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

  PRAISE

  __________

  “Renowned archaeologist Pearson presents the findings of the most ambitious and scientifically informed investigation of Stonehenge thus far . . . The most authoritative, important book on Stonehenge to date.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred

  “This is brilliantly written scholarship. The book combines old ideas about the circle with the unexpected revelations of today. It is a triumph.”

  —Aubrey Burl, author of A Brief History of Stonehenge and seven other books on prehistoric stone circles

  “From 2003 to 2009, the archaeologist Mike Pearson led the Stonehenge Riverside Project. . . . His book is a detailed account of that archaeological survey, expressed in a genial style that invigorates the story of the groundwork.”

  —Iain Finlayson, The Times (London)

  “The book describes one of the outstanding archaeological projects of recent years. It is accessible, original, carefully researched and important. But, above all, it is exciting.”

  —Richard Bradley, Reading University

  BECAUSE EVERY BOOK IS A TEST OF NEW IDEAS

  STONEHENGE

  A New Understanding

  * * *

  Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument

  * * *

  by

  MIKE PARKER PEARSON

  and the

  Stonehenge Riverside Project

  New York

  Also by MIKE PARKER PEARSON

  __________

  From Machair to Mountains: Archaeological Survey and Excavation in South Uist (2012)

  Pastoralists, Warriors and Colonists: The Archaeology of Southern Madagascar (2010)

  Ancient Uists: Exploring the Archaeology of the Outer Hebrides (2008)

  From Stonehenge to The Baltic: Living with Cultural Diversity in the 3rd Millennium BC (2007)

  Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory (2005)

  South Uist: Archaeology and History of a Hebridean Island (2004)

  Fiskerton: An Iron Age Timber Causeway with Iron Age and Roman Votive Offerings: The 1981 Excavations (2004)

  Food, Culture and Identity in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (2003)

  In Search of The Red Slave: Shipwreck and Captivity in Madagascar (2002)

  Earthly Remains: The History and Science of Preserved Bodies (2001)

  The Archaeology of Death and Burial (1999)

  Between Land and Sea: Excavations at Dun Vulan, South Uist (1999)

  Looking at the Land: Archaeological Landscapes in Eastern England: Recent Work and Future Directions (1994)

  Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space (1994)

  Bronze Age Britain (1993)

  New Approaches to Our Past: An Archaeological Forum (1978)

  STONEHENGE—A NEW UNDERSTANDING: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument

  Copyright © 2011, 2013 Mike Parker Pearson

  The illustration credits are a continuation of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The Experiment, LLC

  260 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10001–6408

  www.theexperimentpublishing.com

  Stonehenge—A New Understanding was first published as Stonehenge in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.

  The Experiment’s books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk for premiums and sales promotions as well as for fund-raising or educational use. For details, contact us at [email protected].

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and The Experiment was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been capitalized.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Parker Pearson, Michael, 1957-

  Stonehenge : a new understanding : solving the mysteries of the greatest stone age monument / by Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project.

  pages cm

  “First published in Great Britain in 2012 as Stonehenge : exploring the greatest stone age mystery by Simon & Schuster, a division of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.”--T.p. verso.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61519-079-9 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-61519-172-7 (ebook)

  1. Stonehenge (England)--History. 2. England--Antiquities. 3. Megalithic monuments--England. 4. Stonehenge World Heritage Site (England) I. Stonehenge Riverside Project (England) II. Title.

  DA142.P37 2013

  936.2'319---dc23

  2012047688

  ISBN 978-1-61519-079-9

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-172-7

  Jacket design by Christine Van Bree

  Jacket photograph © Skyscan | Corbis

  Back cover illustration by Matt Johnson | S&S Art Department

  Author photo courtesy University of Sheffield

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Distributed by Workman Publishing Company, Inc.

  Distributed simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Ltd.

  First published May 2013

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  __________

  Map

  Introduction

  1. The Man from Madagascar

  2. A Brief History of Stonehenge

  3. Starting the Project

  4. Putting the Trench in the Right Place

  5. The Houses and the Henge

  6. Was This Where the Stonehenge Builders Lived?

  7. The Great Trilithon and the Date of the Sarsens

  8. Mysterious Earthworks: The Landscape of Stonehenge

  9. Mysteries of the River

  10. The Druids and Stonehenge

  11. The Aubrey Holes

  12. Digging at Stonehenge

  13. The People of Stonehenge and the Beaker People

  14. Bluestonehenge: Back to the River

  15. Why Stonehenge Is Where it Is

  16. Origins of the Bluestones

  17. Origins of the Sarsens

  18. Earthworms and Dates

  19. The New Sequence for Stonehenge

  20. Stonehenge: The View from Afar

  21. The End of Stonehenge

  PLATES

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Index

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  __________

  For millennia Stonehenge has stood alone on Salisbury Plain, a mysterious legacy of a vanished culture. Today it is flanked by two busy roads, and its visitor center attracts almost a million tourists a year from all around the world. Yet only fifty years ago it was still a quiet and empty place, reached by lonely roads and tracks over the high plain. A visiting Dutch archaeologist described it in 1957: “There was no fence nor were tickets sold at Stonehenge, and there were no other visitors, the car was just parked on the grass and you could just walk around the stones and touch them.”1

