It’s fair to say that until recently the wider landscape around Stonehenge, which is mainly rolling farmland, has been pretty much ignored. The long and bitter public dispute about burying the road, which roars past the stones on its way to the West Country, has dominated the Stonehenge debate to the detriment of other things. Yet it is obvious now that this special area was a vast, interconnected sacred landscape. The largest prehistoric mound in Europe, Silbury Hill stands just one mile (1.5 kilometres) to the south of the monument, flanked by the West Kennet Long Barrow. Avebury’s stone circles are just 15 miles (24 kilometres) to the north. There is a lot more yet to discover.
Kings and important figures were buried in round mounds called barrows and many of them overlook the stones. Of late the archaeological pace has been increasing, with some spectacular finds of Bronze Age tombs. The so-called ‘Amesbury Archer’ was only discovered in 2002, when a new housing development was begun at a nearby village. The press dubbed him the ‘King of Stonehenge’, because the goods found buried with him were so rich in quality.
Twenty-nine groups of exhibits came from the barrow group of Winterbourne Stoke. The earliest is a Neolithic long barrow. More than a thousand years later, it was followed by a line of large bowl and bell barrows. The barrows are a mile southwest of Stonehenge, lying in a NE–SW line. Access is easy; there is a lay-by on the A303.
Almost all of the barrows were excavated in the early 19th century, though some were investigated in the 1960s. The most spectacular finds were the remains of two wooden coffins, many decorated pottery vessels and spearheads and daggers of bronze.
I arrived after a brisk five-minute walk through the woods to see pairs of disc, bell and pond barrows and nineteen bowl barrows. Each of the round barrows held one body – presumably a chief living at Stonehenge. The excavations yielded daggers, knives, awls, tweezers, cups, amber, dress pins, faience beads, food containers and urns.
For me, standing beside this line of barrows was a moment of déjà vu. I’d seen burial tombs just like them near the palace of Phaestos in southern Crete, where our adventure began. They lie on the foothills of the Cretan mountains, inland from Phaestos, on the Mesara plain. The tombs of Mesara are constructed of local stone bound together with mud, the roof supported by a type of corbel construction. They are the same height and circumference as the barrows at Winterbourne Stoke.
This could of course be coincidental. To be more certain of a cultural link I needed to go and see the actual grave goods that had been found in the barrows. They included armour, weapons, farming equipment, woodworking tools, jewellery and household and domestic utensils: many are on display in local museums. The two key museums are the Wiltshire Heritage Museum at Devizes and the Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, opposite England’s loveliest cathedral.
These marvellous museums have thousands of Bronze Age arte-facts, especially from the hoards buried at Wilsford (see map), Upton Lovell, Winterbourne Stoke, Amesbury and Wimborne St Giles. The extremely helpful director of the Salisbury Museum, Adrian Green, and the equally helpful director of the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, David Dawson, kindly let me photograph the exhibits.
I separated the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age artefacts buried in the barrow mounds into twenty categories. The main ones were axes; adzes; jewellery; personal hygiene; woodworking tools (chisels, hammers, etc.); farming implements; dress and couture; hunting equipment; weapons offensive and defensive; votive offerings; ceremonial items (mace, Minoan double-headed axe); games and pastimes; trade goods (balance weights); and kitchen and cooking equipment. These twenty principal categories were then further broken down – kitchen equipment into pots and pans, cups, knives, spoons and so on.
I then placed photographs of artefacts in these twenty categories beside similar items found in the Uluburun and Gelidonya wrecks. (I established that the objects found in the wrecks were in fact Minoan in the manner described in chapter 37.) The results may be seen on our website.
The results speak for themselves (see second colour plate section). The people buried at Stonehenge in the Bronze Age used the same bronze weapons as their Minoan counterparts – tanged and riveted knives, swords, lances and arrows, the blades often with the same ornaments. The simplest explanation is that the objects were in fact Minoan.
