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

by Mike Parker Pearson

  Our identification of Stonehenge as a place of the dead has also been confirmed, not only by dating some of its sixty-three cremation burials to show that they span the monument’s use during the third millennium BC, but also by showing how Stonehenge started not as a unique site but rather as one of several enclosed cremation cemeteries well known across Britain.

  The animal bones from Durrington Walls and the lipids from within the pots point to midwinter and summertime gatherings, suggesting that the solstitial and lunar alignments at Stonehenge are not part of an abstract astronomical calendar but marked key moments of the year when people gathered here and celebrated.

  Within Stonehenge, the identification of mistakes made by Richard Atkinson has enabled us to refine the monument’s chronology and phasing. Drawing from the analysis of existing records, and from Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright’s new excavation results, we can place the sarsen trilithons, bluestone Q and R Holes, and sarsen circle in a single phase. We can also date that stage to around 2500 BC, about five hundred years after the initial construction. In that initial stage, we can now confidently place the Aubrey Holes and identify them as stoneholes for bluestone monoliths.

  Our review of old excavations at Durrington Walls and Stonehenge has identified a previously unrecognized type of Neolithic building with a D-shaped, or horseshoe-shaped plan. These large houses were probably for public gatherings. Their D-shaped plan formed the model for the central settings of the Southern Circle’s Phase 2 and the Stonehenge trilithons. Woodhenge and Stonehenge’s bluestone oval appear to be modeled on face-to-face pairings of opposed D-shaped structures.

  Finally, down by the River Avon, at the end of the Stonehenge avenue at West Amesbury, we have found a previously unknown henge. Its small circle contained about twenty-five bluestones that were removed around 2400 BC, perhaps to be taken to Stonehenge. Just when this stone circle was constructed is not certain but it was well before 2500 BC. The discovery of Bluestonehenge, together with new timber monuments upstream, south of Woodhenge, has established the central importance of this stretch of the Avon.

  By 2500 BC, the Avon had come to link two separate but contemporary monument clusters, each with an avenue leading to and from the river. Upstream to the northeast were the timber circles of Durrington Walls, surrounded by the houses of the living. Downstream to the southwest were the stone circles of Stonehenge and Bluestonehenge, set within an area largely or entirely devoid of settlement.

  Just what happened in the next few centuries after 2500 BC is of crucial importance for understanding the decline of Stonehenge, or rather the decline of the Stonehenge–Durrington Walls complex. One of the big problems we face in trying to understand the changes is how to date events within the period 2470–2280 BC. The calibration curve flattens out at this point in time, so it is generally impossible to get a single date any more precise than this broad 190-year period. This makes understanding this period—the Copper Age, or transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age—very difficult: Although we know a lot happened, we cannot be certain of the order in which it happened. It’s the equivalent of trying to work out the sequence of events of the last two centuries without knowing any precise dates.

  In a rare instance, it is possible to be more precise. Where we have a stratigraphic sequence of dated layers, we can apply Bayesian statistics to narrow the probable date range. This has been achieved for Silbury Hill, at Avebury, with its construction now dated to within fifty years either side of 2400 BC.1 We still don’t know what this giant mound was for, but we do know when it was built.

  The biggest event after 2470 BC was the arrival of the Beaker people, and the gradual increase in their numbers. Beaker pottery may have been in use in Britain before this date, but the distinctive burial rite in which a Beaker accompanied the corpse did not appear until after 2470 BC. Similarly, copper metallurgy might have arrived before the Beaker burial tradition; many such burials contain equipment for working gold as well as copper. A Beaker in a grave at Ashgrove in Scotland contained pollen indicative of a mead-like drink;2 archaeologists have thought that the Beaker people also introduced alcohol to Britain, although it was probably already widely in use in the form of beer and possibly cider. So far, the earliest bones of domesticated horses in Britain are from the Beaker period,3 so these people may have introduced horse-riding. They certainly brought entirely new attitudes to monuments and to the dead.

