Monday 21 February 2022

An explanation of the word "Sarsen"



In the Addenda and Notes to " Abury Illustrated," the following is given as an explanation of the word "Sarsen": " The term Sarsen, or Saresyn, was applied by the Anglo-Saxons, simply in the sense of Pagan, to the stones which they found scattered about the Wiltshire Downs. As all the principal specimens of these mysterious blocks were perceived to be congregated into temples popu- larly attributed to heathen worship, it naturally came to pass that the entire formation acquired the distinctive appellation of Sarsen or Pagan stones. The same epithet of ' Saresyn ' the Saxons also applied to their invaders the Danes or Northmen, who, on their coming into this country, were universally pagan. Thus Robert Ricart (quoted in Roberts' History of Lyme) says, ' Duke Rollo Le Fort was a Saresyn come out of Denmark into France ; ' and a spot in Guernsey is still designated by the same term from having constituted the temporary stronghold of certain Norman freebooters." — Waylen's History of Marlborough, p. 529.
The following is from Mr. Henry Lawes Long's ' ' Survey of the Early Geography of Western Europe : " " In addition to the suggestion advanced that our word Sarsen, as applied to the Druid sandstone, is, in fact, a corruption of Saracen, I may add that Sarrasin is the name commonly given on the Continent to ancient objects whether of Celtic or Roman construction, thereby inferring a period anterior to any remains of Christian origin. Roman denarii, which in the north of France still occasionally are current as sous, bear the name of Sarrnsins. The Roman bridge near Aosta is called the Pont de Sarrasins." And I may add the following extract from the " Journal de I'Architecture," (of Brussels,) 4"". annee, p. 84 : " Les traditions locales attribuent la con- struction des chaussees romaines aux Sarrasins. Les mines, les tuiles antiques, les poteries, les medailles, etc., que Ton trouve chaque jour, ne sont connus, comme on salt, que sous les noms de Masures, de Vahes, de JiJonnaies, ou de puits des Sarrasins, Cette denomination remonte evidemment aux temps des Croisades, lorsque les esprits etaient remplis du nom des infideles. Du reste, les armees et les populations qui revenaient de Terre-Sainte, en suivant les chaussees romaines, n'auront pas peu contribue a repandre aux environs I'epithete injurieuse de Sarrasin et de payen, dans laquelle ils auront confondu les Romaines si, comme il est probable, un faible souvenir de ce grand peuple vivait encore a cette epoque dans le souvenir de nos peres." Mr. Long quotes the following from Col. Symonds's Diary, which his cousin, Mr. C. E. Long, edited for the Camden Society: " 12"' Nov. 1644, Tuesday, though a miserable wett windy day, the army moved over the playnes to Marlingsborough, where the King lay at the Lord Seymour's howse, the troopes to Fyfield, two myles distant, a so full of a grey pibble stone of great bigness as is not usually seene ; they breake them, and build their howses of them and walls, laying mosse betweene, the inhabaitants calling them Saracen's stones, and in this parish a myle and halfe in length, they lye so thick as you may goe upon them all the way. They call that place the Grey -weathers, because a far-off they looke like a flock of sheep”.


From Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine Vol XVI 1876 pp.68-75

https://archive.org/details/wiltshirearchaeo16arch

I will add the old farmworkers I grew up pronounced them Saracen Stones. I note also that some of the young of the Pewsey Vale still pronounce Saracen as Sarsen: My daughter for instance:



Update: It has been pointed out by Brian Edwards that "In an experiment in 1986 Kennet Valley locals that spoke with the Wiltshire dialect were recorded saying King's Hill which when spoken translated to "King Zil", Saracen which translated to "saracen" so the same, but Saxon translated to "sarsen". Subsequently, when asked to say sarsen, the tapes reveal what distinctly sounds like Saxon."

Dialect in Wiltshire: And Its Historical, Topographical and Natural Science Contexts by Malcolm Jones, Patrick Dillon Wiltshire County Council, Library & Museum Service, 1987 reproduces from M Wakelin's English Dialects: an introduction 1977 a map that shows the boundaries of the South Western Dialect as defined by the voicing of initial fricatives in the 1950s, ie saying Varmer or Farmer.

It is noticeable that the Kennet valley between Avebury and Marlborough is close to the boundary and lay just outside the South-western dialect area. I believe the dialect area had shrunk since Victorian times, and continues to do so.



Click to enlarge

And from 1903:




Reposted from Nov 2017 in response to being referenced in Mike Pitt's How to Build Stonehenge.

Wednesday 9 February 2022

Temporal Racism - Not just a Stonehenge problem

ACADEMIA Letters

Beforeigners, Thor Heyerdahl, and Ludwig Gumplowicz:

The concept of timesism, temporal racism, or acrochronism

Eirik Stokke, University of Oslo


Das unheilvollste aber aller dieser Gespenster, das den Gang der Menschheit behindert, das wie ein Bleigewicht an deren Sohlen sich hängt, ist der Akrochronismus (möge das Wort mir verziehen werden), das ist der unselige Wahn jedes Zeitalters, dass es das „höchste“ sei. Wir glauben fest daran, dass unsere Zeit die Zeit der „grössten Fortschritte, der grössten Civilisation, der grössten Humanität“ sei und das sie weit hinter uns liegen die Zeiten „der Wildheit“ und der „Barbarei“. Wir nennen unsere Zeit das „Zeitalter der Vernunft“ und hinter uns wähnen wir die Zeiten „des Glaubens und Aberglaubens“.

