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

by Mike Parker Pearson

  Stonehenge (in its Stage 1; top), Llandegai Henge A (middle) and Flagstones (bottom) had many features in common, including burials and large stones.

  To understand why Norman Foster designed this unique structure, we need to see what influenced him. We don’t have access to his private imagination, but we do have various examples worldwide of other buildings (Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, say, which opened in 1997) that mark the emergence of a new architectural fashion. Innovation is a constant process of comparison and contrast, reworking tradition with novelty, and expanding the resources and technology to turn dream into reality.

  The earliest phase of Stonehenge, with its circular enclosure, cremation burials, and standing stones, is actually just one example of a type of monument—a cremation enclosure—that we know well from different parts of Britain. Stonehenge is, in fact, quite late in the fashion for this particular type of structure. Those who accept that the bluestones were fetched from west Wales (rather than moved to Somerset by glaciers) may not be entirely surprised to learn that Stonehenge’s closest comparison was built perhaps a century earlier, in north Wales, 140 miles from Preseli. Outside the town of Bangor, and now covered by an industrial estate, was one of Britain’s other two stonehenges.

  Here at Llandegai (also written as Llandygai) were two henge enclosures, known as Henge A and Henge B.1 The earlier of these, Henge A, was excavated in advance of development in 1966–1967: We have to write about Llandegai in the past tense now because it has all disappeared under concrete, and survives only in the excavation records. Like Stonehenge, Henge A at Llandegai was circular and also had a ditch external to its bank. At 90 meters in diameter, this henge enclosure was only slightly smaller than Stonehenge. Its ditch, however, was both wider and deeper—10 meters wide and three meters deep—and its bank was a colossal seven meters wide.

  The interior of Henge A produced very few traces of Neolithic activity, although it was re-used many centuries later. The henge’s entrance faced west-southwest (though not toward the midwinter solstice sunset) and, against the inside of the bank opposite this entrance, there was a cremation burial, probably of a woman. Next to her ashes someone placed a rhyolite slab for polishing stone axes, and a cobble of crystallized tuff, probably as grave goods. Geologists cannot tell for certain from where either of these stones came, but they did travel some distance to end up here; the ax polisher is either from just west of Preseli or from the Lake District. Another pit on the west side of the henge interior contained no burial, just a complete and unused polished ax from the Langdale quarry in the Lake District. Curiously, the bank covered a shallow pit containing Early Mesolithic pine charcoal dating to 7000 BC: Was this just a tree hole of a lightning-struck tree, or a man-made fire-pit, as it is described by the excavators?

  There was a smaller ditched circle, just nine meters across, immediately in front of the entrance to Henge A. It was cut by five causeways, and all five of its ditch segments contained cremated human bones and quantities of charcoal, some of which may have come from burned planks. The burials were those of at least five adults (one of them a woman), a child, an infant, and a newborn baby. Some of these remains came from small pits inside and around the circular ditch.

  A large block of hornfels (a metamorphic rock) lay within one of the cremation circle’s ditches, pushed over from a standing position. This was evidently the stump of a broken-off standing stone, but was not recognized as such by the excavators. We don’t know if more stones had been removed intact from the ditch circle without leaving evidence of their former presence.

  This small circle was very similar in size to Bluestonehenge. Together with the larger henge, the site at Llandegai contained all the major elements found at Stonehenge and Bluestonehenge, just in a different pattern and without bluestones. Seven radiocarbon dates show that this proto-Stonehenge dated to somewhere within the period 3300–2900 BC, having been started before 3000 BC.

  The other prototype for Stonehenge lies closer to Salisbury Plain, underneath the house of a famous Wessex author. Thomas Hardy lived in a large house named Max Gate on the eastern outskirts of Dorchester, the county town he made famous under the fictional name of Casterbridge. During building works on the house, workmen found a human burial. Although Hardy reported this discovery in the local archaeological journal, he would have had no idea that he was living on top of Wessex’s other Stonehenge.2

  Named after the other house that stood on its site, Flagstones, this henge was not found until 1987 when Wessex Archaeology excavated its western half in advance of a new bypass road.3 Today, half of Flagstonehenge has been destroyed by the bypass and the rest is under Max Gate’s garden. It is a bit sad that our other two stonehenges have been largely destroyed.

