Stonehenge a New Understanding (21 page)

The results were spectacular. Some 102,175 pieces of worked flint were collected from the surfaces of plowed fields by teams walking in 50-meter-long transects at 25-meter intervals. This is a type of sampling. By spreading a field-walking team at consistent, regular intervals, a survey project picks up only a proportion of the total finds, and cannot accidentally select only the most interesting items from a field. From the quantities picked up, and the surface area sampled, one can extrapolate the total quantity of finds likely to be present in the topsoil.

For the Stonehenge Environs Project, the sampling strategy used meant that about a tenth of the total number of surface finds was picked
up. Flints on the surface of a plowed field represent just the tip of the iceberg—amounting to an estimated 2 percent of the overall number—with many more lying within the soil beneath. Thus, the likely total of worked flint in the fields around Stonehenge in 1982 was about fifty-one million pieces. The survey area stretched from Durrington Walls southward to Lake, west to Normanton Down and north to Larkhill, covering some 752 hectares (1,858 acres). Unlike the landscape surrounding Avebury or other major henge complexes, the Stonehenge landscape was full of the debris of prehistoric activity.

Most of the worked flints found by Julian Richards’s field-walking team could not be closely dated. People have worked flint in Britain from the Paleolithic (up to ten thousand years ago), through the Mesolithic (8000–4000 BC), the Neolithic (4000–2500 BC), the Copper Age (2500–2200 BC), the Bronze Age (2200–750 BC) and even into the Iron Age (750 BC–CE 43). Only the diagnostic items, such as arrowheads, can be dated to particular periods. There are also changes in flint-making technology, from long blades and microliths (tiny flakes and blades) in the Early Mesolithic to small blades and microliths in the Late Mesolithic. Microliths then went out of use. During the Neolithic, blades were common in the fourth millennium but were made less often after 3000 BC.

Richards could see that there had been a great deal of prehistoric activity in the hills and dry valleys around Stonehenge, with some areas filled with flintwork. Working out when that activity happened was harder. When potshards are found in association with flints they, like arrowheads, are more closely datable. Of course, this is not a secure way of dating a flint scatter, since the pottery may derive from activity much later or much earlier than the flint knapping. Similarly, arrowheads might well have been fired and lost a long way from home.

Two types of flintworking are entirely missing from the Stonehenge Environs Project’s recovery. These are the large-blade technologies of the Upper Paleolithic and Early Mesolithic, and the microliths of the Early and Late Mesolithic. There is simply no trace of these hunter-gatherers on the chalk plateau of Stonehenge, either on its hills or in its dry valleys. This is puzzling, because we know they were here: The evidence is in the Stonehenge parking lot.

In 1966, increasing visitor numbers to Stonehenge made it necessary to enlarge the car park. An archaeological dig in advance of the construction work was carried out by Lance and Faith Vatcher. Major and Mrs. Vatcher were local archaeologists who conducted seven rescue excavations at and around Stonehenge as well as locations elsewhere in Wiltshire. At first sight, there seemed to be nothing of much interest in the area of the parking lot extension, just a tree hole and a line of three rather large postholes east of it, in an east–west line. With no finds in these postholes other than a burned bone and some charcoal, the Vatchers concluded that they probably dated to the time of Stonehenge.
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Susan Limbrey, an environmental archaeologist at Birmingham University, examined the charcoal from these postholes in her laboratory and discovered that it was pine. This was curious, because pollen analysis shows that pine did not grow on the chalklands of southern England in the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. There was enough charcoal from two of the postholes for radiocarbon dates, and the results confirmed her suspicions. One of the posts dated to 8820–7730 BC and the other to 7480–6590 BC.
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These posts were erected during the Early Mesolithic, around four thousand years before Stonehenge was built, when the inhabitants of Salisbury Plain would have lived in small, mobile groups with no fixed campsites, hunting game and birds, and gathering wild plants and fruit.

The dates of the Mesolithic posts do not overlap, and it’s therefore possible to conclude that the posts were not contemporary with each other. When dating the burned wood of a tree, however, everything depends on which tree rings are dated. A pine tree trunk 0.75 meters in diameter, like the ones in the parking lot, is likely to have accumulated 200–300 annual growth rings. It looks as though the bases of the two tree trunks were charred before they were erected, so the charcoal could come from rings growing at any point in the tree’s life.

A reconstruction of the Early Mesolithic posts (today under the Stonehenge parking lot where they are marked by white circles on the tarmac) with the solstice-aligned chalk ridges in the background.

In 1988, further work in the parking lot unearthed another Mesolithic pit, about 100 meters east of the others. This was the same size as the three found in the 1960s and contained pine charcoal dating to 8090–7690 BC, but it may not have held a post. Many layers of soil filled the pit neatly, one after the other, very different from the stratigraphy left by a decayed post or by a post later removed: If this pit had once held a post, then when that post was removed the entire fill of the pit had been dug out and then filled in again. Nonetheless, it was further demonstration that something important was happening here long before Neolithic people started building Stonehenge.