  The Beaker people came from parts of continental Europe—the Rhine valley from the Netherlands to the Alps—that had no traditions of large-scale monument-building. There are a few small standing stones and stone monuments from Switzerland and the Alps during the third millennium BC, but they are on nowhere near the same scale as Stonehenge, Avebury, and the many other monuments found in Britain. The Beaker people brought to Britain a new funerary rite, burying the dead in graves within small cemeteries. There was no strong sense of separating the dead from the living in a geographical or topographical sense. The living might occupy the same spaces as the dead, except that the dead were below the ground.

  The Beaker people were similar in economic lifestyle to the indigenous population of Britain, being semi-mobile cattle pastoralists and cereal cultivators. It’s likely that indigenous Britons adopted the new way of life from a small number of immigrants, learning to make the fine Beaker pots and acquiring the new trinkets in gold and copper, adorning themselves with these and other personal ornaments.

  Monuments were still built during this period, but they seem to have been something of a swan-song, or a final attempt at a statement of power. At Stonehenge, a large and unexplained pit was dug against the inside edge of the great trilithon and was then filled back in. Its avenue ditches and banks were constructed, while Bluestonehenge was dismantled and enclosed within a henge ditch. Woodhenge’s decaying posts were enclosed within a henge ditch at this time. At Durrington Walls, the avenue continued in use but the henge ditch was constructed over the ruins of the village by 2460 BC. The Southern Circle’s timbers decayed, and pits were dug into them around or after 2300 BC. All of these pits, ditches, and boundaries give a sense that these places were being cut off and closed down, marked as separate from everyday life.

  Most of the Avebury monuments are not closely dated, but the two events in that area that definitely fall within this period of the Copper Age at the very end of the Neolithic are the building of Silbury Hill around 2400 BC and the blocking with large sarsen slabs of the entrance to the filled-in chamber of West Kennet long barrow. The settlement at the West Kennet palisade enclosures might also have been occupied in this period. Building Silbury was a massive project, moving many thousands of tons of chalk from huge quarries around the base of the hill. Back in 1967, when Richard Atkinson excavated a shaft into the center of the mound, the scale of its building was compared to every person living in the UK in the 1960s each carrying a bucket of chalk.

  Elsewhere in Britain, some monuments were modified. One example of such remodeling is a long barrow at Skendleby in north Lincolnshire, whose ditches were re-dug in this period, many hundreds of years after the barrow was first constructed, and its mound rebuilt.4 Otherwise, there was no great funerary monument-building. The early Beaker burials were not marked by round barrows; these did not appear until after the start of the Bronze Age, in 2200 BC.

  Britain was open to new influences from the Continent. Things were done differently there—no overlords told the people how much earth to move or how many stones to lift. Personal identity was emphasized and expressed through the wearing of ornaments by both men and women. The dead were still treated with ceremony, but in ways that quickly removed them from the living; they were no longer a constant presence. The old regime was in danger of being undermined and, ultimately, it would fall. Rather like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the greatest monumental spectacles preceded the regime’s demise. Silbury Hill was that last great monument. After that, no one had the will or ability to work for the authorities on any grand scale.


  By 2000 BC the world of Stonehenge had changed. The avenue ditches had been cleaned out and the bluestones rearranged in an outer bluestone circle and an inner bluestone oval. This would be the last time that any stones were moved until stone-robbers came to dismantle the structure. Activities had largely ceased on the other Wessex henges. At Mount Pleasant, however, the henge’s interior was enclosed within a huge palisade wall of timber posts around 2100 BC.5 Whether the single entrance through this palisade led into a ceremonial space, or whether this was a fortification is unknown. One or more of the West Kennet palisaded enclosures might also have been occupied around this time.

  By now, monument-building had picked up but in a quite different form. From 2200 BC, round barrows started to appear across the landscapes of Britain. Particular concentrations have been noted around the great henges of Wessex, and today more than 350 of these Bronze Age burial mounds are protected within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site alone. Between 2200 and 1500 BC, both sides of the River Avon, in an area centered on Durrington Walls, were covered with more than 1,000 round barrows. The only locations left empty were the “envelope” around Stonehenge (though not entirely so), and the ridge of hills that includes Beacon Hill. Whether these were too sacred to occupy is anyone’s guess.

