Stonehenge a New Understanding (30 page)

It always surprises people when I explain to them that Stonehenge is Britain’s biggest cemetery from the third millennium BC, with a known total of sixty-three cremation burials (fifty-nine found by Hawley, three by Atkinson and one by ourselves) and an estimated likely total of 150 or more, given that only about half of Stonehenge has been excavated and that Hawley didn’t always manage to spot cre
mation burials where he was digging. Through a combination of radiocarbon dating and stratigraphic analysis, we now know that Stonehenge was used for burial for most of that millennium. Burials were definitely placed in the Aubrey Holes, in close association with Welsh bluestones. In at least one case, the cremated bones were added to the chalk packing that held the stone in place.
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In addition to the cremations, scattered pieces of unburned human bone were also left at Stonehenge. Many that Hawley recorded cannot be located in any museum, and only about thirty fragments survive.
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Of these, eight have been radiocarbon-dated. Three of these—fragments of skull and teeth—date to the third millennium BC and we can extrapolate from this 3:5 proportion to estimate that about a dozen of the remaining thirty bones are likely to date to this broad period. Scattering and disarticulating human bodies may seem like something that people would do only to their very worst enemies. Yet it was a common practice in Neolithic Britain in the fourth and third millennia BC, and does not seem to indicate any sort of disrespect.
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Long barrows and chambered tombs include complete, partial, and disarticulated skeletons. Causewayed enclosures were also places where bodies were left to decay and turn into loose bones. Anthropologists have known for over a century of traditional societies in many times and places—from southeast and south Asia to North America and Africa—where the process of rotting and disaggregation down to clean bones must occur for the spirit to be freed from the corpse.
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Funerary practices in prehistoric Britain changed radically through time. We know very little about what happened to the dead during the Mesolithic period—it seems these hunter-gatherers did not usually bury the corpse, or bury deposits of cremated bone. Their mortuary rites are mostly invisible archaeologically (in the same way as the majority of our own dead will vanish from the archaeological record, since today we generally scatter ashes after cremation). In the Early Neolithic, the time of the first farmers, the bodies of the dead were placed inside long barrows and chambered tombs, and in caves, between about 3800–3400 BC.
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Between 3600 and 3000 BC, individual inhumation burial (burial of the body in the ground), sometimes with grave goods, was common in different parts of the country. Some of these burials were marked by round
mounds, over a thousand years before the Bronze Age round barrows.
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None are known from the Stonehenge area. The most dramatic is from the western end of the Yorkshire Wolds at Duggleby Howe, where a group of adult males was buried with grave goods under a huge mound set within its own henge ditch.
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One of the burials seems to have been accompanied by the skull of a woman who had been hit on the head with a heavy club.

After 3000 BC and before 2400 BC, people in Britain appear to have renounced inhumation burial. Disarticulated bones, bodies thrown into rivers, and cremations are all that we find. These seem to have been the only forms of mortuary treatment that have left any trace. There are just a handful of inhumed skeletons from this period: For example, a child buried in a henge at Dorchester, Dorset, a woman buried next to a small henge at Horton in the Calne valley, and an adult with severe injuries found at the bottom of a vertical pothole at North End Pot in North Yorkshire.
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It is likely that this poor chap fell down the hole, so this is probably a Neolithic fatal accident rather than a burial.

After 2400 BC, the inhumation rite returned.
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It was not a British innovation but the arrival or adoption of a Continental tradition. In these burials, the corpse was normally accompanied by a pottery Beaker and other grave goods. The last burial at Stonehenge during the third millennium BC, probably after the cremations had ceased, was the inhumation of a young man in the outer ditch close to the northeast entrance.
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This burial took place at some point during the period 2400–2140 BC. This young man was buried with an archer’s wristguard but no Beaker. Remarkably, he had been shot three times or more from different directions. There are marks on his bones where they have been grazed and punctured by arrows, and three barbed-and-tanged arrowheads were found in the area of his body cavity. Known as the Stonehenge Archer, he was a local man according to his isotope signature.