  Flagstones’s ditch, with its gang-dug segments and diameter of 100 meters, was almost identical to that of Stonehenge. A cremated adult, an adult’s leg bone, and the incomplete skeletons of three children were found in the ditch, most of them covered by stone slabs in the same fashion as the burial found at Thomas Hardy’s house. The slabs were of sarsen and local sandstone, presumably part of a setting of standing stones that might have been demolished shortly after the ditch was dug. Fragments of sarsen, sandstone, and limestone in the fill of the ditch hinted at other stones having been broken up or taken away. Three cremation burials were found inside the henge enclosure, but none have been dated.

  There is one other tie-up with Stonehenge. Thomas Hardy’s neighbors in Wareham House, just northwest of Max Gate, found a small circular pottery disc in their garden.4 This is an incense burner, almost identical to the one accompanying one of Stonehenge’s cremation burials. They are the only two of this type ever found in Britain.

  The Flagstones henge ditch was dug in the period 3300–3000 BC. Whether it had an inner bank and external counterscarp like Stonehenge or an outer bank like other henges is difficult to say, since nothing survives above ground. Flagstones had one thing that Stonehenge does not: Using flint flakes, someone in the Neolithic carved pictures into the vertical chalk sides of its ditch segments in four separate places. This art was very basic: concentric circles, a meander motif, criss-cross lines, and parallel lines—exactly the same motifs as were used on chalk plaques and Grooved Ware pottery. Unlike the peoples of other parts of Europe, Britain’s Neolithic artists seem to have been very restricted in what they could portray.

  Flagstones lies at the heart of a Neolithic ritual landscape, surrounded by remains of burial mounds and three large monuments. To the east lies the henge enclosure of Mount Pleasant, with a timber circle and a newly discovered avenue leading northward to the River Frome.5 To the west is a large pit circle at Maumbury Rings, re-used as a Roman amphitheatre.6 To the northwest at Greyhound Yard, under Dorchester’s Roman town center, archaeologists discovered a line of holes for Neolithic timber posts that formed a large enclosure.7

  Stonehenge, Llandegai A and Flagstones are at the top of the scale for burial enclosures in terms of size and grandeur. Archaeologists have found another sixteen such sites in other parts of Britain. Most are now destroyed, having been found in advance of development, but enough evidence was recovered for us to know that they were in use around the same time as Stonehenge.

  One group of burial sites, rivaling Stonehenge in terms of numbers of cremations, lies north of Stonehenge on the River Thames at the other Dorchester. Sitting in and around a cursus, the Dorchester-on-Thames complex of circular monuments includes six pit circles and a ditched circular enclosure, all with cremations.8 It was here that Richard Atkinson cut his archaeological teeth in the 1940s, excavating some of these pit circles before working at Stonehenge. About 170 cremations were found in these seven small cemeteries. Although none of the cremations have ever been radiocarbon-dated, long bone skewer pins and a broken stone macehead among the grave goods are identical to similar items found with burials at Stonehenge.

  Since Atkinson’s discoveries at Dorchester-on-Thames, more Neolithic cremation
cemetery enclosures have been found in midland England. A pit circle within a small henge ditch at Barford in Warwickshire contained cremated bones.9 At West Stow in Suffolk, archaeologists digging a Saxon village also found a Neolithic cremation circle with a central burial and forty-nine cremations.10 Just recently, seven cremation burials dating to 3300–3000 BC were found in two circular enclosures beneath Imperial College’s sports ground in the Colne valley, west of London.11 Nearby at Horton, the skeleton of a woman, dating to around 2700 BC, lay buried next to a similar enclosure.

