Stonehenge a New Understanding (2 page)

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 Neolithic
^a
, 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 lintels
^c
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.

For me a flash of insight came from sharing ideas with a colleague from Madagascar. Many archaeologists had assumed that the choice of materials—stone for Stonehenge and wood for the Durrington Walls timber circles—was of no particular significance. My colleague Ramilisonina saw things differently. When he visited the monuments of Wessex
^d
with me for the first time, he explained that in his country, before the arrival of the missionaries, stone had been reserved for the tombs of the ancestors while timber was used for the houses of the living. Might not this be the case here in Neolithic Britain? Could the choice of materials be as important as the architecture itself?

This was a radical idea. Some archaeologists thought it an exciting possibility but others greeted it with mild derision. It was a theory, but we needed to find out some crucial information.
If
Stonehenge and Durrington Walls really were contemporary, and
if
there were burials at Stonehenge and none at Durrington Walls, and
if
there were some way of showing how Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were physically connected,
then
there was a case for arguing that timber and stone symbolized the living and the dead respectively. A new idea wasn’t enough: We needed more information.

This all seemed a lot to investigate. We knew there were cremation burials at Stonehenge, dug up in the 1920s but since reburied, but none had been dated so there was no certainty about how they fitted into the monument’s history. Before our project began, no evidence of any dwellings had been found at Durrington Walls by previous archaeologists, so it would be up to us to find out whether it was a place of the
living or not. We suspected that the link between Stonehenge and Durrington Walls was provided by the River Avon, which flows past Durrington Walls and then meanders to the east of Stonehenge before heading toward the English Channel. This river is linked to Stonehenge by a long, linear pair of earthen banks called the Stonehenge Avenue. But no one had ever found any evidence of an equivalent avenue linking Durrington Walls to the river. We would have to do a lot of digging to get new information and start to answer our new questions about the two monuments.

The results of our geophysical surveys and excavations were beyond our wildest expectations. The more we worked in the landscape in and around Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, the more we learned about how Stonehenge was part of a larger complex. We also came up with new evidence casting light on some of the more perplexing questions about Stonehenge. Ramilisonina’s insight about places of the living and places of the dead was just the first step on what would turn out to be a long journey of discovery, taking us far beyond the initial theory of stones being associated with ancestors.

As for Stonehenge itself, we had to tackle some big questions about the date of the monument and its sequence of construction. Although Stonehenge’s big stones were put up around 2500 BC (4,500 years ago), archaeologists have known for a while that the circular ditch and bank around Stonehenge were constructed about five hundred years earlier, around 3000 BC. When we started work, nobody knew whether there had been any circles of standing stones or timber posts at that early date. Another really tricky problem centered on the stones themselves. Among the smaller standing stones at Stonehenge today are numerous “bluestones” of various types of rock that derive from the Preseli Hills, about 180 miles away in west Wales. What are these doing at Stonehenge, so very far from home? When were they brought to Wiltshire and when were they first erected?

Another question—one that we never expected to resolve—was why Stonehenge is where it is. Salisbury Plain is covered with prehistoric monuments but most of these lie close to the rivers and streams that provided water for prehistoric farmers and their animals. So why is Stonehenge located over a mile from water, near the top of a rather desolate ridge?
What was so special about that particular spot that prehistoric people brought stones here from so far away? And why did they expend so much effort—literally millions of man-hours—in quarrying, shaping, pulling, dressing, erecting, and lifting the huge stones to form a stone circle that imitated wood? Through a combination of carefully thought-through research hypotheses, tightly drafted research designs, very hard work by all concerned (and a modicum of luck), we have discovered new sites and made new interpretations of existing information; this book presents the results so far of seven years’ work in the field and in the laboratory.

In 1998—fourteen years ago at the time of writing—I was involved in the making of a BBC documentary,
Stonehenge: Ancient Voices
. The program’s producer decided to bring in and interview someone with experience of erecting standing stones. Malagasy archaeologist Ramilisonina knew all about such things: His family still follows ancient traditions of moving and raising large stones to commemorate the dead. So, in February that year, Ramilisonina braved the British winter and came to Wiltshire to take part in filming.

Ramilisonina and I had already been working together for years. Previously he had taken me to lots of interesting tombs and monuments in the spiny deserts of southern Madagascar; now I took him to Avebury. Ramilisonina was transfixed by this stone circle, which stands about twenty miles north of Stonehenge. Its stones are bigger than anything he has ever handled—so huge that he had to ask me whether the people who erected them had used tractors. If not, he mused, they must have been put up by magic. I told him that the stone circle was more than four thousand years old—so no tractors—and that I honestly didn’t believe that stones could be moved by supernatural means.

As we wandered among the Avebury stones in the fading afternoon light, I explained that we didn’t know what the standing stones were for. Now it was Ramilisonina’s turn to look at me in amused disbelief. How could I not know? To him it was obvious. It seemed that even after many seasons of fieldwork in Madagascar I hadn’t really grasped the significance of stone: It is an everlasting material with which one honors and
commemorates the dead. There in Madagascar, perishable materials—wood, fabric, plant materials—are used only for the living, to clothe and house them during the brief span of human life, before they spend the eternity of death in a stone tomb. Stone monuments are for the ancestors—for Ramil, this explanation was self-evident.

My first reaction was to laugh. Contemporary Madagascar and prehistoric Britain are so disconnected, both geographically and historically, that it was surely a bit absurd to suggest that these two completely separate cultures could share any motivation for putting up megaliths. Nevertheless, at Stonehenge for the filming the next day, I found myself thinking about what Ramilisonina had said, wondering if it might not be so far-fetched. I knew that archaeologists had found many human burials at Stonehenge
¹
—it certainly had some sort of association with the dead. And less than two miles away from the great stone circle there once stood the timber circles inside and outside the massive Durrington Walls enclosure.
²

As a student I’d been taught that these three timber circles in and near Durrington Walls predated Stonehenge and were probably its prototypes. Some thought that they’d once been roofed to make giant circular buildings—and that Stonehenge was a stone copy made after they’d fallen into ruin. If Ramilisonina’s instinct was right, then the relationship between the stone circle and the timber circles wasn’t a question of prototypes, of one style replacing another. The wooden and stone monuments would have played different roles in the lives of their builders. Perhaps wood was juxtaposed with stone for a purpose, to create a complex of monumental structures associated with the transition from life to death. If the timber circles were monuments for the living, as opposed to stone monuments for the dead, then there should be evidence that these structures at Durrington Walls were actually contemporary with Stonehenge.