The presence of Minoan-type artefacts at Stonehenge does not mean that both civilisations had reached the same stage of development and that these items were made by Britons. Anyone who has visited the magnificent palaces of Knossos and Phaestos becomes conscious of the huge gap between ancient British and Minoan culture. The building technology alone reinforces this point: were there any similar Bronze Age palaces in Britain? The answer is a resounding no.
Amber has been found in twenty-nine graves in the area, not least in the form of some exceptionally valuable necklaces. This jewellery is often Minoan in character. Archaeologists have had some of the amber scientifically examined – and I was not surprised to find it comes from the Baltic. Between the amber pieces in many of the Stonehenge burials are amber spacers and faience beads made of crystal or glass. Archaeologists already accept that at least some of these came from the eastern Mediterranean. Faience beads of the same shape and colour were found in the Uluburun wreck. The ceremonial mace at Stonehenge had its counterpart at Mycenae, and so on. The plot was beginning to thicken.
Seen in that light the close similarity of awls, knapping tools, bracelets, armbands, scales, knives, twisted bow drills, triangulated socket points, spades, daggers, necklaces, earrings, bangles, torcs, rings, brooches, earlobe adornments, cups, plates, lance heads, chisels, spearheads, gaff hooks, weights, pins, buttons, fasteners, cleavers, hammers, saws, bradawls, drills – thirty-two separate types of artefacts – cannot be a coincidence. The most exciting of all these ancient things? Two Minoan double-headed axes in the local museum. Just like the famous labrys of King Minos, found at Knossos.
Was Stonehenge a holy site for the Minoans? Perhaps even a place of pilgrimage? Had they, as part of the long-term trading agreements they held with the local Britons, begun to settle here?
CHAPTER 30
THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT
It was at Callanish on the lonely Isle of Lewis that I suddenly had a breakthrough. I realised that, in a manner of speaking, I’d been barking up the wrong tree. The hoard I was here to see, one of the finest Bronze Age hoards ever found in Scotland, contained Irish bronze tools and beads of Irish gold. But it was the trees, not the hoarded bronze and gold that I began thinking about. More precisely, it was the lack of them. It was then I realised that my thinking about Minoan journeys to the west had been, in effect, the wrong way round.
Today, Lewis has large areas of peatland and bog. But reading my guidebook, I discovered that until about 1500 BC the island had been warmer, more fertile and much less wet. I suddenly realised that it was deforestation as well as climate change that had denuded the land. Deforestation. The kind that happens after shipbuilding and repair; the kind that happens after large, industrial-scale smelting operations . . .
At first sight, it seems highly unlikely that Minoan ships from sunny Crete would have ever ventured to the stormy, wet wilds of the Hebrides. But there were many more of these mysterious Bronze Age stashes hoarded in this general area – at Gurness on the Orkneys, for instance and at Dunagoil on Bute. Why, here, on this wild and windy series of islands? What did these sites have in common? One fact was immediately obvious: they had all been built before widespread local deforestation. Was that purely happenstance?
Had this remote island had a population large enough to carry out an elaborate build, such as the Callanish stone circle? It seemed unlikely. Or had the islanders had help when creating the stone ring – in the form of either hostile invaders or very persuasive outsiders? Was there a lack of trees because large-scale smelting had taken place on these islands?
There was one stunning new piece of evidence: DNA. Examining the DNA of the island’s current population, I
discovered that Lewis had a high frequency of haplogroup X2; and one of the few other places that had a similar high incidence of haplogroup X2 was – Crete.8 (DNA is described in more detail in chapter 38.)
I was seeing a repeating pattern of activity. Could this idea be true? The connections seemed to be there. Besides the Irish wares, the hoard at Adabrock on Lewis also contained the Minoans’ characteristic calling cards of amber from the Baltic and glass from the Mediterranean. That was all well and good. But the inevitable question arose: what had been the Minoans’ real interest in the windswept Atlantic island of Lewis?
The true scale of the Minoans’ trading ambitions was beginning to dawn on me. I was standing at the epicentre of what had been a network: I was unveiling a true trading empire, with bases and ports set up along the entire route. This empire hadn’t simply straddled the eastern Mediterranean. The people of Crete had been the East India Company of their day, a maritime enterprise whose size and ambition took your breath away. Where those trading colonies or bases would be was defined by a number of factors – the frenetic trade in bronze, and the desperate need for exploration, to keep that river of bronze going.