  Within Wessex, there are another two Neolithic enclosures with burials. Farmer and archaeologist Martin Green found a curious circle of fourteen pits enclosing a large central hole at Monkton Up Wimborne on Cranborne Chase in Dorset.12 In the edge of this hole, a woman and three children had been buried in a communal grave around 3300 BC. From their DNA it seems that the woman was probably the mother of one of the children, a girl. The other children were brother and sister but unrelated to the woman with whom they were buried. Isotope analysis of tooth enamel shows that the mother grew up about forty miles away on the Mendip Hills, moved to Cranborne Chase, returned to Mendip where she gave birth to her daughter, and then returned again to the area of Dorset where all four met an untimely death. Martin Green also found a small pit-circle henge on his farm. Known as Wyke Down, it has cremation deposits around its entrance, dating to around 2700 BC, as well as Grooved Ware pottery and a stone ax of rhyolite from just west of Preseli.13

  Middle–Late Neolithic cremation enclosures and related sites of the same date as Stonehenge occur throughout Britain.

  In 1890, the antiquarian J. R. Mortimer dug into the Neolithic barrow of Duggleby Howe, on the chalk wolds of North Yorkshire.14 This enormous mound measures 37 meters across and stands more than six meters high. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Mortimer found at the bottom of it an impressive group of fourteen skeletons of adults, children, and infants, and a woman’s bashed-in skull, recently dated to around 3400 BC.15 These inhumation burials were followed by fifty-three or more cremation burials, three of which were accompanied by Stonehenge-style bone skewer pins. Unfortunately, Mortimer made the same mistake as Hawley: He didn’t know what to do with cremation burials either, so he poured all the Duggleby bones into a single big box.

  Many years later, in 1983, archaeologists discovered that the Duggleby mound was surrounded by a circular, segmented ditch.16 At 370 meters in diameter, it is even bigger than the ditched enclosures at Flagstones, Llandegai and Stonehenge, although incomplete on its south side. Only in 2009 was this ditch finally investigated, by Neolithic expert Alex Gibson.

  As far away as Scotland, archaeologists have also found a cremation cemetery of this period.17 It is near Edinburgh at Cairnpapple, West Lothian, where an arc of seven pits was associated with eleven cremations in and around them. A skewer pin from one of these cremations dates them to just before 3000 BC. This Neolithic cemetery was later covered by an Early Bronze Age cairn.

  Llandegai, Flagstones, and the other sixteen enclosures have largely escaped the notice of archaeologists and others interested in Stonehenge. Some have been wrongly assumed to be later in date or, as in the case of Llandegai, the full account of their excavations languished unpublished for years. Only now is it possible to pull together the records of all these excavated sites and see the broader picture. What they show is that, throughout Britain during the centuries immediately before and during Stonehenge’s use, many other circular enclosures were being used for burial. Stonehenge was in the upper stratum as regards size and complexity, on a par with the slightly earlier burial enclosures at Llandegai, Flagstones and Duggleby Howe.

  In the vast majority of cases, the burials within these circles were cremations. Stonehenge, Duggleby Howe, West Stow, and the Dorchester-on-Thames circles were the most densely used for burial, yet none of these contains enough cremated individuals to have been serving each site’s whole local community. It seems that most of Britain’s population during the period 3300–2400 BC was disposed of in other ways, with no lasting memorial. Who were these happy few buried in these prominent places? As with Stonehenge, I suspect that by and large we are looking at the burials of members of prominent local families, a pattern of use of these sites only by an elite that continued, at the larger cemeteries, over many generations.

  Other burials are more mysterious. The Monkton Up Wimborne burial site is earlier than most of the others, and that burial of a woman with a group of children speaks more of violence or tragedy than dynastic memorialization. Duggleby Howe’s group of skeletons has also been considered, by Mortimer as well as others, to be a mass sacrifice on the death of a leader. However, new radiocarbon dates indicate that this was not a single mass deposit but a long-term sequence of burials, more in line with being a dynastic burial ground.

