Stonehenge a New Understanding (27 page)

One of the permissions that we’d had to obtain to excavate Aubrey Hole 7 was a license from the British government to remove human remains from their place of burial. This is left over from Victorian times, one of the provisions of the 1857 Burial Act, which proclaims that “It is not lawful to remove any body, or remains of any body, which may have been interred in any place of burial, without license under hand of one of Her Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State, and with such precautions as such Secretary of State may prescribe as the condition of such license.” Such legislation was drafted to address concerns about nineteenth-century grave-robbers—the resurrection men—removing cadavers for sale to medical schools for dissection, and to protect the Victorian public from the exhumation of rather fresh corpses in desperately overcrowded
cemeteries.
¹⁰
It became law well before anyone thought about the role of archaeology.

It used to be that the Home Secretary was the person who signed the license for archaeological excavation of ancient or prehistoric remains. The license would specify the archaeological specialists responsible for analyzing the remains, and the museum in which those bones would be deposited. It would also specify standard conditions about screening the remains from public view while they’re in the ground or being lifted (not appreciated by the general public, which is fascinated by skeletons) and notifying the local environmental-health officer (utterly pointless for most skeletons more than 100 years old).

While very large excavations of church cemeteries can be quite startling to the public—simply because of the number of skeletons exposed—visitors to archaeological digs are generally intrigued by burial archaeology. There is another type of excavation, of course, which is almost never seen by the public: a modern cemetery being emptied of dead bodies in advance of development. Such work is often undertaken by professional cemetery-clearance companies, who may have to remove hundreds of coffins and corpses—sometimes of quite recent date.
¹¹
Human remains are most often dug up not for archaeological reasons but as a result of redundant churches being converted (into houses or sports bars, for example) or so that developers may build on old cemeteries. In fact, anyone planning to be buried in a municipal cemetery in Britain should expect to be dug up after about a century, since burial plots are usually rented.

Just prior to our dig in 2008, governmental responsibility for the issue of excavation licenses was passed to the newly formed Ministry of Justice. Their lawyers were apparently perplexed by the details of the legislation: Initially their view was that the Burial Act was not actually relevant for archaeological excavations and so licenses were not required at all. This Ministry of Justice advice changed six months later, when it was decided that licenses
were
required, and also that all human bones,
whatever their antiquity
, must be reburied in a “legal place of burial” after two years of archaeological research. This was an entirely new interpretation of the 1857 Act—such a requirement for the reburial of prehistoric human remains had never been imposed at any time in the
150 years since the Act was passed; it was a terrible blow to archaeology and most people didn’t know that it had happened. The ruling didn’t affect archaeological skeletons dug up before 2008, but any new discoveries after that cut-off date—even very, very ancient remains—would be consigned to oblivion. Some of the world’s most important archaeological remains were due to be reburied instead of being stored carefully in museums; future generations would have nothing to study and nothing to learn from.

Only in 2011 did the matter come to public and parliamentary attention. In the face of growing pressure from archaeologists, scientists, journalists and the wider public, the Ministry reconsidered its strange interpretation of the law, agreeing to be more flexible and to allow curation of archaeological bones. Yet the matter has left other European archaeologists astonished that such a path could be chosen by a Western European culture (with an indisputable tradition of frequent removal of old burials) that prides itself on its enlightened and scientific heritage.

By 2008, some members of the Druid groups were already calling on museum curators to rebury British prehistoric bones. They perhaps took their cue from indigenous groups in North America and Australia. In these countries, the situation is rather different, though. All but the most blinkered scientists accept that there is a difficult moral question surrounding the presence in museums of bones of native peoples collected during the colonial period; many seem to have been acquired in much the same way as “natural history” specimens were collected. They are a nasty vestige of an inhumane attitude to other races and conquered peoples.

What to do about such human remains in museum collections has been a difficult question to resolve. In general, if a living group of people still exists with a claim to be descended from these long-dead individuals, archaeologists and museums have given up the rights of science (not without a fight) in favor of the rights of very bitter, damaged communities, often nearly annihilated by European colonization, who often wish to bury such remains according to ancient traditions.

The situation in Britain is obviously much more complicated—the remains of the prehistoric inhabitants of these islands belong to all of us.
The majority of British people can have no idea when their own distant ancestors arrived here; we are a complete mixture, descended from all sorts of people, such as early hunter-gatherers, Bronze Age immigrants, Romans (many of whom were black North Africans, by the way), Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Normans (who were actually French Vikings), and so forth. Some of my ancestors probably arrived a long time ago, some of them may have arrived more recently—I don’t know, and I don’t care, because it’s just not relevant.

It is a fantasy, too, to think that DNA testing can ever unravel this. Even in those cases where DNA can be extracted from ancient remains, to whose modern DNA do you then compare it? Everybody in Britain? Given modern emigration from Britain, the descendants of any prehistoric person could be scattered across the world by now, for all we know. I think we have to accept that prehistoric human remains in Britain should be treated either as everybody’s ancestors or nobody’s ancestors. Either way, we treasure them.