Archaeologists have long speculated whether the Stonehenge Archer was a human sacrifice, a clandestine murder victim, or an executed criminal. He might have been a prehistoric Julius Caesar, assassinated in a bloody coup, a ruler toppled and executed by an angry mob, or even a war leader, surrounded in battle and filled full of arrows. When we put the Stonehenge Archer in the wider perspective of Stonehenge as a
place of burial—a cemetery in use for hundreds of years—it is enough to describe him simply as the last person to have been buried at Stonehenge during its heyday.

By the time the Stonehenge Archer was buried in the Stonehenge ditch, the landscape surrounding the great stone circle was beginning to become a place of burial. Within about three hundred years, by 1800 BC, Early Bronze Age round barrows were everywhere, forming lines and clusters or dotted around the higher ground.
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Before 3000 BC, too, the dead had been similarly prominent in this landscape, occupying the long barrows and the causewayed enclosure of Robin Hood’s Ball. Yet between 3000 BC and the building of the first round barrows around 2400 BC, there is almost no trace of the dead outside Stonehenge itself.

Our excavations at Durrington Walls uncovered just three loose human bones and a single tooth. The human bones from Geoff Wainwright’s previous dig there have all turned out to date to later periods. Percy Farrer claimed in 1917 to have seen cremated bones beneath the henge bank but they do not survive for verification of his report. Maud Cunnington found two cremations, one at Woodhenge and one in the large timber structure south of Woodhenge.
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The latter turned out to be Bronze Age, associated with the later round barrow that was constructed on top of the site of the Neolithic “tower” structure, but the Woodhenge cremation is earlier, dating to 2580–2470 BC, during the Chalcolithic period.

Cunnington describes how this Woodhenge cremation looked as if it had fallen in from the side of a narrow pit, since the bones were found against one side of the pit, from the top to the bottom. She noted that the post pipe was very indistinct in this, compared to what was recorded in all the other Woodhenge postholes. She also noted that the base of this pit was filled with unusually hard-packed chalk rubble, to a depth of 30 centimeters above the bottom; none of the other postholes at Woodhenge had this sort of packing and Cunnington could only explain it as being there to raise the bottom of a post, so that it stood taller in the ground.

Josh was suspicious—why was this feature labeled as a posthole at all when it was so unlike any of the others? Cunnington’s section drawing of this pit shows the characteristic shape produced by an upright having been withdrawn from a pit. Josh realized that not only was Mrs.
Cunnington describing a stonehole, but that the stone pulled out of it was very narrow, too thin to have been a sarsen, like those that had formed the stone “cove” at Woodhenge. Perhaps a bluestone pillar once stood here, together with a cremation buried at its foot, just like the Aubrey Holes. The cremated bones were those of an adult, but there are no indications to determine whether male or female.

In terms of burials and human remains, the contrast between Stonehenge and Durrington Walls could hardly be stronger. At Stonehenge, the most numerous species represented among all the bones ever found is
Homo sapiens
with something in excess of fifty thousand bone fragments. There are just one thousand animal bone fragments, most of which are from cattle, and then pig.
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This is the complete reverse of the pattern at Durrington Walls, where pigs predominate and human bones consist of just three fragments among an assemblage of eighty thousand bones. Durrington has produced a handful of bones from less common species: red deer, roe deer, dog, bird, fox, wildcat, and wolf. Curiously, more than a third of the antler picks used to dig the Stonehenge ditch had been taken from dead deer, with the antler cut out of the skull rather than collected after shedding.
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At Durrington Walls, only around one in ten of the antlers was taken from slain deer.

There is little doubt that the place for a good party was Durrington Walls and not Stonehenge. The animal bones found at Stonehenge are not the debris of multiple, enormous feasts, whereas those at Durrington Walls most certainly are. Added to that, some of those very few bones deposited at Stonehenge probably had no meat on them—it seems that they might have been already ancient when they were brought there. Hawley found carefully placed deposits of animal bones lying on the bottom of the ditch, along with the antler picks. Four of these have been radiocarbon-dated—a cattle skull and two jaws, and a red deer leg bone—and the results indicate that these bones are likely to date to before 3000 BC.
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If so, these animal bones were curated for a long time before being brought to Stonehenge.

