Stonehenge a New Understanding (3 page)

If the stone and timber circles
were
all part of one system, then what joined them together? I knew without looking at the map that the answer was the River Avon. Stonehenge has an avenue, flanked by ditches and banks, that leads from its entrance toward the river;
³
two miles upstream from Stonehenge, Durrington Walls lies very close to the Avon. Perhaps this river was significant as a route between the circles of timber and the
circle of stone, playing a part in a transition from life to death. Eighteen miles north of Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, the stone circles and avenues of Avebury,
⁴
too, could have been designed as part of a larger wood-and-stone complex. Archaeologists had recently discovered the remains of a series of enclosures surrounded by wooden palisades along the River Kennet, a mile from Avebury.
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Maybe Avebury was also built as a place for the ancestors, separated by water from the land of the living.

That day at Stonehenge, Ramilisonina answered questions for the cameras. By the dark and freezing evening, when we finally got inside the stone circle, I was already looking at it with new eyes. Could a link between wood and stone explain why Stonehenge’s builders had shaped the stones in ways reminiscent of carpentry?

Back at home I discussed the archaeological evidence with Ramilisonina. Over the next three days we wrote an academic paper in which we described the meanings of standing stones in Madagascar and drew an analogy with Stonehenge and Avebury.
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All archaeology (and in fact all social and historical studies) relies on analogy. An analogy is an equivalence, or a parallel, and we use analogies all the time, even at the most basic level of identification—when we decide to call an ancient stone or metal object with a particular type of sharp edge an “ax,” for example, we are employing the simplest sort of analogy. In more complex attempts to deduce the motivation behind people’s actions, we draw on analogies to explain what we see and find.

The problem with analogy is that we must have a broad range of possibilities with which to draw comparisons. If we limit our horizons to our own lived experiences, in the urbanized Western world, we risk imposing our own preconceptions on what we find, and can even fail to recognize the most simple of objects if they are beyond our personal frame of reference. For archaeologists it is essential to draw on as wide a knowledge as possible of cultural diversity and the different ways of explaining human action.

As we wrote, Ramil and I talked about “materiality”—the use of physical materials to express intangible meanings. I explained to Ramil that even in Britain today we have complex material symbolism associated with death. The funeral itself often involves impermanent, perishable materials—displays of cut, dying flowers, for example, and the marking
of a recently dug grave by a wooden cross, perceived as temporary. For us, the funerary process requires stone to reach its conclusion: A gravestone is erected months after an interment, to ensure the permanent memory of the dead. We regard such things as practical, pragmatic actions, but there’s usually much more to human behavior at such important moments.

At various times and in many different places around the world, architecture has been used to express notions of permanence. Building in stone communicates solidity and eternal values, often invoking the words or deeds of ancestral figures. An illustration of this can be seen in Washington, DC, which has striking ceremonial architecture. Here colossal edifices house awe-inspiring images of such national ancestors as Lincoln and Jefferson; the overwhelming scale of the statues in their temple-like buildings embodies the immensity of their meaning for the nation—these are monumental figures, in both the precise and the metaphorical senses. The materials with which we surround ourselves can and do affect us. As Winston Churchill once observed, first we build the buildings and then they build us.

The permanence of stone can be used to express concepts of eternity in contrast to life’s temporality, as seen in ancient Egypt, ancient China, and many other civilizations. The sixth-century BC sage Lao Tzu expressed the concept clearly in
Tao Te Ching
:

A man is supple and weak when living, but hard and stiff when dead. Grass and trees are pliant and fragile when living, but dried and shriveled when dead. Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death; the supple and the weak are the comrades of life.

Even earlier, from the eighth century BC, we have a written reference to the souls of the dead being set in stone:
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Archaeologists working in southeastern Turkey in 2008 found a stele—a carved and inscribed standing stone—commemorating the death of a man named Kuttamuwa. This is thought to be the first written reference to the soul, and the inscription also includes the words “my soul that is in this stele.”