Ludwig Gumplowicz (1895), Sociale sinnestäuschungen, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (pp. 1–11), 1

As he laid there [atop the altar stone], drifting off in thoughts about the engineering skills of the masterminds who built Stonehenge, and how wonderful life must have been 4,000 years ago compared to the abominable present, the starry sky was suddenly distorted by the pale beams from gigantic searchlights. A dim, dispiriting light came soaring overhead, followed by a buzzing hum as from an old Ford engine. This was the wonder of current times, the pinnacle of German science. The V-1 flying bomb made Stonehenge’s mossy “slaughter stone” an amateur in the art of killing. Speaking as if he was Jacob the patriarch, and the altar stone was the stone of Bethel, he tells his wife how the irremediable problem with the world is that people are dumb and self-centred. This idiocy and in-group mentality results not only in industrial bloodshed and ethnocentrism, but in the superiority complex of modern civilisation over those past. Praising the genius of the Stonehengers, he ridicules modern man’s proneness to deem his predecessors a moronic bunch.

The author (2021), Famous explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s sleepover at Stonehenge in 1944, Amesbury: Newsletter of the Amesbury Society, 110 (pp. 1–6), 6

The second season of the critically praised, Norwegian TV series Beforeigners[1] was recently launched on HBO Max. Essentially a satire of racism and xenophobia in presentday society, Beforeigners (a play on the words ‘before’ and ‘foreigner’) explores the ‘what ifs’ when Stone Agers, Vikings and 19th Century people unwittingly start appearing through time warp holes, finding themselves trapped in the future. An extract of entries from the dictionary[2] of terms and concepts made exclusively for the series, provides an intriguing insight into the universe that is Beforeigners:

beef breath and dinosaur Pejoratives used by contemporaries. beforeigner or timeigrant Individual who has time warped from the past. cont Timeigrant pejorative. Acronym of ‘contemporary’. Jurassic Park Derogatory term for a timeigrant reception centre.

nowsplaining To explain something to a timeigrant, typically by a contemporary, in a condescending, belittling manner.

sneak-norseification Xenophobic, timesist term.

temporal relativism Belief that no temporal culture or belonging is superior to any other.

timesism Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own temporal affiliation.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the ethos of Beforeigners echoes that of Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002), arguably the most famous Norwegian of all time. What the series would come to label timesism, Heyerdahl referred to as ‘temporal racism’.[3] His controversial belief in socalled primitive man’s ability to traverse world oceans was the leading motif behind the world famous Kon-Tiki, Ra and Tigris expeditions. ‘We of European extraction’, he wrote following the successful Atlantic crossing by the multi-ethnic crew of the reed boat Ra II, ‘are surely not so blindfolded by our own history that we consider ourselves a line of supermen, able to do four centuries ago what the great civilizations of Asia Minor and North Africa could not have done earlier’.[4] He would stress how conceptions like the Maya calendar and the Sermon on the Mount were indicative of human ingenuity in early and pre-European history,[5] and upon assessing Rapanui megalithic construction he pointed out that ‘[t]he technique was admirable but in no way mysterious if we cease to underestimate the intelligence of men in ancient times’.[6]

In an unfinished 1970-ish manuscript[7] housed at the Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo, listed as ‘Children of Adam’ (hinting at the unity of mankind) after the heading of one of its chapters, a dichotomy is made between the sun disk and the Roman cross as visual representatives of the highest being. Asking which one is more barbaric, he urges the reader to contemplate the often-bigoted attitude towards the ancients’ intellectual capacities. To judge from an old Incan legend, the rationale continues, the Andeans of long ago venerated the ocean as consort of the sun and mother of all life. Hence, at a time when European scholars held the story of Genesis to be true, their unknown peers in South America, had, to a certain extent, a pre-scientific understanding of what modern-day biologists know as a variant of the Oparin-Haldane[8] Hypothesis, which posits that solar energy gave rise to organic life in a prebiotic soup.

Most compelling, however, are the passages from what I elsewhere[9] have dubbed the ‘Stonehenge letter’. Penned by the future celebrity to his then wife, Liv, in August 1944, telling of a visit to Stonehenge the day before whilst on leave from a nearby army base, it lends credence to the sincerity of his later thoughts and writings. Stirring her to think, as he reflects on the enigma of what he deemed to be an age-old sun temple, if a better hypostasis of the godhood than the sun can possibly be perceived, he makes the arresting remark: ‘Place the sun and any Pius in all his golden splendour side-by-side, and try and tell me that they were heathens any more than we are in 1944!’[10] Yet, his temporal relativism, if you will, is never as sharp and to the point as when he lets his quasi-religious, philosophical musings culminate in a spirited lecture against all sorts of egotism:

We, conceited mediocres, think that only we exist, that only our time period matters. We are like horses with blinders. Man’s wisdom is pathetic and miserably egocentric. It has always been thus, between individuals, between nations, between races, between eras. It falls quite naturally to the narrow-minded human brain to hold in the highest esteem all that includes ‘I’, ‘we’ and so on. Any other way is incomprehensible, and nor has it been given any earthly being to comprehend the totality of life. One is only able to understand a fraction of a fraction at a time. And contemporary man is so busy running his own complicated messy nest, that he neither has the time to live nor to ponder, let alone stop for a minute and look at that which is outside the ‘we’.[11]

