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

by Mike Parker Pearson

  The Amesbury Archer’s long-distance movement does, however, prove that some individuals traveled more than 400 miles in a lifetime. We cannot rule out the possibility of garbled stories about distant splendors passing from ear to ear over a distance of 2000 miles or more and over many lifetimes. Yet we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Stonehenge and the contemporary wooden circles at Durrington Walls were built in geometrical styles whose ancestry was definitely British. There never were any Egyptian or Mediterranean missionaries, architects, or builders.

  Ultimately, we don’t need to look for the source of the ideas behind Stonehenge by going any further than Britain. Putting really big stones on top of each other had long been practiced, since the fourth millennium. All around western Britain, the simple megalithic structures called portal dolmens were built hundreds of years before Stonehenge, around 3800 BC and after. In the case of Pentre Ifan in Preseli, the capstone, perched on three uprights, weighs around 16 tons.39 Closer to Stonehenge, the long barrow of West Kennet near Avebury contains a stone chamber, built around 3650 BC, whose entrance consists of a large slab supported by upright sarsens.40 Although access to West Kennet was blocked off around 2400 BC, constructions like these were visitable ancient monuments for Stonehenge’s designers around 2500 BC.

  It is possible that these old tombs provided food for thought for the Stonehenge builders. The only problem is that, having been built more than a thousand years earlier, their style would have been rather “retro.” There might have been another, more current source of architectural ideas, albeit in another material. Josh has sometimes said that Stonehenge is our most impressive example of a timber circle. What he means by this curious (and at first glance contradictory) statement is that Stonehenge was built to look as if it were made of wood. The stonemasons used the techniques of wood-working, as archaeologists have known for decades. The dressing of the faces of the stones, the mortise-and-tenon joints, and the tongue-and-groove jointing of the lintels all derive from carpentry.

  Neolithic builders would have been completely familiar with the appearance and construction of house doorways, in which a horizontal lintel rests on two upright jambs. In addition, they probably used lintels in monumental wooden architecture. Over the previous century or three, Neolithic people had been building timber circles throughout Britain and Ireland with regularly spaced uprights whose tops could have been spanned by wooden lintels.41 We cannot prove that lintels were added to these timber circles, since we only ever see where the bases of the posts stood, but it seems more likely than not. Stonehenge was something of a trompe l’oeil, a timber circle made of stone.

  The interiors of many timber circles had central posts arranged in a square. The Northern Circle and the Southern Circle at Durrington Walls are both good examples of this use of a square within a circle. The structure inside Coneybury henge is probably another, earlier example.42 This format of a circle with an interior square arrangement can be found as far away as Ireland, where similar post circles are known at Ballynahatty near Belfast, and at Knowth on the Bend in the Boyne near Dublin.43

  Josh has also spotted that the houses at Durrington Walls have the opposite arrangement—a circle within a square. In domestic architecture, a circular hearth pit was set within a square-walled house with rounded corners. The two houses excavated by Julian Thomas within the western half of Durrington Walls are a variation on a theme. These had four interior postholes forming a square around the circular central hearth, as well as being enclosed within square walls. Both houses were enclosed by circular palisades.

  Does this juxtaposition of circles and squares provide a clue for understanding why there was a horseshoe-shaped setting of five trilithons within the center of Stonehenge? It is possible that the four shorter trilithons are a representation of the corners of a stylized house, in which the great trilithon is the doorway. The problem with this idea is that the trilithons’ horseshoe arrangement is more of a curve than a square. We might also expect corners to be marked by single uprights rather than pairs.

  Of course, not all houses were square in plan. The largest ones in southern Britain, around 12 to 13 meters by 11 meters, had D-shaped or horseshoe-shaped plans. Ephemeral traces of one of these D-shaped structures were found next to the Southern Circle at Durrington Walls in 1967, although at the time of excavation it was thought to be just a hollowed-out midden, or garbage heap. Another is located just inside the south entrance through the ditch at Stonehenge, and was later covered by the South Barrow. Stonehenge’s North Barrow may hide a third example. With no obvious hearth, these may have been public buildings or meeting houses.

  Such D-shaped houses are known from one other location in Britain, from the charmingly named village of Upper Ninepence in Powys, Wales.44 In 1994, archaeologist Alex Gibson was excavating a Bronze Age barrow near the village and discovered Neolithic remains preserved underneath this burial mound. Among the various pits were three semicircular settings of stakeholes. Alex was sure these had to be the remains of circular houses but there were no traces of stakeholes to form full circles despite the excellent preservation of the ground surface beneath the barrow. In hindsight, these structures can be interpreted as D-shaped houses. The two smaller ones had hearths but the largest, at 12 meters by 9 meters, had no fireplace. Radiocarbon dates put their construction in the period 2900–2500 BC, probably slightly earlier than the Durrington Walls D-shaped house.