I had been hoping that later at night I would watch the moon skim the stones, setting them aglow. Although I was unlikely to see the phenomenon that Diodorus Siculus had described, ‘the god’ of the moon ‘visiting the island’. Sadly, I was here at the wrong point in the lunar cycle: I would need to wait until 2034 to observe that almost magical event.
It kept niggling at me as I walked. Why here? Why would the Minoans come all this way, up to the northern tip of the Outer Hebrides? It was then that it struck me. What if they hadn’t been coming to Lewis, like tourists? What if they’d actually been en route to somewhere else? The idea struck me like a blow to the head. What had I been thinking all this time? I’d been looking at things the wrong way round. When they reached Callanish, our ancient travellers had been returning home from a much longer journey – one they had made on the wings of the Gulf Stream. Forget Christopher Columbus. It was the Minoans who had first discovered America.
THE JOURNEY TO AMERICA AND BACK
If Callanish had been the landfall for the Minoan traders returning from America, where did they start from? If the sailors overwintered in Spain, ships intending to make an Atlantic crossing in the favourable season of May–August could begin their voyage from an Atlantic port such as Cádiz or San Lúcar de Barrameda, where Bronze Age ports have in fact been found. Put another way, ships from Thera could winter somewhere like San Lúcar before starting an Atlantic crossing the following year. Overwintering in San Lúcar they could have repaired any broken steering oars and sails and careened the ship to remove barnacles from the hull. In May, past the hurricane season, they could use sail, rather than oar power, and the massive force of the ocean currents to take them to new-found lands.
Then, loaded with copper and following the huge circle of the Gulf Stream, they could speed their way back to Britain from America. On the return journey, reaching landfall at Lewis would have meant being halfway for the Minoans. The Gulf Stream is a massive force to be reckoned with. This colossal current of moving water is caused by the earth’s rotation. The great stream flows clockwise all the year round in the North Atlantic, bringing the warmth and fertility of orange-growing Florida northwards with it. It’s part of a whole network of currents; the Spanish used their sublime force and power to reach the Caribbean, in their treasure-hungry galleons.
In Britain we have the Gulf Stream to thank for our relatively warm weather. When the American statesman Benjamin Franklin analysed its properties in the 1760s, he managed to knock weeks off the standard sailing time between America and Britain by refining the routes ships would take, employing the forces of nature rather than struggling against them. When the Minoans discovered the Gulf Stream, they must have realised that it gave them an express train ride, for free.
In 1970, as captain of the submarine HMS Rorqual, returning from America to Scotland, I requested permission to vary my sailing orders so that I could pass through the Denmark Strait and then through the Faroes Gap and on to northeast Scotland. I wanted to travel with the Gulf Stream and see when it petered out.
A submarine is the ideal vehicle with which to measure the power of this mighty river of warm water as it carves its way across the Atlantic. A submerged submarine needs to equal the weight of the water it displaces. In hot water, the submarine must lighten its weight. If the water then gets colder, the submarine needs to flood in seawater. So when the warm Gulf Stream water disappears – if, say, the submarine is below it at 152 metres (500 feet) – this will become apparent from the submarine’s weight. We discovered that in terms of volume the Iceland–Faroe flow is the strongest of the three current branches flowing from the Atlantic Ocean into the Nordic seas, across the Greenland–Scotland Ridge.
By the time they got to Lewis, on the extreme western edge of Europe, laden with copper from America but desperate for food and water, the Minoan crews would have needed to rest up, repair their ships and restock.
The islands would have become a pivotal point in a powerful Minoan trading empire that spanned the entire Atlantic. From here, these enterprising explorers would have been able to launch further lucrative trading missions to Denmark, Greenland and beyond. These were consummate businessmen: they would maximise their reach to maximise their profit.