By statements such as these, Heyerdahl’s temporal anti-racism is equivalent not just to the concept of temporal relativism, but fascinatingly in compliance with what the Jewish Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) coined ‘acrochronism’ (see epigraph).[12] Acrochronism (from Greek akros, ‘extreme’ + chronos, ‘time’) has been described as ‘chronocentric’egotism, analogoustotheethnocentricegotismofnationalism.[13]Andindeed, Gumplowicz initially treated temporal bias as a form of ethnocentrism.[14] The excerpt above shows that Heyerdahl did the same. Certain critics, however, have claimed racism to be at the very heart of Heyerdahl’s alleged hyperdiffusionist expedition theories, professing that they discredit indigenous peoples’ civilisational achievements in lieu of a fictitious ‘race’ of redhaired, white culturers.[15] A recent paper lists me among scholars, who, according to the authors, ‘have repeatedly rejected the importance of acknowledging the scientific racism inherent in Heyerdahl’s research’.[16] Space does not allow me to adequately address the topic, except bringing to critics’ attention the possibility of Heyerdahl’s research being better understood if assessed in light of his self-acclaimed acrochronistic position. Heyerdahl based his migration theories to a large extent on native lore. To question the authenticity of semihistorical, indigenous traditions such as, for instance, white gods and culture heroes, ‘clearly reflects’, he writes at one point, ‘the European underestimation of the intellect and historicalmindedness’[17] of those people. In fact, the argument made is that the critic who dismisses such legends, whether as imperialistic inventions or mere fables of irrational minds, misunderstood cases of malnutrition[18] or albinism, and what have you, runs the risk of nowsplaining.

References

[1]      Bjørnstad, A., Lien, J., Mar, F. H., Matthews, S., Skodvin, E., Wikander, C. (Executive Producers). (2021–2022). Beforeigners [TV series]. Rubicon TV; HBO Max.

[2]      The entries here are gathered from the official dictionary on HBO Nordic’s Beforeigners website (see https://beforeigners.com/dictionary/), albeit the wordage is my own. Celine Ryel, PR Manager Norway at HBO Europe, has kindly provided me with additional material, whilst André Nilsson Dannevig, linguistic consultant for the TV series, has patiently answered any questions that I had.

[3]      Wærhaug, S. (1999, November 13). – Tidsmessig rasisme. Verdens Gang (VG), p. 63.

[4]      Heyerdahl, T. (1971). Isolationist or diffusionist? In G. Ashe, T. Heyerdahl, H. Ingstad, J. V. Luce, B. J. Meggers & B. L. Wallace [Authors], The quest for America (pp. 115–154). Pall Mall Press, 130.

[5]      E.g., Hansson, P. (1972). Den ukjente Thor Heyerdahl, part 1, Vi Menn, 32 (pp. 13–16, 26), 16; cf. Evensberget, S. (1994). Thor Heyerdahl: The explorer (P. Shaw & R. Waaler, Trans.). J. M. Stenersen. (Original work published 1994), p. 203.

[6]      Heyerdahl, T. (1950). The Kon-Tiki expedition: By raft across the South Seas (F. H. Lyon, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1948), p. 138.

[7]      Heyerdahl, T. (No date). Children of Adam [Unpublished manuscript]. Thor Heyerdahl archives (NO KTM 1983-100-0001-023, box 058, folder 1, chapter II). Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo, Norway.

[8]      Referringto theSovietbiochemistAlexanderOparinand theBritish evolutionarybiologist J. B. S. Haldane.

[9]      Stokke, E. (2021). The Stonehenge letter: Reconstructing a preliminary stage of the KonTikiexpeditiontheory, WiltshireArchaeologicalandNaturalHistoryMagazine(WANHM), 114, pp. 222–231.

[10]  Heyerdahl, T. (1944, August 27). [Letter to Liv Heyerdahl]. Thor Heyerdahl archives (box 13.3, folder 2, p. vi). Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo, Norway. All translations from Norwegian are my own.

[11]  Ibid., pp. viii–ix.

[12]  Gumplowicz, L. Op. cit.; cf. Bizumic, B. (2019). Ethnocentrism: Integrated perspectives. Routledge, p. 6.

[13]  Reclus, E. (2013). The modern state. In J. Clark & C. Martin (Eds. and Trans.), Anarchy, geography, modernity: Selected writings of Elisée Reclus (pp. 186–201). PM Press. (Original work published 1905), 188.

[14]  Gumplowicz, L. (1883). Der rassenkampf: Sociologische untersuchungen. Wagner’sche Univ.-Buchhandlung, pp. 352–353; cf. Bizumic, B. Op. cit., p. 14.

[15]  E.g., Andersson, A. (2018). A hero for the Atomic Age: Thor Heyerdahl and the KonTiki expedition. Peter Lang. (Originally published 2010); Engevold, P. I. H. (2019). Thor Heyerdahl og jakten på Atlantis. Humanist; Holton, G. E. L. (2004). Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki theory and the denial of the indigenous past, Anthropological Forum, 14 (pp. 164–181). https://doi.org/10.1080/0066467042000238976; Magelssen, S. (2016). Whiteskinned gods: Thor Heyerdahl, the Kon-Tiki Museum, and the racial theory of Polynesian origins, Drama Review, 60 (pp. 25–49). https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00522; Melander, V. (2020). The coming of the white bearded men: The origin and development of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki theory [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. Australian National University.

[16]  Rasmussen, J. M. & Viestad, V. M. (2021). Curation by the living dead: Exploring the legacy of Norwegian museums’ colonial collections, Critical Arts (pp. 1–21), 14. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2021.1979064

[17]  Heyerdahl, T. (1978). The bearded gods before Columbus. In Early man and the ocean (pp. 96–123). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1971), 117.

[18]  In rare instances malnutrition can cause dark hair to turn reddish.


