayne: “Tell your friend, the next time he tries to come here we’ll break his legs.”

  Lessons were also learned about the river’s prehistoric past. This is the most winding and tortuous stretch of the River Avon on its route to the English Channel. Floating around the river’s bends and meanders, Chris and Wayne became completely disoriented. One moment the canoe was heading northwest and the next it had turned through 180 degrees.

  Many studies of societies around the world have noted how common it is for those undergoing rites of passage to be deliberately disoriented as they change from one state of being to another. This is very frequently the case during funeral rites; often such ceremonies involve measures to ensure that the dead are confused by their journey, to make certain that they will not return to the living.2 The dead must be led to the otherworld by such a route that they will not be able to find their way back. I’ve often seen examples of this during funerals in southern Madagascar: The pallbearers leave the village with the coffin on their shoulders and twist and turn on the final journey to the tomb, trying to disorient the vengeful ghost.3

  If this stretch of the river had been a special place for rituals and ceremonies—what anthropologists call a liminal zone, after the Latin word limen for “threshold”—held by Neolithic people, then what evidence did they leave along the riverside of this journey from life into death? Is there evidence for passage from the transient world of wood to the permanent world of stone?

  During the 1930s and 1940s, amateur archaeologist J. F. S. Stone spent his spare time taking every opportunity to look into holes being dug anywhere in the vicinity of Stonehenge. In 1934 he was contacted by Flight-Lieutenant Somerbough, who had found something in his back garden while putting up a fence. The RAF officer lived at Millmead, a house perched on the high cliff overlooking the Avon at Ratfyn, just north of Amesbury and about a mile southeast of Woodhenge. Two Early Bronze Age skeletons had been found there fourteen years earlier, so Stone knew immediately that something interesting might turn up.

  In the garden at Millmead, Stone found four pits containing Neolithic objects.4 The largest pit was just over a meter deep and had been filled with charcoal packed with more than five hundred worked flints, hundreds of animal bones, and some scrappy bits of Grooved Ware. Among the flints were two chisel arrowheads, knives, and five flakes with edges serrated like saws. The animal bones were mostly of cattle, with some pig. There were also some rather peculiar finds: the scapula of a brown bear, and pieces of scallop shell. Both of these must have come quite a distance—the shell from the sea (at least thirty miles away) and the bear from some distant forest. Bear bones have turned up with Grooved Ware in two other places, at Wyke Down on Cranborne Chase, and at Barholm in south Lincolnshire.5 This connection with Grooved Ware is interesting because bear bones are hardly ever found on Neolithic sites in Britain. Perhaps bear-baiting was part of the entertainment at places like Durrington.

  Seven years later, in 1941, Stone was called in by the owner of a house called Woodlands on Countess Road North, just 300 meters southeast of Woodhenge, who had also found something strange in his garden. Mr. Booth was himself an amateur archaeologist and it was his “perspicacity and acumen” while gardening that led to this unusual discovery, a pair of Neolithic pits.6 The first was very odd, having been filled in one go with black earth and wood ash, packed with animal bones, worked flints, Grooved Ware and, once again, a scallop shell. Among the flints, Stone and Booth found two chisel arrowheads and six saws. The pit had been capped with a cairn of flints, which would originally have been visible above ground level, Stone realized.

  There were more saws and chisel arrowheads in the second pit, along with an unused flint ax and a broken stone ax from the Graig Lwyd ax-production site in north Wales. In this pit the wood ash and charcoal formed just a thin layer. Six years later, Mr. Booth found another two pits in his garden.7 The third pit’s filling was very similar to that of the first, and the fourth pit contained just a basket-shaped heap of charcoal and wood ash, tipped in and then covered with chalk rubble.

  The pits in both gardens sound very strange. We excavated more than fifty Neolithic pits at Durrington Walls and none of them contained these deep layers of ash and charcoal.8 The bones, too, are different: Among the bones from the first pit at Woodlands were not only those of cattle and pig, but also sheep, dog, fox, and chub (a freshwater fish). At Durrington Walls we have found only a few bones of sheep and dog (though their feces survive), and none of fish or bear. There isn’t a single flint saw from Durrington Walls, and yet examples of these tools, probably for cutting reeds, were found in virtually every pit at Woodlands and Millmead. Admittedly, these two sites were occupied probably a few centuries before Durrington Walls (chisel arrowheads date to before 2600 BC) but the time difference doesn’t entirely account for the contrast.

  The pottery from Woodlands is also very unusual. Although it is Grooved Ware, it has horizontal cordons (strips of applied clay) that are decorated with parallel grooves. The Durrington Walls pottery has both vertical and horizontal cordons, but the grooved decoration is found mostly on the surface of the pot rather than on the cordons. Somewhat unimaginatively, archaeologists call these two Grooved Ware sub-styles “Woodlands” and “Durrington Walls.”9 The difference is probably chronological, with the Woodlands style being earlier than Durrington Walls. Some of the pottery from Woodlands is wafer-thin (just two millimeters thick); these pots could not have been intended for use more than once.

  This disposable pottery, the quantities of ash and charcoal, and the bones from an unusually large range of animal species mark Woodlands and Millmead as rather different from Durrington Walls and other settlements of this period. The charcoal and ash were dumped into the pits all at once, so these deposits are probably the remains of large, open-air bonfires. This is in contrast to the thin layers of hearth ash that we found in the pits around the houses at Durrington Walls. Perhaps the high cliffs overlooking this stretch of the river were used for bonfires and feasting at certain times of the year.

  We needed to follow up Stone’s work by looking to the south of Woodhenge. Unfortunately, most of this land now lies under a long line of modern houses and gardens along Countess Road North, which runs from Amesbury northward to Durrington. Any remains are no doubt buried beneath houses, lawns, and flowerbeds. We didn’t have the heart to knock on doors and ask to dig up gardens on the off-chance that we might find something, but there was one area of open ground, immediately south of Woodhenge beyond the north end of the houses, where we could look.

  In 2007, Josh and California Dave opened two large trenches there. They were joined by a colleague of Josh from Bris
tol University, Alistair Pike, an archaeological scientist and enthusiastic outdoor chef. At morning tea break he’d produce fry-ups in a wheelbarrow, and soon everybody on the project was clamoring to be chosen to dig with the “south of Woodhenge” squad. Maud Cunnington had already dug part of this area in 1928.10 There used to be three round barrows here but they’ve all been plowed completely flat; Cunnington had found postholes for an unusual building beneath one of the barrows and Josh wanted to take a closer look.11 He also had a shrewd idea that there might be more than one of these post arrangements.

  Cunnington had found a square arrangement of four chest-deep postholes surrounded by a curving but near-rectangular ring of smaller postholes. These formed an enclosure entered from the southeast between two pits. Some Grooved Ware shards indicated that this enclosure was significantly earlier than the Bronze Age barrow on top of it, and Josh reckoned this might have been a timber circle similar to the Northern Circle.

  When Josh opened up his trench, he soon found that, over the seventy-nine years since Cunnington’s dig, plowing had almost eradicated the small postholes. He could discern the outlines of some of them, but many had been plowed away entirely. Some archaeologists thought that Cunnington’s structure could have been a house with four large internal posts to support the roof. Josh’s investigation showed otherwise.