As Plato had said: ‘This power came forth out of the ocean.’ It was as I had suspected: the Minoans’ tremendous seafaring capability had given them control of a vast trading empire; an empire far larger than simply the Mediterranean. It was one that took full advantage of the vast mineral wealth of the west, of America, ‘an island larger than Libya and Asia together’.
The Minoans probably did not set out to colonise the Outer Hebrides or the Orkneys, but arrived there while heading for home, ships filled with pure American copper (see chapter 33). With that in mind we can look at what they left behind them: starting with voles.
There is clear evidence of the human introduction of three types of vole in northern Europe: the field vole to the Outer Hebrides, the bank vole to Ireland and the sibling vole to Svalbard. None of these voles are found on the mainland of the British Isles.
Which group of humans brought these voles, and when? Radio carbon dates of 3,590 ± 80 (i.e. c.1500 BC) and 4800 ± 120 (i.e. c.2700 BC) are from two bone samples of voles excavated in the Orkneys.9 DNA comparisons made by York University show the closest match to the Orkney vole are those of southern France and Spain. So it seems seafarers came from southern France or Spain to the Orkneys between 2700 BC and 1500 BC. Rodent stowaways in Minoan ships would have been commonplace – the Uluburun wreck had a Syrian mouse! An alternative explanation is that the voles reached the Orkneys first, then southern France and Spain.
The common vole is the only vole on Orkney. It inhabits eight Orkney Islands: Burray, Eday, Mainland, Rousay, Sanday, South Ronaldsay, Stronsay and Westray. The vole cannot swim, so it must have been brought by humans. It is most likely that they were in the hay or straw which seafarers took along for animals. This vole is not found on the adjacent Shetland Islands, nor on mainland Scotland or in England. It is at least arguable that the voles link the Orkneys with southern France and Spain.
CONCLUSION
Because of their physical location at the end of the Gulf Stream, the Outer Hebrides and the Orkneys became trading hubs for Minoan ships bringing copper from the Great Lakes to Europe. Perhaps burials in the Orkneys would tell us more?
A BBC television programme contained this report by David Keys:
According to sensational archaeological discoveries currently being made in Scotland, Bronze Age Britons were practising the art of mummification at the same time as ‘mummy culture’ was in full swing in Pharaonic Egypt. It appears that ancient Britons invented this skill for themselves . . .10
A team of archaeologists, led by Dr Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University, had made an
astounding discovery on the Hebridean island of South Uist. Two mummified bodies were buried under the floor of a prehistoric house in an area called Cladh Hallan. The house was part of a unique Bronze Age complex. The report said that the complex was made up of seven houses arranged as a terrace, and ‘is as mysterious as the preserved corpses that were buried there’. The report went on:
To the astonishment of the archaeologists, they saw that one individual, a male, had died in around 1600 BC – but had been buried a full six centuries later, in around 1000 BC. What is more, a second individual (a female) had died in around 1300 BC – and had to wait 300 years before being interred . . .
The report speculated that the bodies could have been members of some ritual élite, potentially priests or shamans. It is just as possible that they were new arrivals or settlers. I suggest the people were Minoan leaders. The Minoans knew of mummification from the Egyptians, notably from their extended stay at Tell el Dab’a. It’s worth mentioning that when he was excavating at Mycenae, Heinrich Schliemann noted that one of the bodies he uncovered had been mummified.
The extraordinary thing was that the more I looked, the more there was to find. We will seek to have the DNA of the South Uist mummies tested to see whether the haplogroup X2 is in their genes. The intriguing fact about haplogroup X2 is that it has been found not just in the Orkneys and not just where the Minoans originated (see chapter 38) but in the Americas of the Great Lakes. Nowhere else is this haplogroup so prevalent and so highly marked in local populations of today. As Professor Theodore Schurr states, ‘A genetic marker appropriately called Lineage X suggests a definite – if ancient – link between Eurasians and Native Americans.’11 So the scientific evidence backs up the high incidence of shared DNA between Orcadians and Cretans: both have a very high incidence of haplogroup X2 (7.2 per cent) in their genes.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 24
