There is no doubt, from Nick Card’s recent excavations at the Ness of Brodgar, that thousands of tons of stone were required to build the houses and halls of this enormous village.24 Colin thinks that the copious use of stone in Orcadian Neolithic houses was more than just the result of a shortage of timber on these treeless islands. Working on the stone circles at Calanais (Callanish) on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, he came to appreciate that these two similar environments, both rendered treeless in the Neolithic, gave rise to two entirely different types of house and settlement. The Neolithic communities of Orkney and the Hebrides developed along very different pathways after the arrival of farming.
In the Outer Hebrides, habitation was transient and people used turf as well as whatever wood they could find—driftwood and small timbers—to build their houses. Stones were used in the foundation layers but the superstructures were built of perishable materials. In Orkney, Colin reckons, habitation was sedentary, with stone providing a potent metaphor for permanence, and a material manifestation of attachment to place. Perhaps Orcadian Neolithic people’s identity was rooted in their relationships to particular places and expressed through stone architecture. Whereas the places of the living within the rest of Britain were constructed in metaphors of impermanence, Orkney was different—tombs as well as places of the living were made of stone.
We can now see that Stonehenge incorporated elements of design and use that were current across Britain. Its Aubrey Hole bluestone circle is similar to the Ring of Brodgar, its various elements can be found in a different configuration at Llandegai, and it shares many similarities with other cremation cemeteries. The distance traveled by the bluestones, however, is truly remarkable and requires explanation.
If we accept the role of human agency in moving the stones from Preseli and other parts of Wales, we need to explain why people did this. One of the interesting aspects of west Wales archaeology—and the Brecon Beacons—is the presence here of a significant concentration of Early Neolithic monuments: portal dolmens, long cairns, and a causewayed enclosure. Between 3800 and 3600 BC, this was a thriving Neolithic society. Recent research by Alison Sheridan, of the National Museums of Scotland, has shown that the west coast of Britain may have provided favored landfalls for Continental farming groups arriving in Britain as early as 4000 BC.25
We normally think of invaders and immigrants to Britain coming across the shortest route from Calais to Dover, and there is evidence for some very early Neolithic people here, including a megalithic sarsen tomb at Coldrum in Kent.26 Otherwise, however, the closed chamber tombs and short passage tombs—thought to be among the very earliest Neolithic monuments in Britain—have a distinctly westerly distribution, from Pembrokeshire and northwest Wales to the west of Scotland. Alison has also looked at the pottery of these earliest farmers. It is in some west coast sites in Britain that the styles of pots are closest to those used in northern France and Brittany. For example, she is certain that a pot from the burial chamber of the Carreg Samson closed chamber tomb is of a style identical to that made in Brittany before 4000 BC. She reckons that, in large measure, the Neolithic way of life was brought by migrating Continental farmers as a package rather than just its separate components being imported by the indigenous hunter-gatherers. Once farming had arrived in Britain, it was adopted by the locals. Two hotspots of surviving Breton-style tombs within Britain are in north Wales and in Pembrokeshire.27 These areas might well have been points of origin for the earliest immigrant farmers, who colonized the valleys that run down to the coast and exploited the adjacent uplands for grazing.
There are no radiocarbon dates for the beginning of the Neolithic in Wales earlier than about 3700 BC, but the evidence from Carreg Samson indicates that farmers probably lived here before then. Unfortunately, the acidic soils of the region do not preserve human bones or antler picks, so there is nothing suitable to date the use of the earliest tombs. Archaeologists recovered a few tiny fragments of cremated human bone from the burial chamber within Carreg Samson, but these are too small for radiocarbon dating.28
The most interesting point when thinking about Stonehenge is that areas such as Salisbury Plain were not densely inhabited until around 3600 BC, although there was some initial settlement around 3900–3800 BC (as well as that enigmatic date of 4360–3990 BC on a cow bone from Stonehenge itself). All of the area’s long barrows so far dated were built after 3600 BC, and many of the undated ones are of styles likely to be similarly late in date. This was good, open grazing land, however, and access to these chalk grasslands would have been strongly contested by arriving groups making claims to the land. Did early farmers move in large numbers from Wales to Salisbury Plain during the fourth millennium BC, between 3600 and 3000 BC?