  The myth of Stonehenge in seclusion is a powerful on
e. Many have tried to understand Stonehenge on its own, without thinking greatly about its surroundings on the windswept plain, or the people of its wider world. Astronomers, mathematicians, engineers, and all manner of scholars and enthusiasts have pored over plans and drawings of this great stone circle, extracting significance from myriad possible interpretations of its design. In the modern era, many of those interested in the monument have certainly hoped that some secret code to its meaning might somehow be broken—if only we knew how.

  If we could travel back in time, some 4,000 or 5,000 years, we would find that Stonehenge was not an isolated marvel. It was one of many monuments in this part of Salisbury Plain. Some were built of timber, and lasted only a few centuries. At least one monument of stone standing on the bank of the nearby River Avon was dismantled by ancient people only a few centuries after it was put up. The banks and ditches of large earthwork enclosures lasted much longer, but millennia of plowing and erosion have reduced them to mere humps and bumps that are barely visible today. Stonehenge in its heyday was thus not alone, being part of a landscape teeming with construction and activity. For those studying Stonehenge, therefore, the stone circle is not in itself the puzzle but rather just one piece of a complex jigsaw.

  For more than three hundred years people have been trying to find that puzzle’s missing pieces. In 1666 John Aubrey, the king’s antiquary, discovered that there was an “avenue” leading from Stonehenge toward the River Avon, which runs to its east. In the 1720s the antiquarian William Stukeley recorded many details about Stonehenge and its surrounding burial mounds, or barrows. Eighty years later, local landowner Richard Colt Hoare, the excavator of many of these barrows, mapped a huge earthwork enclosure, known as Durrington Walls, that is situated some two miles northeast of Stonehenge. The pace of discovery quickened during the twentieth century, as the “footprints” of long-vanished timber circles at Durrington Walls and the nearby site called Woodhenge were excavated by teams of expert archaeologists.

  In archaeology context is everything. As a rule, an artifact or a monument studied in isolation is out of context and, as such, any interpretation of it will always be partial and flawed. If we can understand a monument in terms of what it related to, who made it, how they lived, and what else they did, we stand a better chance of understanding the thing in itself as the product of wider forces. But the process of piecing together the past can be compared with assembling a jigsaw puzzle only so far. We may be able to see what fits together, but this will not necessarily reveal how it fits together. There must be a deductive insight—a flash of perception—that explains the hows and whys. This is where we need theories and hypotheses—the starting points of all scientific endeavor, whether we’re attempting to explain relativity or the causes of the Second World War.

  Theories provide new ways of seeing, new understandings of the facts, and new lines of evidence to be sought out. Theories are not articles of faith or belief; they are there to be tested to breaking point. When we discover that an existing hypothesis doesn’t explain new findings, that hypothesis must be discarded or modified. Consequently, the history of knowledge is strewn with the debris of rejected theories. In archaeology the most powerful theories are those that match and explain evidence produced by new discoveries; if the new evidence doesn’t support the theory’s predictions then the theory is wrong.

  This book is about the relationship of Stonehenge to its surrounding landscape and to the people who built it. We have tried throughout to explain why some theories about Stonehenge are better than others. Our knowledge has changed dramatically as a result of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which started in 2003 and ran for seven years, to 2009, during which time forty-five archaeological excavations were opened throughout the Stonehenge World Heritage Site’s 26.6 square kilometers. During the first two years of the project, as its overall leader, I gathered a team of expert archaeologists to be codirectors—Colin Richards, Josh Pollard, Kate Welham, Julian Thomas, and Chris Tilley. Together we then recruited teams of university students, local volunteers, and professional archaeologists from across Britain and Europe on what became one of the world’s largest archaeological projects of its day.

  Our investigations not only explored locations at and around Stonehenge itself but also focused on the nearby great henge enclosure of Durrington Walls. At the heart of our research was the possibility that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were not separate monuments, as everyone had thought, but two halves of the same complex. In other words, to understand Stonehenge we had to understand its relationship to Durrington Walls.