Academia Letters, January 2022                ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Eirik Stokke, stokke.eirik@gmail.com

Citation: Stokke, E. (2022). Beforeigners, Thor Heyerdahl, and Ludwig Gumplowicz: The concept of timesism, temporal racism, or acrochronism. Academia Letters, Article 4644. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4644.

No changes made.

Sunday 6 February 2022

Archaeology and legend: investigating Stonehenge - Mike Parker Pearson

Archaeology and legend: investigating Stonehenge

RESEARCH-ARTICLE

 1 , 

Archaeology International

UCL Press

NeolithicStonehengestone circlesBritainlegend


Abstract

Stonehenge is one of the world’s most famous prehistoric monuments, built 4,500–5,000 years ago during the Neolithic in a time long before written history. The recent dramatic discovery of a dismantled stone circle near the sources of some of Stonehenge’s stones in southwest Wales raises the fascinating possibility that an ancient story about Stonehenge’s origin, written down 900 years ago and subsequently dismissed as pure invention, might contain a grain of truth. This article explores the pros and cons of comparing the legend with the archaeological evidence.

Main article text

Introduction

Myths and legends have always inspired archaeologists and adventurers: Homer’s Iliad in the search for Troy; the legend of King Arthur in the search for Camelot; or the Greek myth of Minos and the Minotaur’s labyrinth in the discovery of Knossos. Often the myth proves elusive, as in the fruitless search for Eldorado’s city of gold or the quest for Prester John’s fabled lost kingdom. The complex relationship between archaeology and ancient legend is fraught with difficulties. What legends, if any, may be considered true? Might some contain only a kernel of truth, fortuitously resistant to the erosive sands of time? Or are they merely the vestiges of ever-changing stories from a bygone age that were intended only to entertain and moralise, and not to bear witness?

One of the earliest recorded tales of ancient Britain relates to the building of Stonehenge. Written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in about 1136, just six years or so after the very first documentary reference to Stonehenge by Henry of Huntingdon, it is a lengthy account of how Merlin the wizard organised, on behalf of Aurelius Ambrosius, the building of this great monument – supposedly a memorial for the fallen – by taking megalithic stones from a previous stone circle in Ireland. This story is found in Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, also known as De Gestis Britonum [On the Deeds of the Britons]), written by a cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Galfridus Monemutensis). Although its title seemingly promised an accurate presentation of facts, it can best be described as a pseudo-history in which a few reliable historical facts are sprinkled among a morass of uncorroborated fictions and false claims (Wright 2007). Geoffrey’s work may be better considered as a political statement to demonstrate the unity of Britain rather than an objective historical account (Flood 2016).

Although Geoffrey drew on a number of identifiable historical sources, including Gildas, Bede and supposedly ‘a very old book in the British tongue’, much of his writing is thought to have come from his own imagination. As early as 1190, William of Newburgh was claiming that most of Geoffrey’s history relating to the time of Merlin and King Arthur was made up, partly by Geoffrey and partly by others (Chippindale 1994, 24). The passages that relate to Stonehenge (which he names as Stanheng; Wright 2007, 180) have no antecedent in any earlier writings, so the account’s lack of historical pedigree places it in the category of ‘fake’ history unless proved otherwise. During the twentieth century scholars mused on whether any aspect of it might be true, with varying degrees of confidence in its possible veracity (Hibbard Loomis 1930Piggott 1941). So why should we pay any attention to this story? What could it contain that might possibly relate to the purpose of Stonehenge? But, first, what does Geoffrey’s story actually say about Stonehenge?

The legend of Merlin and Stonehenge

According to Geoffrey, Stonehenge’s origins lay in a time of conflict between Britons and invading Saxons in the aftermath of Roman rule. During a parlay at ‘Ambrius’ (Amesbury, close to the site of Stonehenge), 460 British aristocrats are treacherously murdered by King Hengist and his Saxons, carrying daggers under their clothes. Sometime later, the British king Aurelius Ambrosius replaces the previous king, Vortigern, unites the armies of Britain and defeats the Saxons. Wanting an everlasting memorial to the Britons killed at Mount Ambrius, he calls upon Merlin to devise a suitable monument. Merlin decrees that it should be built out of Chorea Gigantum (the Dance of the Giants/Giants’ Dance/Giants’ Ring), a circle of enormous stones on the mountain of Killaraus in Ireland. ‘If you set them up in the same pattern around the burial-place, they will stand forever’ (Wright 2007, 172). According to Merlin, they had been erected by giants who used them for their magical and medicinal properties; whenever they fell sick, they set up baths among them, washed the stones and poured the water in the baths to be cured. It is these mystical stones that Merlin wants for his design of Stonehenge.

Merlin and the king’s brother Uther Pendragon take 15,000 men to Ireland, defeat the Irish army and dismantle the stones, shipping them back to England and setting them up around the Britons’ burial place at Mount Ambrius in the same manner as they had been in Ireland. As well as memorialising the British fallen, Stonehenge becomes the burial place first of Aurelius Ambrosius and then Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur, the heroic war-leader of legend. The final royal burial at Stonehenge is Arthur’s successor Constantinus, supposedly around 542 ce.

There are clearly major impediments to assuming that this story is in any way true. Stonehenge was built in the third millennium bce and not in the 400s ce when Britons fought Saxons. Nor was there an ancient race of giants. And nor do Stonehenge’s stones come from Ireland. Yet there are niggling questions that hint at possible grains of truth buried in this medieval legend. Among the remaining stones of Stonehenge are 43 ‘bluestones’ which derive from the Preseli hills of southwest Wales, 275 km from Salisbury Plain (Figure 1). Might these somehow relate to the legend’s account of a distant origin in Ireland?