Such a mass migration would certainly explain the apparent absence of Late Neolithic monuments in southwest Wales. There is not a single cursus or henge in Preseli or its environs. There are henges further south around Carmarthen—one has recently been excavated—but otherwise, to find monuments of that date, you have to go as far east as the Walton Basin in Clwyd–Powys, 30 miles northeast of the Brecon Beacons, where Alex Gibson has excavated a 34ha palisaded enclosure at Hindwell dating to around 2700 BC.29 Further north, near Welshpool, he also found a cursus, a small cremation enclosure dating to around 3300 BC, and a timber circle dating to about 2100 BC.30
It may be that the eastern part of Wales, around the Severn valley, flourished while west Wales stagnated. There is, however, no sign in the pollen diagrams of regenerating woodland—such a change in vegetation would hint at a mass exodus—nor is there any evidence of a climatic downturn that made Wales’ uplands any more inhospitable than usual at this time. Even if there were no migration out of west Wales, it may be that many descendants of the earliest farmers headed east in search of new pastures. It is highly unlikely that they packed their Neolithic suitcases with bluestone monoliths, but perhaps they came back for them a few generations later.
As anthropologists have observed, immigrant communities drop their heaviest cultural anchors in second, third, or even later generations, when links to former homelands and traditions may be re-forged. I have seen something of this at first-hand during my fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides, the ancestral homeland of many Scottish Americans and Canadians; the descendants of nineteenth-century emigrants feel a powerful emotional link to their Hebridean origins, not only visiting the islands but reviving music, language, and folk customs thousands of miles away.
A perhaps more likely scenario is that Preseli was considered to have ancestral significance for the descendants of immigrant farmers who had landed on the coast of west Wales and brought farming to Britain shortly before 4000 BC. Perhaps people could recall that this was a place of origin after 30 or so generations (or, more likely, re-invented it as such); the existence of the now ancient closed chamber tombs and portal dolmens would certainly have served to remind them of an ancestral presence in this region.31 Preseli and Stonehenge could have been considered as the two most sacred places of origin of the British people, one as the place where the first farming settlers built their portal dolmens and the other as the place where indigenous hunter-gatherers and, later on, early farmers celebrated the axis of the world, where lines in the land marked the sun’s solstices.
Stonehenge was a monument of unification, bringing together groups with different ancestries in a coalition that encompassed the entirety of southern Britain, if not the entire island. Its design embodied cosmic unity, geometrical harmony, and interconnectedness.
Extrapolating from the evidence of modern DNA, the earliest communities of farmers in Britain were probably genetically diverse, composed of groups from Iberia and the French coast as well as indigenous hunter-gatherers already inhabiting Britain when the farmers arrived. Similarly, the styles of pottery and tombs in use during the fourth millennium BC hint at a marked degree of regionalism: Tombs in the Cotswolds and Severn valley are different from those in Wessex, for example. A
nd there is evidence that certain groups did not always get along with each other. Within southwest Britain, for example, archaeologists have found defended enclosures whose encircling distributions of arrowheads indicate that these strongholds were attacked.32
One such site is Hambledon Hill in Dorset. Any thoughts that this was merely a ritual enclosure were dispelled when archaeologists discovered that parts of this complex had been turned into fortifications that had been attacked and burned around 3400 BC, probably entailing the deaths of two young men. One was found in the bottom of a ditch with an arrowhead in his ribs, and the other’s body, similarly shot, had been covered over with a layer of loose chalk. Further north in Gloucestershire, at Crickley Hill, another causewayed enclosure’s encircling banks were turned into fortifications in the same period; the positions of hundreds of flint arrowheads showed that the defended entrances had been attacked and that arrows had rained down upon the defenders.
In 2010, I went to Orkney to work as a volunteer digger for archaeologist Nick Card, who had been excavating a Neolithic village at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, west of the Ring of Brodgar. The buildings are very large, more like halls than domestic houses, and have well-preserved stone walls.
