Stonehenge a New Understanding (25 page)

The pits in both gardens sound very strange. We excavated more than fifty Neolithic pits at Durrington Walls and none of them contained these deep layers of ash and charcoal.
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The bones, too, are different: Among the bones from the first pit at Woodlands were not only those of cattle and pig, but also sheep, dog, fox, and chub (a freshwater fish). At Durrington Walls we have found only a few bones of sheep and dog (though their feces survive), and none of fish or bear. There isn’t a single flint saw from Durrington Walls, and yet examples of these tools, probably for cutting reeds, were found in virtually every pit at Woodlands and Millmead. Admittedly, these two sites were occupied probably a few centuries before Durrington Walls (chisel arrowheads date to before 2600 BC) but the time difference doesn’t entirely account for the contrast.

The pottery from Woodlands is also very unusual. Although it is Grooved Ware, it has horizontal cordons (strips of applied clay) that are decorated with parallel grooves. The Durrington Walls pottery has both vertical and horizontal cordons, but the grooved decoration is found
mostly on the surface of the pot rather than on the cordons. Somewhat unimaginatively, archaeologists call these two Grooved Ware sub-styles “Woodlands” and “Durrington Walls.”
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The difference is probably chronological, with the Woodlands style being earlier than Durrington Walls. Some of the pottery from Woodlands is wafer-thin (just two millimeters thick); these pots could not have been intended for use more than once.

This disposable pottery, the quantities of ash and charcoal, and the bones from an unusually large range of animal species mark Woodlands and Millmead as rather different from Durrington Walls and other settlements of this period. The charcoal and ash were dumped into the pits all at once, so these deposits are probably the remains of large, open-air bonfires. This is in contrast to the thin layers of hearth ash that we found in the pits around the houses at Durrington Walls. Perhaps the high cliffs overlooking this stretch of the river were used for bonfires and feasting at certain times of the year.

We needed to follow up Stone’s work by looking to the south of Woodhenge. Unfortunately, most of this land now lies under a long line of modern houses and gardens along Countess Road North, which runs from Amesbury northward to Durrington. Any remains are no doubt buried beneath houses, lawns, and flowerbeds. We didn’t have the heart to knock on doors and ask to dig up gardens on the off-chance that we might find something, but there was one area of open ground, immediately south of Woodhenge beyond the north end of the houses, where we could look.

In 2007, Josh and California Dave opened two large trenches there. They were joined by a colleague of Josh from Bristol University, Alistair Pike, an archaeological scientist and enthusiastic outdoor chef. At morning tea break he’d produce fry-ups in a wheelbarrow, and soon everybody on the project was clamoring to be chosen to dig with the “south of Woodhenge” squad. Maud Cunnington had already dug part of this area in 1928.
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There used to be three round barrows here but they’ve all been plowed completely flat; Cunnington had found postholes for an unusual building beneath one of the barrows and Josh wanted to take a closer look.
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He also had a shrewd idea that there might be more than one of these post arrangements.

Cunnington had found a square arrangement of four chest-deep postholes surrounded by a curving but near-rectangular ring of smaller postholes. These formed an enclosure entered from the southeast between two pits. Some Grooved Ware shards indicated that this enclosure was significantly earlier than the Bronze Age barrow on top of it, and Josh reckoned this might have been a timber circle similar to the Northern Circle.

When Josh opened up his trench, he soon found that, over the seventy-nine years since Cunnington’s dig, plowing had almost eradicated the small postholes. He could discern the outlines of some of them, but many had been plowed away entirely. Some archaeologists thought that Cunnington’s structure could have been a house with four large internal posts to support the roof. Josh’s investigation showed otherwise.