In our article Ramil and I pointed out that this association of stone with the eternal was neither shared just between contemporary
Madagascar and prehistoric Britain, nor an innate human universal found in all times and all cultures. Our cultural metaphors change as our surroundings change: Today we commonly draw upon technology to provide metaphors—comparing the human brain with a computer, for instance—but such analogy was simply unavailable to any earlier culture. Stone has no inherent meaning that identifies it with the eternal, the dead or the ancestors. Instead, its meanings are always historically contingent and subject to change according to social context. Even so, the cultural association of stone with permanence, and perishable materials with transience, seems to have been a commonly followed strategy in many different times and places, drawing on some of the most basic metaphors of human life and death.

In prehistoric societies working with stone and wood, these material properties of permanence and perishability would have been self-evident. But of course, the meanings ascribed to the materials cannot be assumed to be the same as ours. I wondered how one could find evidence that stone and wood incorporated meanings that invoked permanence and transience, or life and death, for the people who built Stonehenge.

Our idea that Stonehenge was built as a place of the ancestors was not entirely new. In the late nineteenth century, two of the finest archaeological minds of the time had come to similar conclusions. In 1880, William Flinders Petrie, later the greatest Egyptologist of his era, declared Stonehenge to be more monumental and sepulchral than religious or astronomical.
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Five years later, Arthur Evans, the excavator of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, wrote that Stonehenge was built to honor the departed ancestors of a whole prehistoric tribe.
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In 1957, the prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe wrote in the sixth edition of his masterwork,
The Dawn of European Civilization
, that Stonehenge was built as a monument to the establishment of peace and unity. These interpretations had, however, been forgotten or ignored by most archaeologists.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, similar ideas began to resurface. In 1987, in his book
The Stonehenge People
, Aubrey Burl wrote that Stonehenge was a house of the dead.
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Ten years later, archaeologists Barbara Bender, Alasdair Whittle, and Josh Pollard were all putting new ideas into print
about the importance of the Stonehenge builders deliberately having chosen stone to signify permanence.
¹¹

As a break from thinking about Stonehenge, I took Ramilisonina to my other research area, in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. Even in summer the rain and wind can be extreme and, that February, it was predictably stormy. Although he admired the farming lifestyle, accompanied by all the modern conveniences that are still lacking in most of Madagascar, Ramilisonina found South Uist appallingly cold and wet. As a storm blew in from the Atlantic and threatened to rip the roof off our rented caravan, he was convinced that he was about to die and would soon be joining his ancestors.

Four months later our paper was published in the academic journal
Antiquity
and caused a bit of a storm of its own. Some scholars thought it was just the kind of fresh thinking needed to explain Stonehenge and its surrounding monuments. Others thought it was just terrible. (One postgraduate student even asked whether I’d had a particularly bad day when I wrote it.) There were those who didn’t like the use of analogy—arguing that Neolithic Britain was a unique society so any comparison was inadequate. Others still said the article was mechanistic and structuralist—that binary oppositions (such as stone:wood) were too simplistic to explain the complex actions and events surrounding Stonehenge’s construction and use.
¹²

We wrote a reply, setting out predictions of what archaeologists should find in the Stonehenge landscape if the theory were valid, and where to look.
¹³
If the theory was on the right track, we said, the timber circles at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge should be associated with a “domain of the living.” The burials at Stonehenge should be part of a “domain of the ancestors,” not just a fleeting and temporary moment of use of the site as a cemetery. If we were right about the role of the River Avon in linking two parts of a ritual landscape, there should also be the remains of an avenue leading from Durrington Walls to the Avon, in the same way that the Stonehenge Avenue leads from the Avon to the stone circle.

