Stonehenge a New Understanding

“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

by
MIKE PARKER PEARSON

and the
Stonehenge Riverside Project

New York

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.

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www.theexperimentpublishing.com

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

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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

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

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 one. 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.