  Another question concerns the shape of these cremation burial cemeteries—why do so many of them employ circular geometry in their plans? Archaeologists have been aware for some years that the digging of enclosures with perfectly circular plans started only after about 3400 BC, thereafter diversifying into a wide range of ellipses, ovals and sub-circular shapes. It is also a peculiarly British phenomenon. There are very few perfectly circular Neolithic enclosures of the late fourth and early third millennia elsewhere in Europe, which is odd because marking out a circle with a rope and peg is so very simple.

  Perfect circles are present in nature in various forms: the iris of the human eye, ripples in still water, the sun and the full moon, for example. We will probably never know whether any or all of these were perceived by Neolithic people as sharing the same geometric property, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the sun and the moon were the two principal entities symbolized in circular enclosures. Elsewhere in the ancient world at this time, other cultures expressed less equivocal materializations of their religious attitudes toward the sun. Examples of these, from very different times and places, are the sun symbols of ancient Egypt and the many sun motif carvings on flat stones found among former wooden-post circles at the Neolithic Rispebjerg complex on Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.18

  Some of the most enigmatic circular sites are the four Priddy Circles in the Mendips. These circular enclosures, each about 160 meters in diameter, have often been compared with Stonehenge because they have external ditches. Re-excavation in 2008 of a 1950s excavation yielded charcoal from within the ditch of Circle 1, dating the beginning of the ditch’s filling-in to 2930–2870 BC, close to the date of Stonehenge’s first stage.19 Only further excavations will reveal whether these circles, too, are burial enclosures from that time.

  Some archaeologists have talked of a religious reformation around 3300 BC, on a par with the sixteenth-century upheavals of early modern Europe.20 There is no doubt that choosing to bury the dead within these enclosures was very different from burying people inside long barrows and causewayed enclosures, the latter never being properly circular. The Duggleby Howe mound and ditch—with their similarities to Early Neolithic mounds and causewayed enclosures—are something of a hybrid, on the cusp between two mortuary styles, past and present.

  There seems to have been an intervening period between causewayed enclosures and circular burial enclosures, from 3600 BC to 3300 BC, when cursuses were fashionable. Although our interpretations favor cursuses having a funerary dimension, linking the living and the dead, we have little idea where the actual remains of the dead went during that period. There is no evidence at all of anyone being buried within the cursuses. As we found at Amesbury 42, the long barrow at the east end of the Stonehenge Cursus, only a very few people were buried in the long barrows associated with the cursuses.

  After 3300 BC there was an explosion of stone circle construction. In Orkney, off the northern tip of Scotland, people built one of the largest circular monuments of the age—the great stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar. With probably more than sixty standing stones arranged in a single circle inside a 123-meter-diameter ditch, it is one of
Britain’s most impressive stone circles. In 2008, Colin and Orkney archaeologist Jane Downes dug a trench into its massive 3.5-meter-deep ditch to try and get samples for dating.21 Though they were ultimately unsuccessful, they think the Ring of Brodgar was built shortly before 3000 BC. To the east of it, along a narrow peninsula half a mile away, lie the newly discovered Neolithic settlement complex of the Ness of Brodgar and the settlement of Barnhouse, excavated by Colin in the 1980s.22 Beyond these is another, smaller stone circle from this period, the Stones of Stenness, set within a henge ditch and bank.23 Colin thinks that a central fireplace and other structural features found within the Stones of Stenness were once part of a large house that was turned into a stone monument.

  The Ring of Brodgar is one of Orkney’s many Neolithic monuments. In its first stage, Stonehenge would have looked very much like this, with its bank and ditch and ring of bluestones in the Aubrey Holes.

  At the Ring of Brodgar, archaeologists have tried to explain the absence of a bank to go with the ditch as being the result of the ditch’s contents being used for the circle’s standing stones. Colin can tell that the rock here would not have been solid enough to work into megaliths—and, anyway, he has found one of the quarries for the Brodgar standing stones a couple of miles away. He also suspects that the stones dug out by the Neolithic builders from the Ring of Brodgar’s ditch went into building the masonry walls of the Ness of Brodgar houses.