The debate went round and round, and it was all about theory. For some academics, what mattered was theoretical correctness—structuralism had been fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s but had been replaced by post-modernism. Others felt that archaeology simply
couldn’t answer such questions. No one seemed particularly interested in going out and collecting new evidence to see if our idea could be challenged and rejected. All any of us had to work with were some poorly recorded data from old excavations by dead archaeologists. Trial by theory was not a satisfactory resolution—someone needed to get out there and find out whether our predictions had any reality on the ground. If the ideas didn’t hold up, then the theory was flawed and we could all move on, and try some different explanation of what Stonehenge is all about.

It often surprises people to learn just how little archaeological investigation has been done at and around Stonehenge. Whenever a new discovery is made there’s general amazement that there is anything left to find. Yet the truth is that most of Stonehenge and the land around it have never been investigated. Even the twentieth-century digs within Stonehenge itself explored only half of it. There are also problems with the records of these previous excavations.

Despite the shortcomings of our knowledge about Stonehenge, however, we know a lot about the people who lived in Britain at the time that it was built. They were farmers who lived off crops (such as wheat and barley) and domestic animals (pigs, cows, and sheep) as well as gathering and hunting wild foods. They used clay pots for cooking and storing their food, but they roasted meat as well as boiling it. Their diet may have been predominantly vegetarian and dairy-based, interspersed with special occasions when animals were slaughtered and eaten. Judging by finds from elsewhere in Europe, their clothing was made of leather, fur, and vegetable fibers, such as flax (used to make linen).
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The Neolithic people of Britain reared sheep but we have no evidence that they had yet invented spinning or weaving of wool. Nor is there any evidence that they had invented the wheel. Horses, too, may well have been unknown; although horses were being used for riding in eastern Europe and the steppes of central Asia, it seems that they had not yet been brought across the Channel.

Stonehenge was built at the end of the Stone Age, so most of the people’s tools were made of flint—arrowheads, scrapers for cleaning hides, strike-a-lights for making fire, and a tool set of other specialized awls, burins, knives, and saws. Their axes were made of flint or of igneous rock, polished and then hafted on to remarkably modern-looking ax
handles. By 2500 BC, though, the first metal tools (copper axes) were beginning to appear in northwest Europe. Some may have been brought to Britain and Ireland or even made here; there are stray finds of early types of copper ax, but these cannot be closely dated. It also seems likely that the earliest copper tools would have been too valuable to put into the ground for archaeologists to find—and they had the advantage over flint axes in being recyclable. We have fewer remains of perishable organic equipment but we do know that people used birch-bark containers, cord made from sinews, rope made from linden bast (fibers) or from honeysuckle, wicker baskets and leather bags, arrow quivers and belt pouches.

Neolithic people seem not to have lived in villages, except in a few special areas, such as the islands of Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland. Across most of Britain, their dwellings were single farmsteads or hamlets. Before about 3000 BC, a typical farm might have consisted of a rectangular house, normally around 12 meters long and 5 meters wide. Some rectangular houses were rather larger and can be called “halls” but no one knows if these were domestic dwellings or community buildings. After 3000 BC, house forms adopted a square plan of about 5 meters across. Remains of Neolithic houses are difficult to find because they were usually made of wood and the shallow holes in which their posts were set have only rarely survived later plowing. Nonetheless, archaeologists are fairly certain that the limited spreads of worked flints found in plowed fields derive from hamlet-sized settlements.

This apparently isolated pattern of living contrasts with what we know of Neolithic gathering places, where people assembled periodically in large numbers. During the fourth millennium BC, the building of large, communal tombs required the collective efforts of many families coming together. Even larger numbers congregated at causewayed enclosures, a type of gathering place that was especially popular in the thirty-seventh century BC. Later on, after 3600 BC, the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain built other large monuments that required many hands, a labor force no doubt drawn from farmsteads scattered over wide areas. Archaeologists often talk of mobility among these populations—meaning that they moved seasonally from place to place with their animals rather than living all year round in one spot. The early farmers of Britain appear to have been
more similar in these terms to their hunter-gatherer ancestors than to the early farmers of mainland Europe—who were much more sedentary, living in large longhouses and occupying the same plot of land for centuries.