  The plan of the Durrington Walls D-shaped house, located next to the Southern Circle, can fit snugly within a horseshoe setting of ten large posts at the center of the Southern Circle’s second phase. Given that the D-shaped house probably belongs with the circle’s first phase, it could have been the model for this horseshoe setting. This horseshoe of posts replaced an earlier square of posts at the center of the circle. Thus, the horseshoe setting in the Southern Circle may represent in monumental form the D-shaped meeting house, a new architectural design to replace the traditional format of a square of posts that represented the rectangular domestic house. This would also explain the shape and size of the trilithon setting at Stonehenge, or at least its southwestern arc formed by the great trilithon and its two neighboring trilithons. Yet there is an additional form in which the D-shaped meeting house was represented monumentally.

  Turning to Woodhenge, the arrangement here of six concentric rings of posts has conventionally been perceived as an oval. Even allowing for minor inaccuracies in excavator Maud Cunnington’s plan, it is better understood as a pair of concentric semicircles of posts facing each other across the middle of the monument. Look carefully at the plan in Chapter 5 and it is apparent that the two half-circles do not meet precisely along the structure’s northwest-southeast axis. The builders of the two halves also positioned the ramps of the largest post circle in two different ways. In the northeast D-shape, the posts were erected from ramps inside the semicircle. The southeast D-shape is distinctly different, because the posts were erected from outside the semicircle. Perhaps Woodhenge represents the joining of two monumental representations of the D-shaped house.

  On this plan of the pits and stakeholes excavated by Alex Gibson at Upper Ninepence in Wales, one can trace the outlines of two D-shaped buildings. The larger (Structure 3) appears to have had no hearth; the smaller (Structure 2) does.

  Such a “double D” form is also found in the bluestone oval at the center of Stonehenge. Although it, too, has been considered as an oval, it may in fact be formed of two semicircles. The clue to this is the position of one particular bluestone (Stone 61a), now reduced to a stump. It is off the line of a proper oval (which may explain why it is even sometimes left off plans of the bluestone oval) and lies at the intersection of the two semicircles formed by the two halves of the oval.

  We may conclude that Stonehenge incorporates constructional principles also found in the Southern Circle—the horseshoe plan of uprights—and from Woodhenge—the double D plan. Since the Southern Circle was laid out using long feet, and Woodhenge
was laid out in short feet, this could explain why both units of measurement were employed at Stonehenge. In summary, Stonehenge amalgamates architectural elements of both timber circles. At its center is a stone representation of a meeting house—the meeting place of the ancestors of the people of Britain.

  If the plan of the trilithons can be explained in this way, how do we account for their lintels and for there being five of them? They have long been considered as representations of doorways, but we have no idea where the doorways were on the D-shaped meeting houses. People have wondered if the trilithons represented doors to another world, but they could equally have symbolized five tribal lineages charting their descent from five original households or founding ancestors. In this respect, it is interesting that there are five house enclosures in the interior of Durrington Walls, forming an approximate arc facing down the valley toward midwinter sunrise. Could these be five tribal or clan houses, with the largest of them in the center represented at Stonehenge by the great trilithon? Unfortunately, the otherwise neat arc of enclosures is not perfect, as the southernmost enclosure is about 100 meters off the line of the arc.

  The Stonehenge of 2500 BC is an amalgam not just of features referencing the timber circles of Woodhenge and the Southern Circle, but also of two types of stone already present on the site. At this time, the shaped sarsens were brought to Stonehenge, dressed and arranged so that they enclosed the re-arranged bluestones (formerly in the Aubrey Holes). The stones with Welsh origins were now contained within arrangements of stones brought mostly from the Marlborough Downs. This raises the possibility that Stonehenge’s identity, as expressed through the stones’ origins, represented a union of two groups with geographically diverse ancestries—the people of the bluestones and the people of the sarsens.

  One of the problems with which we’ve been wrestling at Durrington Walls is why there were two wooden versions of Stonehenge—the Southern Circle and Woodhenge—and why Woodhenge was placed in a location marginal to the Southern Circle and its avenue. We did think that the two timber circles might have been built and used at different times, with Woodhenge replacing the Southern Circle, but the dates of the two structures suggest that this is not a good explanation. Although Woodhenge’s henge ditch was not dug until 2400–2280 BC, the person whose cremated bones were buried in hole C14 of Woodhenge died around the same time as the Southern Circle was constructed, more than a century earlier.

  Josh has noticed that the timber structures he excavated immediately south of Woodhenge are different in plan to the post settings within the house enclosures and of the Northern Circle within Durrington Walls. Instead of having circular perimeters, the structures south of Woodhenge are oval and slightly irregular. The holes for the large central posts in the structures south of Woodhenge are also anomalous; although they are the same size as other large posts at Durrington Walls, they have no ramps with which to ease the posts into their holes.

  Perhaps the two groups of timber monuments—the Woodhenge set and the Durrington Walls set—were constructed by two different groups of people. If so, there may be a clue as to which group was which. The sarsens that stood along the Durrington Avenue may be associated with the Southern Circle, showing a local ancestry for the builders and users of these sites. One of the stoneholes at Woodhenge probably held a bluestone rather than a sarsen, so perhaps the Woodhenge complex of structures indicates an association with Welsh ancestry for a second, separate group of people. There is no way of knowing for sure but we should learn more in the coming years from aspects such as the origins of the cattle brought to Durrington Walls and Woodhenge.