You can read in the textbooks that hunter-gatherers do not and never have built monuments. All over the world the earliest monumentality is associated with agricultural societies. There are all sorts of reasons why this is so. Generally, hunter-gatherer societies are less able to produce a surplus that can be used to feed people over the long periods required for monument building. In contrast, the slack periods in the agricultural cycle, between planting and harvesting, provide dead time when farmers’ labor can be mobilized. The experience of clearing cultivable land—felling trees and moving stones—provides the know-how to take
on moving big trees and rocks. The need to lay claim to a specific territory is more important for sedentary farmers than for more mobile hunter-gatherers. So the Stonehenge pine posts were a bolt from the blue for archaeologists and anthropologists. As late as 2004, some specialists in Mesolithic-era hunter-gatherers were still arguing that no Mesolithic societies built monuments, despite the fact that the Stonehenge results were published almost ten years earlier.

The Stonehenge posts are also very early in global terms. At places such as Göbekli Tepe and Jericho in the Near East we have the earliest monuments in the world. Jericho has a large stone-built tower around ten thousand years old,
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whereas the earlier site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey consists of large buildings filled with carved standing stones.
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These date to the late tenth and ninth millennia BC—about a thousand years earlier than the eighth millennium, when the posts were put up on Salisbury Plain.

What were the Stonehenge posts for? It has been suggested that they might have been totem poles, perhaps like those of the Northwest Coast of America. The people there were also hunter-gatherers when Captain Cook visited them in the late eighteenth century, although their sedentary lifestyle and organized management of salmon-fishing makes them rather atypical. The Stonehenge posts’ east–west alignment might have been referencing the tree hole to their west, or rather the tree itself. And the posts lined up toward the highest point in the landscape, Beacon Hill to the east.

It would be a bit of a coincidence if the one part of Stonehenge’s vicinity to be stripped for building work—the parking lot excavation involved an area measuring only 150 meters by 50 meters—were the only spot where these features might be found. Perhaps such pits and postholes are much more widely distributed around Stonehenge than anyone has realized. Was there something important in the vicinity of Stonehenge that would explain why this place was so special for prehistoric people at such different points in time? Since they have left few other remains of their presence on Salisbury Plain, where did the Mesolithic builders of these posts live? In later seasons we would find some answers to these questions, but by 2007 we were investigating other monuments in Stonehenge’s neighborhood.

After the Mesolithic posts, nothing was built in the Stonehenge area until after 4000 BC. The earliest of the Neolithic monuments are the long barrows. Long barrows are mounds constructed of earth and subsoil (chalk, in the case of those on Salisbury Plain) dug out from parallel ditches on either side of the mound; typically the mound covers a mortuary structure of wood or stone containing the bones of the dead. The tomb of West Kennet, near Avebury, is the largest example in Wessex of just such a stone chamber inside a long mound.

A plan of the Greater Cursus, showing the Amesbury 42 long barrow and the locations of all excavations between 1917 and 2008.

Other long barrows seem not to have contained any structures other than flimsy wattle fences put up to act as barriers between sections of the mound while it was being built. Although long barrows are indubitably tombs for the human dead, it’s common to find the skulls and bones of cattle inside, often mixed with the human bones; in a few cases excavated long barrows have turned out to contain no human bones at all. There are more than two thousand long barrows known in Britain, of which only a fraction has been archaeologically excavated with modern methods. These long barrows mostly date to within the period 3800–3400 BC, the Early Neolithic. There are about fifteen known long barrows around Stonehenge.
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Unfortunately, we know very little about them because so few have been investigated in modern times. None has yet produced a date earlier than 3600 BC, so it may be that this part of Salisbury Plain was late in adopting this island-wide style of tomb.

The other type of monument built in this early part of the Neolithic was the “causewayed enclosure.”
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These are areas of ground, often several hundred meters across, surrounded on all sides by ditches with internal banks. There are many gaps in the ditches, where solid ground leads to and from the interior: These form the causeways that give their name to this type of site.

Early in the first investigations of such sites, archaeologists realized that these enclosures have too many entrances to have served a defensive purpose. Subsequent work on examples such as Hambledon Hill and Windmill Hill (both quite near Stonehenge, one to the southwest and the other near Avebury) has confirmed their use as ceremonial gathering places.
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There is one causewayed enclosure in the immediate Stonehenge area, lying almost three miles (four kilometers) to the northwest: The very curiously named Robin Hood’s Ball. Very little work has been done on it, but dating of old finds indicates that it was in use around 3650 BC, making it among the latest of the causewayed enclosures to be built in Britain.

The largest prehistoric earthwork in the Stonehenge area is known as the Cursus, an unusual monument that was first recorded almost three hundred years ago. The antiquarian William Stukeley was a good landscape archaeologist: Not only did he survey the avenue leading from Stonehenge, but he also found another avenue-like earthwork half a mile to the north. While he deduced that Stonehenge was prehistoric, Stukeley thought that this long, straight monument must have been built by the Romans. He thought it could have been a racecourse, and therefore named it the Cursus—from the Latin word for a chariot-racing track.