Other enclosures further west, at Hembury in Devon and Carn Brea in Cornwall, may also have been attacked, and tombs in Dorset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, and south Wales contain many casualties of violence, with the skeletons bearing wounds caused by clubbing and shooting. It seems odd to think of areas such as Gloucestershire and Dorset as war zones, but that is what they appear to have been in the fourth millennium BC. Such warfare was probably endemic in Neolithic society at that time, but it might have had a regional and tribal dimension—the evidence for violence in this part of Britain is not matched elsewhere, and it may indicate that these were borderlands where the western British fought the eastern British.
Toward the end of the fourth millennium BC, the evidence for violence drops away. At the same time, fashions of pottery and monument-building began to take on wider currencies. Cursus monuments were built from Scotland to the south coast. The use of a particular style of pottery, decorated with impressed, abstract motifs (known as Peterborough Ware), extended from eastern England to Wales. After 3000 BC, people across Britain became ever more uniform in their tastes for pottery styles, funerary practices, domestic architecture, and the new monumental forms of henges. The new pottery was Grooved Ware, with its flat-bottomed pots with external decoration. The new funerary practice involved cremation. Houses were now small and square rather than rectangular, and almost identical in form from Wessex to Orkney to Wales. Archaeologists have been used to looking beyond Britain for the origins of new styles. We know that farming had to be imported, so it is possible that subsequent forms of pottery and architecture were brought by later waves of immigrants. Yet it’s clear that there are no Continental precursors for these material styles of the British Neolithic—they appear to be indigenous innovations within Britain. In fact, they represent a growing divide between Britain and the rest of Europe, manifestations of an essentially British way of life diverging from its European origins.
Certain of these innovations—Grooved Ware and henges—may have originated in Scotland, most likely in the islands of Orkney. By 2800 BC, Grooved Ware had spread to Wessex, as Britain’s inhabitants enjoyed the first sharing of fashions across the entire land mass. Early archaeologists used to consider such uniformity of material culture as the product of a single tribe or ethnicity—were these the “Grooved Ware people”? Given what we know about the likely diversity of their genetic ancestries, the people of Britain were anything but a single tribe. It’s far more likely that the widespread sharing of material styles served to create a sense of unity for an ethnically diverse population. People could now travel the length and breadth of the land and feel at home among people who had previously been strangers, or even enemies with unfamiliar ways and habits.
The first stage of Stonehenge was built in that pivotal period around 3000 BC when this pan-island solidarity was gathering momentum. Within this wider context, it’s possible to understand how Stonehenge might have been designed as a monument for unity, embodying the spirit of the age. The designers of that first Stonehenge had big plans: It wasn’t just a unification of people and places, drawing bluestones from an ancestral place of power in Wales, but also a unification of the entire cosmos—the earth, the sun, and the moon.
Those who brought the stones from Wales were not simply laying claim to some good grazing land here on Salisbury Plain; they were also taking control of something akin to the omphalos, the navel of the world, or the birthplace of gods—the place where the movement of the sun was marked in the land. The work of moving the bluestones was not that of a small, devoted sect but entailed the mobilization of an entire society, possibly a growing political domain or kingdom.
If Stonehenge in its first phase, shortly after 3000 BC, was a monument to herald unity and unification in cosmic as well as human terms, its dramatic transformation around 2500 BC into the Stonehenge we see today, with its huge megaliths, may have had slightly different meanings. Its builders were making an even more grandiose gesture to mark this center of the earth and heavens; the sarsens were even joined together to symbolise unification. Was the reworked Stonehenge a triumphal celebration of the actual attainment of political unity—no longer a vision but a reality? Or was this a moment when unity was threatened by the end of Britain’s long isolation from the Continent, with the arrival of metalworking and the imminent immigration of the Beaker people? After five hundred years, the site had also taken on an ancestral significance—as a place of the revered dead commemorated by huge stones. Although megalith-building continued in various pockets around Britain on a smaller scale, Stonehenge was the last great stone monument of the megalithic age.