Figure 1

Stonehenge’s bluestones (see inset) were brought from the Preseli hills, 275 km from Stonehenge. The sea and coastal routes now seem unlikely with the discovery that one of the stones (the Altar Stone) probably comes from an inland part of South Wales, along the postulated overland route (Source: Irene De Luis)

Of the hundreds of Britain’s stone circles, only Stonehenge is composed of stones that have travelled a great distance. This fact could not have been known before the advent of the modern science of geology. Is it actually possible that knowledge of its distant sources was passed down by word of mouth over some 4,000 years from prehistory to Geoffrey’s time? The question is even more pertinent when we consider that Pembrokeshire, the region of southwest Wales from which the bluestones derive, may well have been considered in the post-Roman and early medieval period to be part of Ireland. Irish kings were believed to have ruled this region in the centuries before Geoffrey’s time, up to the end of the eleventh century (Davies 1982, 87–8, 95; 1990, 39), the area having been settled by the Irish probably from 400 ce onwards (Davies 1982, 88). Yet this attribution is problematic; within a few pages of his story of the Dance of the Giants, Geoffrey talks of St David’s in Pembrokeshire as being in Wales and not Ireland.

While Geoffrey’s identification of Ireland as the source of Stonehenge’s stones may be broadly compatible with the bluestones’ origin in the Preseli hills of Pembrokeshire, there is no evidence for the existence anywhere of a Mount Killaraus (later referred to in William Caxton’s Chronicle of England of 1480 as ‘the mounte of kylyon’; Chippindale 1994, 25). So can the archaeological evidence help us further?

Archaeological evidence

Although antiquarians and archaeologists have studied Stonehenge for over 300 years, it is only recently that much attention has been paid to Geoffrey’s story. In 2008 Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright carried out an excavation at Stonehenge, developing their theory that Stonehenge had been built as a place of healing, drawing on one particular aspect of the tale (Darvill and Wainwright 2009, 16–18). They considered the bluestones to have arrived at Stonehenge around or after 2500 bce, linking their presence with nearby burials of people with unusual injuries (Darvill 2007). One of these was the Amesbury Archer, a Beaker migrant of 2480–2280 bce from continental Europe with a damaged knee (Fitzpatrick 2011). Two others were Early Bronze Age people (c. 2000 bce) whose skulls had been trepanned – suffering holes cut into their skulls – perhaps as a cure for illness.

The healing theory is not without problems. Excavations at Stonehenge in 2008 by a second team, the Stonehenge Riverside Project, produced evidence that the bluestones had been erected much earlier, during its first stage in 2995–2900 bce (Parker Pearson et al. 2020, 168, 536), and that the monument had been used as a large cemetery from this time onwards for the next 300–600 years (Parker Pearson et al. 20092020, 539–43; Willis et al. 2016). The burials with unusual injuries were most likely 600–1,000 years later than the arrival of the supposed ‘healing’ bluestones, which had in fact adorned a burial ground – a place of the dead rather than a place of healing. More appropriately, the motive of healing and curing fits well with the medieval ecclesiastical mindset. For example, just a few pages later in his History, Geoffrey twice refers to healing waters in contexts other than the Giants’ Dance (Wright 2007, 115, 116). The claim that water splashed on stones of the Giants’ Dance had healing properties is more likely to be an anachronistic fancy in the same way as the erroneous post-Roman date of Stonehenge.

Darvill and Wainwright had been searching since 2002 for the source of the bluestones in the Preseli hills of southwest Wales, the area identified by the geologist Herbert Thomas a century earlier (Thomas 1923). ‘Bluestone’ is a catch-all term for a variety of Stonehenge’s monoliths, used to distinguish these small pillars from sarsens – the huge silcrete blocks that comprise the majority of Stonehenge’s stones and most likely derive from West Woods, 24 km to the north (Parker Pearson 2016Nash et al. 2020). Bluestones are actually a variety of rock types: spotted dolerite, unspotted dolerite, rhyolite, volcanics and sandstone. All derive from on and around the Preseli hills except for the sandstone Altar Stone, which comes from an as yet unidentified source (Ixer and Bevins 2011Bevins et al. 20132020Ixer et al. 2017).

In 2011 geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer published their identification of an impressive rocky outcrop at Craig Rhos-y-felin, just north of the Preseli hills, as a source of one of the types of rhyolite at Stonehenge (Figure 2). Two years later their geochemical analysis sourced spotted and unspotted dolerite stones from Stonehenge to two less spectacular outcrops in these hills, one at Carn Goedog and the other at Cerrigmarchogion (Bevins, Ixer and Pearce 2013). This was something of a bombshell because, ever since Thomas’s time, archaeologists had been focused on a different location, the impressive outcrop of Carn Menyn or Carn Meini (see, for example, Atkinson 1956, 36–9); yet none of Stonehenge’s bluestones in the new analysis matched the geology of this more prominent outcrop.

Figure 2

Location of the dismantled stone circle of Waun Mawn (red-ringed circle) as well as the bluestone sources of Carn Goedog (spotted dolerite), Craig Rhos-y-felin (rhyolite) and Cerrigmarchogion (unspotted dolerite). The locations of the Neolithic causewayed enclosure of Banc Du and palisaded enclosure of Dryslwyn (black-ringed circles), and Early Neolithic portal tombs (black squares) are also shown (Source: Mike Parker Pearson)

Armed with the geologists’ dramatic discoveries, the Stonehenge Riverside team began investigations of the rhyolite and spotted dolerite sources at Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog respectively. For the next five years, as part of the Stones of Stonehenge project, we carried out excavations at the two outcrops. Both sites produced evidence of human activity, from the Mesolithic (8000–4000 bce) to the medieval period, but especially from the Neolithic period in the centuries before and around 3000 bce, just before the installation of bluestones at Stonehenge. This Neolithic evidence included stone tools and quarrying installations – gaps in the rock where pillars had been removed, artificial stone platforms onto which monoliths had been lowered and a trackway leading from the foot of one of the loading platforms (Parker Pearson et al. 2016Parker Pearson, Bevins et al. 2015Parker Pearson, Pollard et al. 20172019).

