Stonehenge a New Understanding (22 page)

The Cursus is 1.75 miles long, east-west, and consists of two parallel banks and ditches (with the ditch on the outside, unlike a henge enclosure), culminating in banks and ditches at either end. It appears to have had no entrance and its western end was separated from the rest of the Cursus by a ditch running at an angle, northwest-southeast. The west end of the Cursus sits on a high saddle of chalk, from where its route leads eastward down a gradual incline into Stonehenge Bottom, the dry valley (which might have flooded annually in the form of a “winterbourne”) that runs north-south past the eastern side of Stonehenge. The Cursus continues up the other side of Stonehenge Bottom, terminating at its eastern end on a high ridge, where sits a Neolithic long barrow (a monument known to archaeologists by the very uninspiring name “Amesbury 42”).

When our project began, in 2004, the Cursus had been known about for three hundred years and still no one had established its date or purpose—though everyone did agree that it had been built during the Neolithic. When Julian Richards excavated two trenches into it in 1983, as part of his Stonehenge Environs Project, there had already been digs by three previous excavators.

Percy Farrer was the first of these, cutting a narrow trench through it in 1917, shortly before he put a trench through Durrington Walls.
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In 1947, J. F. S. Stone dug a length of the long south side of the Cursus and found an antler pick in what he described as an “embayment,” a possible wide niche in the bank.
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Much later, Julian Richards had this pick radiocarbon-dated; it was from the same period as Durrington Walls and Stonehenge’s main phase, but Julian was not convinced that it dated the construction of the Cursus because the embayment was possibly a later pit cut into the silted-up ditch.

Stone’s other interesting find was a small chip of Welsh sandstone, similar to a type of sandstone out of which two of the Stonehenge bluestones are formed. Unfortunately, Stone could not tell when his sandstone chipping entered the ditch—whether it had been at its construction or much later, when it had filled up—but he knew that other bluestone chippings lay in the field just to the south of the Cursus. William Young had found some on its plowed surface some years earlier and Stone plotted another seven.

In 1959, Patricia Christie excavated at the west end of the Cursus and discovered that the terminal ditch was 1.5 meters deep, nearly a meter deeper than the side ditches.
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She found a layer of flint-knapping debris at the bottom of this end ditch but nothing else that could allow it to be dated. Intriguingly, inside the west end of the Cursus, she found a pit containing pine charcoal. In retrospect, we can be fairly sure that this was another Mesolithic pit, although it has not been radiocarbon dated.

Julian Richards’s trenches in 1983, on the Cursus itself and into the ditch of the long barrow at its east end, were similarly unforthcoming in terms of datable finds.
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Although his survey team had found high densities of flints and prehistoric shards to the north of the Cursus, the monument itself seemed to contain no vestiges of human use or occupation. Julian had more luck with another monument, the Lesser Cursus, which lies just to the northwest of the Cursus.
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This was identified long after Stukeley’s time and is much smaller, being only 400 meters long by 60 meters wide. The main Cursus is often called the Greater Cursus to distinguish it from this smaller monument.

Like the Greater Cursus, the Lesser Cursus also runs east-west but its east end has no terminal ditch, and it is cut in half by a ditch running north-south across its center. In his excavation here, Julian found antler picks that had been left at the bottom of the ditch and was able to date the construction to the second half of the third millennium BC, between 3600 and 3000 BC. It is older than Stonehenge. But why are there two cursuses so close together? Did one replace the other? Or were they built and used by two different groups?

The eastern ditch of the Amesbury 42 long barrow, excavated by Julian Thomas’s team in 2008.

In 2007 and 2008 the other Julian—Julian Thomas—had the opportunity to try his luck with the enigmatic Greater Cursus and its long barrow. From the experience of archaeologists excavating the ditches of cursuses and long barrows elsewhere in Britain, Julian knew that narrow trenches weren’t going to produce the required antler picks on the ditch bottom. To stand a reasonable chance of success he needed to dig long sections of ditch. Balanced against this was the necessity to dig as little as possible, thereby leaving as much as we could untouched for the future.

The National Trust owns both sites, and for a long time their archaeologists weren’t happy with what we proposed; it was too much to sacrifice. After months of wrangling and discussions, we finally agreed a compromise: four trenches into the Cursus ditch—the largest to be no more than 10 meters long—three into the Cursus interior, and a single trench, also 10 meters long, into the long-barrow ditch. This was more of a gamble than we wanted to take but we had no option.

None of the smaller trenches produced any antler picks, but Julian was lucky with the two larger trenches. The one at the west end of the Cursus appeared very disappointing at first. The upper layers here had been badly disturbed by digging and dumping when there was an army camp in the area during the First World War. From the empty .303 bullet casings dating to 1940 and 1942, it seemed the military presence had continued during the Second World War. As Julian dug lower into the ditch, however, he could see that the layers at the bottom were undisturbed. Then, right in the middle of the trench, he found the broken-off tip of a large antler pick, lying on the very bottom of the ditch. Its radiocarbon date of 3660–3370 BC places the construction of the Greater Cursus in the same date range as the Lesser Cursus.
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Re-opening Stone’s embayment into the south ditch and extending sideways from it, we could see that it was indeed a later pit; in fact it was one of two pits cut into the partially filled-in ditch. This south ditch had then been cleaned out during the Early Bronze Age and had again filled up with fine silt, presumably deriving from Bronze Age plowing of the grassland around Stonehenge. On the north side of the Cursus the ditch had also been dug into after it had partly filled up. The angled ditch we found here proved to be a Bronze Age field boundary, partitioning off what was almost a ready-made field demarcated on three sides by the west end of the Cursus.