From earlier periods, there are larger megaliths, both in Britain and northern France. In Pembrokeshire, south of Preseli, a collapsed portal dolmen at Garn Turne supports a massive capstone weighing about 60 tons;33 it may actually have collapsed the tomb’s chamber when it was hauled on top of it from its quarry about 100 meters away. Near the Yorkshire coast, the Rudston monolith stands 7.6 meters high—more than half a meter higher than the top of Stonehenge’s great trilithon—and was probably quarried ten miles away to the north.34 All three are minnows in comparison to the Menhir Brisé at Locmariaquer in Brittany, which is 20.3 meters long and weighs perhaps 280 tons; it probably came from a quarry two miles away.35 The Rudston monolith is undated but may well be Neolithic, given its location close to a group of cursuses, and the Menhir Brisé dates to probably more than a thousand years before Stonehenge.
Further afield, from around the same time as Stonehenge, the Cueva de Menga at Antequera in southern Spain is the largest megalithic tomb in Europe.36 The biggest of its four huge capstones weighs an estimated 250 tons. Its linteled entrance leads into a chamber in which the roof slabs are supported along the central axis on two dressed uprights. Although the large stones came from nearby, their massive size would have made them more difficult to move and lift into position than the Stonehenge sarsens.
The question that many people have asked is whether there was a link between the culture that built Stonehenge, and the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Egypt. It was in 1956 that Richard Atkinson seriously proposed that there had been influences on Stonehenge from Mycenae and Minoan Crete, two ancient Greek civilizations. Ten years later, the journal Antiquity rejected as unsuitable for publication an academic paper entitled “Wessex without Mycenae,” written by Colin Renfrew, then a very young scholar and now one of Britain’s most eminent archaeologists.37
Renfrew eventually published this paper, which turned out to be a crucial study of Stonehenge, in the rather obscure Annals of the British School at Athens. He demolished every claim that the building of Stonehenge was influenced by ancient Greece, and it’s worth remembering that he worked out all the
arguments at a time when radiocarbon dating was only in its infancy. Much later, in 1995, when high-precision radiocarbon dates were finally obtained for Stonehenge, Renfrew was proved completely right: Stonehenge is far older than Mycenae.
In spite of Renfrew’s impeccable refutation of the Mycenae theory, we do still have to ask whether some distant civilization, flourishing at an earlier date, could have influenced the building of Stonehenge. It seems that many people are intrigued by the possibility of a link between Stonehenge and some other culture, being apparently reluctant to accept that a group of Stone Age British farmers could have come up with either the idea or the engineering skills without outside help. We therefore need to look at ancient Egypt (although I’m not going to waste any space discussing the “built by aliens” nonsense).
The first of the three great pyramids of Giza, the pyramid of Khufu or Cheops, was built during the first half of the twenty-sixth century BC.38 It would have been a brand-new, state-of-the-art structure when the sarsens went up at Stonehenge, probably at the end of that century. Each pyramid at Giza had an associated mortuary temple that was connected by a causeway to a valley temple beside the Nile. Although Stonehenge has nothing in common with the form of the Giza pyramids’ construction, it does have a vague similarity to the architecture of the valley temple of Khafra (or Chephren), who reigned in the second half of the twenty-sixth century BC and built the second Giza pyramid. Although Khufu’s valley temple can no longer be seen, Khafra’s has a rectangular arrangement of pillars and lintels.
The arrangement of valley temple, linking causeway, and mortuary temple (placed next to the pyramid) also strikes a faint chord with the relationship between Bluestonehenge, the avenue, and Stonehenge. Unfortunately for the enthusiasts for foreign-intervention arguments, this slight similarity is entirely fortuitous. Construction at Stonehenge started long before the great pyramids were built, and the juxtaposition of Stonehenge and Bluestonehenge is probably many centuries earlier than Khufu’s pyramid and valley temple. To claim any direct link is pushing interpretation of similarities much too far, especially in the total absence of any other evidence for contact between Britain and ancient Egypt at that date.
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