The aims of the Stones of Stonehenge project were to identify the bluestone quarries for Stonehenge and also to find out about the landscape context of these quarries. What was so special about the Preseli area in the Neolithic? It was already known that this region, including the valley of the River Nevern on the north side of the hills, was a focus for Early Neolithic settlement (4000–3400 bce), judging by the concentration of dolmens and enclosures (Lynch 1972Darvill and Wainwright 2016, 55–76). But what could be associated with the period of the bluestone quarries – the Middle Neolithic between 3400–3000 bce? And why was there seemingly little trace of any activity in the Late Neolithic (3000–2500 bce), the time of Stonehenge?

From 2012 onwards the Stones of Stonehenge project set out to explore the landscape around the bluestone quarries. With most of the agricultural land under permanent pasture, their survey methods included aerial photography, LiDAR (light detection and ranging), three-dimensional aerial photogrammetry and geophysics, coupled with excavation. Although numerous circular enclosures were identified as possible henges, all turned out to be sites of a much later date (Casswell, Comeau and Parker Pearson 2016Parker Pearson, Caswell and Welham 20172018). It seemed that the project had run out of road, and in 2017 the team members were ready to abandon the quest for Middle Neolithic sites. As a final move, we took a second look at a group of four standing stones on the hill of Waun Mawn, within 5 km of the bluestone quarries (Figure 3).

Figure 3

The arc of former standing stones at Waun Mawn during trial excavations in 2017, viewed from the east. Only one of them (third from the camera) is still standing. The stone in the foreground originally stood in a socket and formed one side of the solstice sunrise-oriented entrance of the former circle (Source: photograph by Adam Stanford)

Waun Mawn: a dismantled stone circle

We had investigated the standing stones of Waun Mawn in 2011, carrying out geophysical surveys around the stones to see if their curving arrangement was due to their being remnants of a mostly demolished stone circle. This had been the interpretation of archaeologists a hundred years before (RCAHMW 1925, 258–9), although later archaeologists, including W.F. Grimes, a director of the Institute of Archaeology, had been sceptical of this interpretation (Grimes 1963, 150; Burl 1976, 371). Disappointingly, our magnetometer and resistivity surveys yielded no trace of buried stoneholes to indicate that the arc of stones had originally formed part of a complete circle. It seemed that ‘Peter’ Grimes had been right to dismiss it.

With a last throw of the dice, we returned to Waun Mawn in 2017, this time with spades and shovels. Excavating beyond the ends of the arc, we uncovered two stoneholes that had once held standing stones, although the stones themselves were long gone. It was clear that the geophysical surveys in 2011 had not worked on the difficult terrain, so in 2018 we brought in teams of geophysicists who tried the full range of methods, including ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic induction. With no positive results from any of the methods, even where we knew there were stoneholes, it was now clear that the poor magnetic and conductive properties of the underlying glacial drift were contributing to this problem. Geophysical survey was not going to help us, and the only way forward was to try to find more stoneholes by excavation.

We returned to Waun Mawn in September 2021 with a team of staff, volunteers and students from UCL and the universities of Southampton and Bournemouth. In just three weeks of excavation by hand we discovered another four stoneholes, revealing that the surviving stones had indeed once been part of a stone circle 110 m in diameter, making it the third largest stone circle in Britain (Figure 4Parker Pearson et al. 2021). The stoneholes were not particularly deep, but each bore at its base the imprint of the standing stone that had formerly stood in it. Most also had packing stones – small stone blocks jammed into the ground to stabilise the standing stone – even though the monoliths that originally stood in these holes had been removed.

Figure 4

The excavation trenches (in black [2018] and red [2021]) at Waun Mawn, showing the locations of the four remaining standing stones (in purple), the additional stoneholes (in red), pits that never held stones (in green) and other features (in black). From the centre of the circle, the midsummer solstice sun rose within the entrance formed by Stoneholes 128 and 21 (Source: Chris Casswell and Kate Welham)

Two of the stoneholes were different to the others. These were both on the northeast side of the circle and had no packing stones. Beside one of them was one of the four surviving standing stones, now lying on its side; it had obviously once stood in this hole. What was most unusual about these two stoneholes was the direction of their axis. Instead of having their long sides facing inwards to the centre of the circle, they were perpendicular to it. We realised that this ‘gunsight’ arrangement identified them as opposite sides of an entrance into the circle. Measurements taken by archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles in 2019 revealed that the entrance faced towards the midsummer solstice sunset, similar to the famous orientation of Stonehenge (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Positions of Waun Mawn’s entrance stones as seen from the centre of the circle. The digitally generated profile shows the path of the rising summer solstice sun around 3300 bce (Source: Clive Ruggles)

A further surprise was our realisation that the diameter of Waun Mawn was the same as the diameter of the enclosing ditch around Stonehenge. As far as we know, no other Neolithic monument in Britain has this same diameter of 110 m (though several fall within the range of 13–100 m). This remarkable coincidence provides a further link between the two circles of Waun Mawn and Stonehenge. Yet the most important question to be answered about their relationship was whether the Waun Mawn circle dated to before Stonehenge (i.e. before 3000 bce) and whether its vanished standing stones had been removed by the time that bluestones were set up at Stonehenge (also probably around or slightly after 3000 bce). Could Waun Mawn have been the original Stonehenge, the Dance of the Giants?