  Visible from Stonehenge to its south are the Early Bronze Age round barrows on Normanton Down, including the rich burial under Bush Barrow. A viewshed is those areas of landscape visible from any particular point, in this case Stonehenge.

  These round barrows were monuments on a much more personal scale. People were now building only for their own family’s ancestors. To construct an average-sized round barrow would have needed only the labor of the extended family of a small lineage. If any one of us were to assemble all the descendants of one great-grandfather, such a group would be easily big enough to build a round barrow. Even so, the work would have been hard and must have taken months. During one of our excavation seasons, we took a day off to visit a team from Bournemouth University excavating a round barrow near Cranborne Chase. Using a team of around twenty diggers over three summer seasons, their director John Gale has meticulously unpicked the entire construction sequence.6 To put it in “rewind” gives us some idea of the scale of the process.

  John Gale’s team of Bournemouth University students excavating a round barrow at High Lea Farm, Dorset, in 2008. The central baulk preserves the last remnants of the turf that once formed the mound, capped by chalk from the ditch.

  The building of this Cranborne Chase barrow began with the erection of a circular wooden fence around the chosen spot for the grave. Other fences were erected around this in a series of concentric rings. Then the grave was dug out and the cremated bones were buried within a Collared Urn. John Gale has so far found no trace of the site of the funeral pyre itself. The grave was filled in, but some or all of the soil for this was brought from elsewhere, leaving the chalk that originally came from the hole lying around it on the surface.

  The hardest job of all then began. Turfs were cut from surrounding grassland, presumably with antler picks, and then piled up to form a mound 30 meters in diameter, centered on the grave. This tedious and difficult labor must have hurt, physically, emotionally, and economically. Perfectly good grassland for the herds was being removed; the area of ground stripped of its turf was thereby taken out of productive use for years afterward. Some of the denuded area could later have been plowed up, but no evidence has been found for this.

  Finally, a circular ditch, just over 1.5 meters deep and 30 meters in diameter, was dug around the perimeter of the turf mound. This ditch was deep and wide enough to prevent any casual visitor from climbing on to the barrow, which was now capped with a layer of gleaming white chalk. This reversed world—in which grass lay beneath chalk—was separated from the everyday world by this ditch with no entrances.

  Not everybody who died between 2200–1500 BC was buried under a round barrow, though it clearly became the fashionable style for those who had enough land to provide the turf, enough family to provide the labor, and a big enough food surplus to feed the numbers needed to build the mound and dig its ditch. There was a wealth divide, also apparent in the grave goods, and it started widening. By 1900 BC, some burials were lavishly equipped—notably those within the barrow cemetery of Normanton Down, overlooking Stonehenge from the south. The most dramatic of these rich burials is the man buried beneath Bush Barrow.7 Other men and women buried in nearby barrows were also provided with ornaments of gold, amber, and jet.

  Similarly rich graves have been found all over Wessex. In 1938, Stuart Piggott declared them to be the Wessex Culture, a group of aristocratic burials centered on Wessex, but with outliers in East Anglia, and also occurring elsewhere in England, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany.8 The name has stuck and these barrows appear to have been a first wave of fancy burials. As a result they are known as “Wessex I,” to distinguish them from a later sequence of burials (around 1700–1500 BC) known as “Wessex II.” We have recently obtained the first radiocarbon date for a Wessex I burial, and it confirms the date as being around 1900 BC.9 By now, Stonehenge’s stones had received their final modification.

  We will never know just how much gold was owned by the families burying these individuals in the Wessex I barrows but, given the amounts that they could evidently afford to leave in the ground with the corpse, it is likely to have been a lot. To get an idea of the quantities of gold in circulation by this time, it’s worth visiting the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Five minutes in the “gold hall,” packed with Bronze Age gold ornaments, is enough to get an impression of the sheer scale of Bronze Age bling.