The smaller postholes around the outside of Cunnington’s structure were very like some found by Julian Thomas in the center of Durrington Walls: the postholes of the circular palisades around the two “special” houses inside the henge. The very large internal postholes of Cunnington’s structure were too deep and too wide to have been roof supports. With each of these posts likely to have been more than 50 centimeters in diameter, they would probably have stood at least 5 meters high. Josh realized that the structure was not a house but a tower, surrounded by a fence. The four large posts probably supported a wooden platform. With its entrance aligned on the midwinter solstice sunrise, this tower is likely to have had some ceremonial purpose. The view from its platform, if it had one, would have included grandstand coverage of the river below.

North of Cunnington’s structure, Josh discovered another, similar array of postholes. Here four postholes formed a square arrangement and had two pits to the east of them; the layout was identical to that of the first structure, although slightly smaller, and only a few of the ring of little postholes had survived. The posts of this second structure had been set about half a meter shallower but were nonetheless massive.

These timbers had been left to decay
in situ
and, as with the Southern Circle, pits had been dug into the tops of them and filled with cattle and pig bones—and, in one case, with the skull of a wolf or large dog. One of the two pits at the front turned out to be another
posthole. In its fill there was a lump of daub, indicating that the oval enclosure fence had probably been faced with daub like the walls of the nearby houses at Durrington Walls. A radiocarbon date has established that this timber structure was probably of the same date as the settlement at Durrington.

South of Cunnington’s structure, there was a third arrangement of postholes, this one much smaller and consisting of a square of holes about 2.5 meters apart. There was no sign of a surrounding palisade fence, and the fills of these postholes showed that the posts had been pulled out and not left to decay. How many more of these Neolithic timber structures had lined the cliff top above the river? And what were they for?

We don’t know what happened to most of the dead during the Neolithic period. During the Early Neolithic some people were buried in long barrows, but certainly not everyone—there are nothing like enough barrows to contain the whole population. There is almost no trace of what happened to the dead of the later Neolithic. Some people were cremated, and the ashes then buried.
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Perhaps others were scattered after cremation; some groups may have used funerary rites that are unfamiliar to us and that have left almost no archaeological trace. Josh thinks that the timber towers south of Woodhenge were raised platforms for exposing the remains of the dead. Corpses could have been left for their flesh to be picked clean by birds, and the bones then collected up and placed in the river. In that way, the spirits and the bones of the dead could begin their journey downriver toward Stonehenge. Whatever the purpose of the wooden towers, we have no doubt that the people of Stonehenge regarded this stretch of the river as very important in their spiritual as well as everyday lives.

We hoped to find out whether anything had been regularly deposited into the Avon during prehistory. In 2007, we therefore dug a couple of trenches into the paleochannel below Durrington Walls. Because of the Environment Agency’s rule about no disturbance closer than eight meters to the riverbank, we could not examine the bit that we really wanted to get at. We should have liked to investigate the deeper part of the former river channel, where the Durrington Avenue would have ended. Anything heavy thrown into the river from here, such as stone
artifacts or even pots and human bones, might have sunk into the mud at the bottom of the channel.

We were limited to the eastern edge of the paleochannel, and here we found only a few burned sticks and a worked flint. Further downstream, where the channel had widened in prehistoric times to form a reed swamp, there were no artifacts at all in our trench, but the deep sequence of layers contained pollen grains that would give us a complete vegetational history of the locality. We could see the bottom layers, formed after the Ice Age when hunter-gatherers lived along the river’s margins. Then there were layers of reeds that built up during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age; these would have provided the roofing material for the Neolithic houses. The reed layers were abruptly terminated by deposits of gray soil, washed into the river from the Middle Bronze Age (about 1500 BC) onward, as the intensity of farming dramatically increased and rain flushed loosened plowsoil into the river.

Examining plant pollen is a standard archaeological technique for reconstructing prehistoric vegetational environments. Although the plants themselves rot away, leaving no trace, their pollen can survive for millennia. Ancient pollen survives only in damp places and can sometimes be retrieved by coring a hole through layers of waterlogged soil; pollen is, of course, entirely invisible to the naked eye, so the extracted core of soil is sent for examination by a specialist who identifies the various species present.