Dating these events of construction and dismantling at Waun Mawn would not be as easy as it might sound. While archaeologists working on prehistory mostly rely on radiocarbon dating, the acidic soils of southwest Wales destroy materials containing carbon, such as bones, wood or antler, except for charcoal. Although common on settlement sites, charcoal is exceedingly sparse on ceremonial sites such as stone circles. Through systematic flotation and fine sieving of the fills of the stoneholes, we recovered a few very small pieces of charred wood. These presented further problems because such small pieces are liable to be either residual (incorporated into the fill of a stonehole having been deposited in the soil centuries or millennia earlier) or intrusive (moved downwards into the stonehole by worm action centuries or millennia later). How could we tell which charcoal pieces dated to the time of the circle’s construction and dismantling and which to before or after?

The way to answer these troubling questions was to employ a second method of dating alongside that of radiocarbon, which was carried out by Tim Kinnaird of the University of St Andrews. This method was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) profiling and dating, a technique which measures the energy remnant in quartz-grained sediment since it was last exposed to light and estimates the time which has passed since that moment. It is less precise than radiocarbon dating, producing a wide error margin of 10 per cent, which covers the best part of a millennium when dating sediments laid down in the Neolithic. We realised, however, that it could provide broad parameters for the circle’s dates of construction and dismantling.

Stone circles are difficult to date because of the general lack of suitable finds or dating materials. We are fortunate that Stonehenge is so well dated because of surviving antler tools and bones. Yet Britain’s largest stone circle, Avebury, remains undated. Like Stonehenge, some of Britain’s great stone circles date to the early third millennium bce – Calanais in the Outer Hebrides (Ashmore 2016) and the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney (Richards 2013, 90–118). Also in Orkney, the Stones of Stenness are dated to 3020–2890 bce (Schulting et al. 2010, 35–6). The small stone circle later covered by the passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey in the north of Wales is associated with cremation burials dating to 3500–3100 bce and 3310–2900 bce (Burrow 2010). Of closely comparable size to Waun Mawn, the circle of Long Meg and her Daughters in Cumbria, 172 km in diameter, is dated to 3340–3100 bce on hazel charcoal from one of its stoneholes (Archaeological Services Durham University 2016). In summary, we can currently date the earliest stone circles to the Middle Neolithic – between 3400 bce and 3000 bce – though they continued to be built throughout the Late Neolithic, with smaller circles constructed during the Copper Age and Bronze Age, continuing well after 2000 bce (Bradley and Nimura 2016).

The OSL dates from packing deposits in Waun Mawn’s stoneholes can be combined to produce a weighted probable date of construction of 3530±330 bce (3860–3200 bce). Sediments from the fills of the empty sockets provide a weighted probable date of dismantling before 2120±520 bce (2640–1600 bce). This latter date, of course, may be much later than the actual date of dismantling since it is derived from sediments that filled the voids left by the removed stones. While this removal is likely to have taken place in the Neolithic, we cannot say just when.

Thirty-one radiocarbon dates on charcoal from Waun Mawn’s stoneholes range from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age, although none fall within the Late Neolithic (3000–2500 bce) or Copper Age (2500–2200 bce). Only four coincide with the OSL dates for construction: 3670–3520 bce, 3650–3520 bce, 3500–3340 bce and 3340–3030 bce. The two dating methods together suggest that the Waun Mawn stone circle was constructed in 3400–3200 bce. The date of 3340–3030 bce is from charcoal within an emptied socket, so could provide a date for removal of the standing stone.

With further analysis ongoing to see if the dating of Waun Mawn can be refined, the current evidence reveals that Waun Mawn was left unfinished, abandoned in mid-construction, since holes were prepared for stones that they never held (see Figure 4). Of the standing stones that were put up, all but four were then dismantled, perhaps taken to Salisbury Plain to be erected in Stonehenge’s first stage which began in 3080–2950 bce (Parker Pearson et al. 2020, 164). There is a strong case that can be made for Stonehenge as a second-hand monument, constructed in its first stage out of bluestones that had graced Waun Mawn. Since the likely number of stones that once stood at Waun Mawn is unlikely to have numbered more than 15, based on the positions of stoneholes, it is most likely that other bluestones either came direct from the quarries or derived from other, as yet undiscovered, stone circles in the Preseli area.

The Dance of the Giants?

There is the possibility that Waun Mawn could be the site of the Dance of the Giants. Its elevated location at 331 m OD on a high hill within the Preselis could qualify as a ‘mountain’. The concordance of the stone circle’s diameter, comparable to Stonehenge’s Stage 1 enclosing ditch, echoes Geoffrey’s words: ‘erected … round the cemetery exactly as they had stood on Mount Killaraus in Ireland’. Yet other features do not coincide. Waun Mawn shows no sign of any ‘baths’ for collecting water among the stones; perhaps this section of the narrative was entirely invented to provide some justification for the medieval mind of why the stones were so important that they had to be moved such an extraordinary distance. At the very best, the legend may preserve only the fact that there was a stone circle in the far west dismantled and moved to Stonehenge, and that Stonehenge was a memorial to the dead as demonstrated by its use as a cemetery.