  We now know a lot more about Stonehenge. We know that it was a place of burial for a long period of its use, that it was built on the end of a geological feature coincidentally aligned on the solstice axis, and that its first two stages date to around 3000 BC and 2500 BC. Around the same time as that second stage of construction, when the trilithons and then the sarsen circle were erected, people were building comparable circles in timber at Durrington Walls, within a large settlement, to which people and their herds came from many miles away for seasonal feasting in winter and summer. While Stonehenge was a place for the dead, Durrington Walls was occupied by the living, whose houses reveal many aspects of their daily lives. This short-lived and seasonal settlement may well have been the builders’ camp for Stonehenge.

  Ultimately, the Stonehenge of 2500 BC is unique, without any evident predecessors in northern Europe. But could the people of Neolithic Wessex have built it without outside help? Previous generations of archaeologists, including Richard Atkinson, had a pretty low opinion of the Stonehenge people. As far as Atkinson was concerned, “these men were essentially barbarians.”45 Since this society had no architecture (as distinct from mere construction), he claimed, they would not have been able to build Stonehenge without the assistance of a superior civilization. A lot has happened since 1956, and our knowledge of these “barbarians” and their abilities has mushroomed. Atkinson knew very little about the sophisticated timber architecture of the many British henge complexes, since most of them have been found since his time. He also belonged to an era when people talked about “primitive societies” rather than “societies with primitive technologies.”

  Stonehenge’s architectural plan and design owe nothing to very distant lands and cultures. Yet the scale of moving, shaping, and lifting its sarsens puts it in a league of its own, beyond anything else in Britain at that time. Only Avebury comes close, but even that major achievement in stone lacks the elements of dressing uprights and raising lintels.

  21

  THE END OF STONEHENGE

  __________

  Stonehenge is not one monument, built at one moment in history, but many monuments built over many centuries. To try to study the stone circle in isolation is to be doomed to failure and error. Understanding Stonehenge requires knowledge of the Early Mesolithic use of Salisbury Plain, the subsequent arrival of farming communities there as well as across Britain, and the wider developments in Late Neolithic society.

  Long-distance patterns of mobility and trade, and widespread architectural developments and funerary customs are an essential key to making sense of the development of the first Stonehenge as a stone circle and cremation cemetery. Understanding its transformation around 2500 BC requires knowledge of its landscape context, to grasp how it formed part of a larger complex centered on the River Avon. We can also now consider the social and economic forces that led to Stonehenge’s decline.

  Before doing so, it is worth summarizing how the discoveries of the Stonehenge Riverside Project have changed the way that we think about Stonehenge.

  Firstly, we now have several instances where prehistoric people adapted pre-existing natural features into their cultural designs. The most significant of these is the series of three chalk ridges aligned by geological accident on the midsummer sunrise/midwinter sunset axis. On top of these, Neolithic people constructed the first stretch of the Stonehenge Avenue. This natural landform’s solstitial alignment, on the end of which Stonehenge was constructed just after 3000 BC, seems to have set the blueprint for solstitial alignments in the monuments of the immediate locality, not only at Stonehenge but at four of the timber circles at Durrington Walls, and Woodhenge as well. It’s interesting that no certain solstitial alignments have been identified at the other great henges of Wessex, such as Avebury, Marden, or Dorchester. Maybe this was a particular feature of celebrations at Stonehenge.

  Stonehenge was inspired by fashions of building monuments and houses locally within Britain, not by distant civilizations in the Mediterranean. Its first two stages were, in fact, constructed during a period of cultural isolation from the Continent, when the people of Britain were increasingly unified by sharing pan-island styles of material culture (pots, houses, burial practices) despite their diverse genetic ancestries. Stonehenge can be understood as a monument of unification, integrating the cosmological aspects of earth, sun, and moon into a sing
le entity that also united the ancestors of the people of Britain in the form of Welsh bluestones and English sarsens.

  The Durrington Walls Avenue is a Neolithic structure whose existence was entirely unknown and unsuspected. We went out to look for it on the basis of a theory, not because of any evidence on the ground. Not only does the newly discovered Durrington Avenue link the Southern Circle to the River Avon, but this solstice-aligned feature also sits on top of a natural precursor, in this case a geologically formed surface of broken flint, that had collected in the bottom of the valley. The Durrington Walls Avenue’s midsummer sunset orientation provides a counterpoint to the Stonehenge Avenue’s midsummer sunrise axis, while the Southern Circle’s view toward midwinter sunrise contrasts with Stonehenge’s midwinter sunset axis.

  What started as a hypothesis—that Durrington Walls was a place of the living—has now become something we recognize as fact. When we started work nobody knew that Durrington Walls was a Neolithic settlement. We found evidence for a large village, with the remains of many houses being well-preserved beneath the henge banks. The discovery of just three human bones among eighty thousand animal bones found at Durrington shows that the activities that took place here were the complete opposite of what was happening at Stonehenge, where the bones of Homo sapiens are more common than those of any other species.