Mike and Charly’s colleague Rob Scaife has analyzed the microscopic pollen grains from the Avon paleochannel’s different layers to find out which species of tree and shrub grew in this area through time. He’d previously studied a sequence from a spot 300 meters upstream from Durrington Walls, and these two studies led him to a surprising discovery. The landscape of 8000–7000 BC, inhabited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, was only lightly wooded with beech, pine, hazel, and oak trees; by the time of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, the area was largely devoid of trees and shrubs.
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Instead, the vegetation was dominated by grasses, with the addition of sedges and marsh plants on the floodplain. Perhaps this vegetational development of Salisbury Plain since the Ice Age—from light woodland to largely treeless grassland—can be put down to
woodland clearance by the earliest Neolithic farmers. Mike, Charly and Rob have also found a similar sequence on the high chalkland of Cranborne Chase, twenty miles to the south; here, however, the change probably took place without human interference.

Mike Allen has reached a similar conclusion about the lack of woodland on Salisbury Plain by using a quite different type of evidence. Mike is an expert on snails: When snails are retrieved from archaeological layers, specialists like him can look at which species are present and thereby reconstruct what sort of vegetation was present.
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When most people think of snails they imagine the big, fat garden variety, a centimeter or more across, but actually the majority of snails are extremely small and have to be identified by species with a microscope.

As far as archaeologists are concerned, there are two types of snail. Some are catholic, in the sense of wide-ranging or broad: These snails are adapted to live in many different and varied habitats, which makes them useless for our purposes. The types of snail that are useful to us are those that are niche specific; some species can live only in open grassland, others only in shady woodland, and so on. Through years of patient research, examining snails from prehistoric ground surfaces preserved beneath burial mounds, Mike has discovered that during the Neolithic and Bronze Age the area around Stonehenge was not inhabited by woodland-dwelling snails. It looks as if there never was a dense Neolithic forest on the chalk uplands of Salisbury Plain.

After the Ice Age, growth of trees on the downland began later than in surrounding lowlands, initially with just birch and pine being present. After 8000–7000 BC, the warming climate supported light deciduous woodland of oak, elm, and hazel, gradually replacing the cold-temperature species. The woodland thinned out during the millennium before 3000 BC when Stonehenge was built; the open, grassy plain that we see today was already formed five thousand years ago, partly through clearance and grazing by early farmers and their animals, and partly because much of this landscape was already open. Of course, away from Stonehenge, the river valleys, lowlands, and lower slopes of the chalk were forested and, even long after the time Stonehenge was built, the Avon’s floodplain still supported alder and hazel woodland even though the downlands around it were largely treeless. Only a few stands of wood
land or single trees of oak and linden were scattered over this open, chalkland landscape and, as we have learned from our excavations of prehistoric tree holes, these lone sentinels might well have had special significance for the people of the Neolithic.

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Anyone planning to dig at Stonehenge has to jump through a lot of hoops. Permission is granted in the name of the Secretary of State for Culture, but the advice given by English Heritage to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (or “Arts and Darts,” as it’s sometimes called) decides the matter. English Heritage’s opinion is formed from the views of its regional inspector and regional manager, with input from the management team for Stonehenge. Before the recommendation is sent to DCMS, a final decision is taken by English Heritage’s chief executive and the English Heritage Advisory Committee (EHAC), which comprises not civil servants but rather the great and the good in matters of historic buildings, ancient monuments, and archaeology.

EHAC must have been taken aback when it received not one but two applications for digs at Stonehenge in 2008. The first application was for the work planned by Professors Geoff Wainwright and Tim Darvill. Geoff had retired from his job as Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage and was now President of the Society of Antiquaries. After an illustrious career, including digging on virtually every henge in Wessex other than Stonehenge, he was fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. Tim and Geoff had been working in the hills of west Wales, searching for the source of the Preseli bluestones.
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Now they planned to dig a trench within Stonehenge to try to date the double arc of bluestones there.
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