A small group of Druids and other Pagans seem to want pre-Roman human remains to be reburied. As far as I know they are unconcerned about our other ancestors—the late arrivals, as it were—and I don’t think they’ve ever commented on the emptying of cemeteries and churches for development, the displacement of our more recent dead. The small museum at Avebury was targeted by a small but vociferous group, and the National Trust, the museum’s owner, agreed to a national consultation over whether the museum’s prehistoric skeletons should be reburied. Many months later, English Heritage and the National Trust announced that there was overwhelming public support for the storage and display of prehistoric human remains in museums.
¹²

At the time of our excavation at Stonehenge in 2008, both the National Trust and English Heritage were holding the line that prehistoric burials, because of their great antiquity and value for ongoing research, should be retained for future study and education. Neither organization had yet commented on the illogical position caused by the Ministry of Justice’s change of policy—human remains excavated a long time ago, sometimes with no information about where they came from, we keep; remains excavated today, with proper recording and analysis, we were instructed by the minister to rebury. And in the middle of this
surreal situation, we were hoping to excavate the cremated bones at Stonehenge: Our timing was definitely off.

“Paganism” is an umbrella term that can include Druids, witches, Wiccans, shamans and other belief groups. In the 2001 UK census, 30,569 people recorded themselves as Pagans and 1,657 as Druids
^p
. This total of about 32,000 people is about one-tenth the number of Sikhs in the UK and about the same number as Spiritualists. (Some 390,000 people said they were Jedi Knights in that same census.) Although some people claim that Paganism and Druidry are ancient religions that survived underground during 1,500 years of Christianity, it is a modern invention that seems to draw inspiration from long-abandoned folk beliefs. The term “pagan” is used to cover a host of religious groups and orders that, as in many other religions, appear to disagree with each other frequently on dogma, rites, and rituals, and other aspects of belief. By a strange quirk of history, one of modern Druidry’s progenitors was William Stukeley, the antiquarian who did so much research on Stonehenge in the early eighteenth century; Stukeley invented his own order of druids.
¹³

Stukeley was a clever man—with very little to work on, he was able to deduce that Stonehenge had been built before the Romans arrived. His best available guide to life in prehistoric Britain was Julius Caesar’s account of his invasions in 55 and 54 BC.
¹⁴
In Caesar’s time, the religious specialists of the ancient Britons were called
druides
(the Latin we translate as “druids”), so Stukeley reasoned that, if Stonehenge was a pre-Roman temple, it must have had something to do with druids. The logic was faultless—except that (obviously) Stukeley had no idea that Stonehenge was built 3,000–2,500 years before Caesar’s druids ever existed. That is more remote in time from Caesar than Caesar is from us today. Is there any evidence that the traditions of Iron Age druids went back thousands of years into British prehistory? It is exceedingly unlikely, and all the archaeological and documentary evidence points to their being no more ancient than the Late Bronze Age at best.
¹⁵

William Stukeley’s drawing of how he imagined a British druid of the Roman period to have looked.

Caesar knew a lot about druids. One of his friends, Diviciacus, was a druid as well as King of the Aedui in central Gaul (now France). Druids were important ritual specialists who could take up to twenty years to learn their craft, all of it passed down by oral learning only. According to Caesar: “The druids officiate at the worship of the gods, regulate public and private sacrifices, and give rulings on all religious questions . . . They act as judges in practically all disputes.”
¹⁶
Caesar himself served as
pontifex maximus
, high priest of Rome, so he probably had some interest in comparative religion.

Caesar was one of many Classical authors who wrote about the druids of Britain and Gaul.
¹⁷
Unfortunately, these writers do not make the most reliable of authorities, since most of them never went anywhere near those barbarian lands, and there seems to have been a fair amount of copying of other writers’ tales. Perhaps the author among them who is
most trustworthy—likely more so than Caesar, whose propagandist motives must have affected his writings—was Posidonius, a philosopher and scholar of great renown who traveled in Gaul and other parts of the barbarian world in the early first century BC. Sadly, his writings survive only as plagiarized versions by other authors, but he probably witnessed druidical practices with his own eyes.
¹⁸
In the first century AD, Tacitus wrote graphically in his
Annals
about the Romans’ slaughter of the druids on the Welsh island of Anglesey in AD 67: “Their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it, indeed, a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.”
¹⁹

In not one Classical account is there any mention of druids worshipping at stone circles. Authors such as Tacitus mention groves, presumably sacred places in forests.
²⁰
Equally, the archaeological evidence shows very little activity during Iron Age times in or around the stone circles of the Neolithic. The one period when there was considerable re-use of prehistoric monuments of the Neolithic and Bronze Age was much later, during the Saxon period in the sixth to ninth centuries AD, when these ancient earthworks were often chosen as locations for burials and cemeteries. From Stonehenge itself, there is a single human skull fragment from the Iron Age (dated 520–360 BC), and other human remains from later periods: a skull fragment dated AD 340–510, a decapitated skeleton dated AD 600–680, and a pair of teeth dated around AD 800.
²¹

It is also clear that the Classical writers perceived druids principally as judges and public functionaries, with their religious tasks often listed almost as an afterthought. To consider them primarily as priests or religious specialists—as many have believed since Stukeley’s day—may be to misunderstand their actual roles in Iron Age society.

On the basis of the evidence, archaeologists have to conclude that the association of druids with Stonehenge is an entirely recent invention with no basis in prehistoric reality. Yet, thanks to Stukeley, it has become a modern myth, trotted out again and again by the uncritical. I suspect that many modern Pagans are perfectly well aware that druids never worshipped at Stonehenge; it may be more important that Paganism is a new religion—or, rather, a group of new religions—in which people can make emotional links between the past and the present.