On the long barrow, our scaled-down plans allowed for a 10-meter-long trench into the 60-meter-long ditch on the barrow’s east side. We decided to place it immediately north of Julian Richards’s two-meter-wide trench into the ditch,
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reckoning that this would help to increase the odds of finding an antler pick. Excavation trenches are always refilled when a dig is over. The location of a trench remains visible on the ground surface for some years but, providing the backfilling and re-turfing are done well, it eventually disappears, becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding area. Julian Richards’s trench had been dug more than twenty years earlier, so we were relying on a plan to determine where it had once been.

As we started digging, we soon discovered a large rectangular pit. We had landed on the edge of Julian Richards’s trench. After some pleading with English Heritage and National Trust officials, who had to
re-issue the excavation paperwork, we were allowed to re-site our trench to where it should have been and start again. The barrow ditch was massive, three meters deep and 3.5 meters wide. As we sieved every bit of soil and chalk, we became increasingly disappointed to find that there was nothing in the lower fills of the ditch. Then, right on the bottom of the ditch, Julian Thomas found what he was looking for: Just two meters from the edge of Julian Richards’s trench there was a broken antler pick. Its radiocarbon date was almost identical to that of the antler pick from the Cursus ditch.

The radiocarbon dates for the Cursus, Lesser Cursus and long barrow present us with a dilemma. The calibration curve forms a flat plateau for this period, meaning that artifacts cannot generally be dated more closely than 3600–3300 BC. Within this three-hundred-year period, all three monuments could have been built at the same time, or any one of them could have been earlier than the other two. From this dating evidence, we’ll never know for sure if the long barrow was built first, followed by the Cursus lining up on it, or whether the Greater Cursus replaced the Lesser Cursus. What we can say is that the long barrow would not have been an already ancient monument at the time the Cursus was built.

Are we any closer to understanding what these cursus monuments were for? There are more than 150 in Britain—and they are, like henges, a specifically British monument, not found on the Continent.
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Julian Thomas has dug on seven of them in England and Scotland, and probably knows more about them than anyone else. The Scottish ones are earlier, being built mostly before 3600 BC, whereas the English ones are from broadly the same date as the two at Stonehenge. There are certain recurring themes. Cursuses often have no identifiable access into them: There is no way in, or out, across their ditches and banks. As confirmed by our trenches inside the Cursus, there is generally no sign of activity within them. Many of them either cross a stream or have a watercourse close to one end. They are also often positioned close to one or more long barrows.

The longest of them is the Dorset Cursus, running for seven miles across Cranborne Chase, about twenty miles south of Stonehenge.
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This is actually two cursuses joined together, with groups of long barrows positioned at each end. The western of these two cursuses is aligned on the midwinter solstice sunset, framed on the horizon by one of the long
barrows. The excavators Martin Green and Richard Bradley interpret it as a monumental avenue of the dead, linking the ancestors with forces of nature, such as springs and the sun. Back in 1947 J. F. S. Stone interpreted the Stonehenge Cursus as “the material embodiment of an attempted connecting link between the living and the dead.”
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Neither of the Stonehenge cursuses has a solstice orientation, but they do have relationships with long barrows. The barrow at the east end of the Greater Cursus is not much to look at today. Most of the long mound has been destroyed and what little of it survives is underneath a modern track. It must once have been very impressive, originally more than 60 meters long and standing perhaps three meters high. It was dug into in the nineteenth century by John Thurnham.
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He found no human remains in primary positions within the mound, but did recover an ox skull. Our own excavations recovered a stray Neolithic human arm bone.

One of the discoveries made by both Julians—at different times—was a line of pits that had been dug into the side of the mound, just next to the ditch. At some point after the mound was built (and not before, as the 1983 excavation results misleadingly hinted), someone quarried out chalk from these pits dug into the side of the barrow, perhaps to give the mound a makeover by spreading clean, white chalk across its surface. If the Greater Cursus is indeed a later construction than the barrow, then this chalk-digging might have been done when the Cursus was built, to give the impression of newness for both barrow and Cursus.

The Lesser Cursus has a line of Bronze Age round barrows and an undated pit circle off its west end, all of which were most probably built later than the Lesser Cursus itself. However, one of the barrows is a small long barrow—in this case the long barrow lies at the west end of the linear cursus as opposed to the east end, as seen at the Greater Cursus. Perhaps we have a situation not dissimilar to the two Dorset cursuses: The two Stonehenge cursuses might have been constructed as a pair, with the Greater Cursus leading east to the Amesbury 42 tomb, and the Lesser Cursus leading west to its own associated tomb.

Julian thinks it is most likely that the Stonehenge cursuses were monuments to former processional routes, whose antiquity could have gone back to the Mesolithic. Their position, straddling the watershed between the Avon and its tributary, the Till, occupies a natural routeway for
people and animals crossing from one valley to another. We know that the upper waters of the Till were an important place for Early Neolithic people: Many of its coombes and valleys are overlooked by long barrows. Similarly, there is a significant group of Early Neolithic long barrows to the east, around what would become Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. Perhaps the ditches and banks of the cursuses demarcated routes that had once been used by the ancestors, moving back and forth between the settlement areas in the two valleys.

Julian also has an idea about how the Greater Cursus was laid out. Starting at its west end, the southern ditch runs almost due east, heading for the major landmark of Beacon Hill. For anyone crossing the watershed from west to east, this would have been the skyline feature to head toward. After a few hundred meters, the Greater Cursus ditch then shifts orientation northward to head for the large long barrow (Amesbury 42). The north side of the Greater Cursus is strangely irregular, as we found when digging our trench into it. Most likely, the Neolithic surveyors used the kinked southern ditch as their baseline and then took offsets to establish the line of the north ditch.