  Most people have never even heard of Durrington Walls. Named after the present village of Durrington, a stone’s throw to its northeast, this is a neglected but internationally important part of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. A major road runs through the middle of this prehistoric circular earthwork, or henge. Just beyond it to the north lies the Stonehenge Inn, where coachloads of Stonehenge visitors stop off for pub lunches, oblivious to the enclosure’s existence. And who can blame them? The earthworks of Durrington Walls are visible only to the trained eye. Next to it, on its south side, is the site of Woodhenge, the remains of a timber circle whose excavated postholes have been filled with concrete cylinders to mark the positions of the long-gone timber posts that once stood in them. Another two Stonehenge-sized timber circles—known as the Northern and Southern Circles—were discovered inside the circular earthworks of Durrington Walls in the 1960s, during excavations when the main road was built, but these now lie buried and unmarked beneath the road embankment.

  The size of Durrington Walls is impressive. Covering an area of 17 hectares (42 acres), the earthen banks of this enormous enclosure once stood more than 3 meters (10 feet) high, with a ditch inside the bank some 5.5 meters (18 feet) deep. Today there is little more to see on the surface than a panel informing visitors that this was once the largest of Britain’s henges.

  Henges were built only during the Neolithica, Copper Age and Bronze Age (starting at around 3000 BC)b and they are found only in Britain. The word henge does not refer to a circular structure of stone or wood, as is commonly thought, but is actually the name given to an earthen enclosure in which the ditch is situated on the inside of the bank—as if keeping something inside it rather than keeping people out. It just so happens that many of these inside-out enclosures have the remains of structures inside them. Paradoxically—and despite lending its name to this type of prehistoric monument—Stonehenge itself is not technically a henge: Its own ditch lies outside its bank.

  Before the enclosing ditch and bank were constructed at Durrington Walls, some 4,500 years ago, this was also the largest settlement of its day in northern Europe. Our excavations have revealed that this was a landscape filled with small wattle-and-daub houses; it must have been alive with the sounds of thousands of people gathering from miles around to celebrate and worship at the two great timber circles. Archaeologists have often wondered whether lots of people lived at Stonehenge, because its stones obviously required a huge number of people to “dress” them (to shape and smooth them), and to put them up. The builders must have lived somewhere, in large groups for a long period of time, and we know that prehistoric people usually left traces of their presence—things such as broken pots, flint tools, animal bones, burned grain, houses, and storage pits dug into the ground. Archaeologists, including myself, have looked for traces of a builders’ camp in the vicinity of Stonehenge but without success. Settlement remains are largely absent from Stonehenge and its immediate surroundings. So it seems that the people who lived in the village that we discovered at Durrington Walls built both Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. We now know from our new findings at Durrington Walls that large gatherings of Neolithic people could create huge quantities of waste, even during a period of occupancy lasting less than a few decades. New studies of DNA and isotopes tell us something about who these Neolithic people were, including where they came from, what they ate, and how they lived.


  Had the timber circles and houses of Durrington Walls been built of stone, they might have survived for people to appreciate today. It would also have been self-evident that Stonehenge was part of a larger complex and should be understood in such terms. There are other reasons why earlier archaeologists failed to understand the link between the two sites. It was thought that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were built at different times in prehistory and so could not have been in contemporaneous use. The radiocarbon dates for Durrington Walls appeared to be several centuries earlier than those for Stonehenge; as a result, until as late as 2008 (when we reinterpreted the whole chronology of Stonehenge and Durrington Walls), some archaeologists argued that the stones of Stonehenge were put up much later than the Durrington Walls timber circles. Perhaps, as my university teachers suggested thirty years ago, Stonehenge was a stone copy of the timber circles, created after they’d fallen into decay? Until our recent findings changed the story quite radically, the radiocarbon dates misled archaeologists into thinking that the timber circles of Durrington Walls and Woodhenge would have been in ruins by the time the stones were erected at Stonehenge.

  Even so, there were always unappreciated clues that Stonehenge and the Durrington Walls timber circles might be related. For centuries it has been common knowledge that Stonehenge’s builders employed features derived from carpentry. The lintelsc are secured to the tops of the uprights by tenons (carved knobs projecting from the top of the stone) that fit into cup-shaped mortise holes on the undersides of the stone lintels. The ends of each lintel are slightly curved so that each nestles snugly against the next in a simple form of tongue-and-groove jointing. It’s unlikely that the stonemasons considered these to be practical requirements—the sheer weight of the five-ton lintels made this mortise-and-tenon jointing unnecessary—so their inclusion must represent a stylistic nod toward timber architecture.