Large numbers of people staying in one place for even half a day can leave enormous quantities of waste. Those attending the overnight midsummer solstice festival at Stonehenge, for example, leave behind a small mountain of rubbish, every scrap of which, in these eco-friendly
days, has to be picked up and taken away in garbage trucks after the solstice celebrators go home. In 2007, while looking for bluestone chippings, Josh, California Dave and I excavated, by accident rather than design, a small part of the 1977 Stonehenge festival site. I was there myself, among the thousands of people and a small city of tents. Nothing of it survives above ground—nor do traces of any of the solstice festivals—but 100 square meters of archaeological test pits laid out across a field near Fargo Plantation produced plenty of tent pegs, crushed beer cans, bottle glass, and even a drug dealer’s set of halfpennies used as weights.

The overall impression from the findings of every archaeological dig at Stonehenge is that the place was a cemetery and a building site, with chippings, hammerstones, and broken flints strewn about underfoot, and not a party venue.

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Our dig into Aubrey Hole 7 in 2008 salvaged burned bones from fifty-nine separate cremation burials deposited within Stonehenge more than four thousand years ago. William Hawley had first encountered these burials in the ditch around Stonehenge, and in and around the Aubrey Holes, and had excavated them during the 1920s. Although these fifty-nine, together with the four cremations found by Atkinson and ourselves, probably represent fewer than half of the Neolithic people buried in the monument, they are our only tangible remains of the actual people of Stonehenge. Even reduced to burned fragments of bone, there is much they can tell us about their ancient lives. Christie Cox Willis, an osteoarchaeologist at Sheffield University, has the long task of patiently examining each and every fragment of cremated bone, and is still sorting through the three hundred bags of material that we recovered from the hole.

In the coming months and years, Christie will be helped by Jacqui McKinley of Wessex Archaeology, as well as by Sheffield biological anthropologists Andrew Chamberlain and Pia Nystrom, to catalog and identify all the bones, looking for indicators of age, sex, pathology, and trauma. Certain bones, notably parts of the skull, jaw, and pelvis, can provide indications of whether they come from a man or a woman. Age can be estimated from bones and teeth. Pathologies on bone provide indications about health, in the form of tumors and other growths, arthritic alteration of joints, and bone alterations such as
cribra orbitalia
, a condition caused by iron-deficiency anemia.
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Archaeologists are also
interested in trauma, such as the marks of arrow wounds found on the human femur from Durrington Walls. All these things are much more difficult to detect on cremated bone than on a complete skeleton, so careful and lengthy study is required.

Only ten years before our excavation, nuclear scientists came up with a method for radiocarbon-dating cremated human bones. The problem they had to solve was that radiocarbon-dating uses the substance in bone called collagen, which contains carbon, and bone collagen is destroyed by burning. Scientists finally worked out that combustion over 600°C causes the inorganic components within collagen (known as bio-apatite) to recrystallize, and that the carbonate in these crystals can be extracted from cremated bone and radiocarbon-dated.
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As a result of this new science, the cremation burials from British prehistory can now be dated. Previously, cremations could be dated only if there was associated wood charcoal from the pyre, or if there was, say, a grave good of unburned bone buried with the cremated bones. There are thousands of previously undated cremations, many without any grave goods at all, that can now be restudied.

With unburned human bones it’s possible to learn about diet and patterns of mobility from study of various isotopes in the collagen and in tooth enamel.
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With the collagen burned away and tooth enamel shattered into minute fragments, though, it’s not possible to employ the available study techniques on cremated bone. DNA does not survive the heat of a pyre, for example. However, the range of scientific methods that we can apply has expanded dramatically in recent years, and who knows what may be possible in years to come? In the meantime, we can at least get some idea of who these people were—their age, sex, pathology, and trauma—and when they lived and died.