  With no Bronze Age banks or safety-deposit boxes, this jewelery must have been worn more frequently than just on special occasions. These people wanted to show off their wealth. Burying this amount of goldwork with a dead relative was an extraordinarily ostentatious thing to do; the people who arranged these funerals were able to show that they were so rich that they could easily spare large quantities of gold.

  Overall, the picture we have of Stonehenge’s decline suggests a gradual process. It appears to have ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Even though the main construction work had finished by the time that the Amesbury Archer and his fellow immigrants arrived in Britain, Stonehenge remained a focus for them, as demonstrated by the hundreds of Beaker pottery shards from in and around the monument. Yet the area in which it stood was now treated very differently. The hitherto empty space on all sides of Stonehenge, especially north of the stone circle and south of the Cursus, started to fill with burials and settlements. Beaker shards from small temporary settlements have been found in many areas around Stonehenge, particularly the enigmatic Beaker-period North Kite enclosure, and further north next to the Fargo bluestone scatter.

  Bush Barrow was excavated by Richard Colt Hoare in 1808. A plan of this Early Bronze Age grave, dating to about 1900 BCE, has been reconstructed by Stuart Needham and colleagues from Hoare’s description of where the many grave goods lay in relation to the skeleton. The objects include bronze studs from the handle of a dagger or knife (1), a bronze ax (2), a pair of bronze daggers and a gold belt buckle (3), a small bronze dagger (4), a gold lozenge (5), and a stone macehead, and its bone and gold fittings (6).

  As communal public works projects tailed off in Wessex, ceasing with the construction of Silbury Hill around 2400 BC, Stonehenge was no longer at the center of the people’s world—or, rather, their afterworld. The dead remained just as important as they ever were, except that the focus was now on family and close kin. By 2000 BC the fashion for monument-building had returned, but it was now channeled toward the family-sized round barrows. Perhaps nobody could recruit the labor any more for building on the scale of Stonehenge or Silbury Hill, or perhaps nobody wanted to. By 1900 BC, there were some very wealthy and powerful families, but their wealth, generated by cattle and other agricultural produce, was directed toward personal adornment and family burial monu
ments.

  By 1500 BC that world too had gone. Southern Britain was parceled up by land boundaries dividing the communal grazing grounds into plots.10 Intensive arable farming and sedentary farmsteads were now a feature of economic life. Disputes were settled not with bows and arrows but in face-to-face combat using bronze rapiers, leather shields, and body armor. Economically, Wessex was out-matched for soil fertility, and thus cereal production, by the farmlands of eastern England in the lower Thames valley, East Anglia, and the east Midlands. The center of wealth and power shifted, and Stonehenge was left high and dry.

  Silbury Hill has been excavated twice in modern times, by Atkinson in 1968–1970, and by English Heritage in 2007–2008. It dates to 2490–2340 BCE, broadly contemporary with Stage 3 at Stonehenge.

  Just how important Stonehenge remained for the rest of prehistory is debatable. There’s no doubt that people visited it throughout the following millennia, judging by the shards of pottery from the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and later. Just over a mile to the east, the construction of a hillfort called Vespasian’s Camp (though it has absolutely nothing to do with Claudius’s general Vespasian, who invaded Britain in CE 43) shows that this landscape was occupied and farmed in the Iron Age (750 BC–CE 43). Durrington Walls, too, was being used at this time, being the site of a large agricultural settlement during the Iron Age. This brings us to another disputed interpretation of Stonehenge: that it was internationally renowned during the Iron Age.

  In the first century BC, the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) recorded in Book II of his Library of History that, on an island in the far north of Europe, in the land of the Hyperboreans, there was a temple where the god Apollo was said to reside during the summer months, returning to his temple at Delphi for the rest of the year. The Hyperborean temple was associated, he said, with the vernal equinox and the Pleiades constellation. He obtained this story from a late-fourth-century BC writer Hecateus of Abdera, who, in turn, had found it in the writings of the Greek seafarer and explorer Pytheas of Marseilles. Diodorus described this building as “a temple of a spherical form,” which has been taken to mean a round temple.