More can be said about the motivation behind the bluestones’ movement. The legend’s account of the stones being forcibly taken is contradicted by recent evidence of mobility among those buried at Stonehenge. Strontium isotope analysis of cremated bone can establish movement between geological zones by an individual in the last decades of their lifetime (during the continuous process of bone remodelling). Analysis of 25 cremated individuals from Stonehenge has revealed that at least ten lived beyond the chalk of Salisbury Plain, four on geology consistent with that of southwest Wales (Snoeck et al. 2018). Interestingly, these four women and men are among the first people to have been buried at Stonehenge (since the latest of them dates to 3020–2900 bce). Since Stonehenge’s burials are likely to number 150 or more, these 4 out of 25 can be extrapolated to represent perhaps around 30 people of this external origin buried there. Since bone remodels within a decade or so to absorb the strontium isotope ratios of the underlying geology, any incomers who died more than a decade after moving would not show up by this method. Taking this possibility into account, perhaps as many as half of the people buried at Stonehenge could have been incomers; the 4 out of 25 thus potentially represent an initial migration, followed by their descendants living locally on and around the chalklands of the Stonehenge area.

This pattern of movement among the people of Stonehenge suggests that some came with the bluestones, that the stones were brought by the Neolithic inhabitants of Preseli and not taken by the invading force of a Neolithic Uther Pendragon. Just like the healing explanation, the story of seizure of the stones may also be erroneous. A new avenue of investigation is the possibility that the paucity of evidence for Late Neolithic activity in Preseli may represent a real pattern of out-migration around 3000 bce.

Finally, one further aspect of the legend is of interest. The Neolithic people of Wales and western Britain can be differentiated from those of southeast England on the basis of both material culture (see, for example, Pioffet 2017) and genetic ancestry (Brace et al. 2019). This potential territorial separation between east and west, with Salisbury Plain in the borderland in between, echoes Geoffrey’s anachronistic conflict between Saxons of the east and Britons of the west, meeting at a place of parlay. Given Stonehenge’s location at a place that already had a tradition in the Neolithic of large-scale gatherings for feasting and monument building, its purpose may have been as a monument of unification (Childe 1957, 331; Gron et al. 2018Parker Pearson 20122019Parker Pearson, Pollard et al. 2015Parker Pearson et al. 2020). Its location between large-scale territorial groupings to the east and west may have enhanced its significance as a place of conflict resolution where groups from different regions could meet to resolve their differences. Perhaps Stonehenge really was erected in its first stage by ‘Britons’ (people in the west, as opposed to ‘Saxons’ – people of the east) to commemorate a disastrous and bloody parlay gone wrong.

The antipathy of resident Britons and incoming Saxons can also be read as another anachronistic reworking of a second prehistoric encounter, this time around 2500 bce, when the second stage of Stonehenge involved the erection of the great sarsens as a horseshoe of five trilithons surrounded by a circle of lintelled sarsens. This major rebuilding of Stonehenge, when it took the form that it largely has today, took place on the eve of the arrival of new practices from the Continent. Recent genetic analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that the people introducing new rites of inhumation burial accompanied by a pot and other grave goods – the so-called Beaker people – have genetic ancestries distinct from the Neolithic population of Britain (Olalde et al. 2018). Although the earliest Beaker burials date to 2450–2325 bce (Jay et al. 2019, 75), it is very possible that the first Beaker people arrived in Britain in earlier decades in a ‘contact’ scenario that has left few archaeological traces. It is just possible that the legend preserves a folk memory of this event, the outcome of which was to be as transformative of prehistoric society as the Saxons’ invasion was for early medieval England.

Conclusion: the longevity of oral tradition

The various concordances between legend and reality at Stonehenge might be entirely dismissed as no more than coincidence if we can be certain that oral traditions have little or no chance of lasting 4,000 years. An acceptable limit would seem to be 500 years in many cases (Parker Pearson 2012, 280). Homer’s Iliad is thought to have been composed around 700 bce, drawing on oral history of events that took place 500 years earlier. In traditional societies today, such as in southern Madagascar and Highland New Guinea, it is possible that some oral traditions also go back as far as 500 years (Parker Pearson et al. 1999Weissner and Tumu 1998). On the Pacific island of Vanuatu, the memory of Chief Roy Mata has persisted for nearly 800 years (Garanger 1972). An even older oral history of coastal abandonment by the Tsimshian of the Pacific Northwest region of British Columbia has been corroborated by simulation-based modelling of radiocarbon dating, placing this event 1,200–1,100 years ago (Edinborough et al. 2017).

Greater claims are made for India’s oldest Sanskrit texts, the Vedas. These are reckoned to have originated in the Late Bronze Age, around 1000 bce, and to have been transmitted orally over a period of some 3,000 years (Gerety 2017). There are even claims for oral history dating back 10,000 years or more, relating to sea-level changes on the northwest coast of North America (McLaren et al. 2015, 161–2). Australian Aboriginal oral tradition relating to ancient flood events has been claimed as evidence of transmitted memory of early Holocene sea-level rise some 7,000 years ago (Nunn 2018).

In a worldwide survey of deep-time oral traditions, David Henige (2009) points out many of the problems of trying to tie oral history to ancient geological events that occurred many thousands of years ago. The two cases of sea-level rise just mentioned are examples of the many flood myths found in different cultures throughout the world and which need not have any basis in reality. According to Henige, such claims for deep-time transmission of oral histories are, in the words of his article’s title, ‘impossible to disprove but impossible to believe’.

Scholars … can assume that indeed oral traditions can be, and often are, transmitted intact as many as hundreds of times, immune to internal and external influences all along the way. Or they can assume instead that during the course of these transmissions many influences affected and changed the content of these traditions, ending with the incorporation of outside matter ... Given these two mutually exclusive choices, it seems impossible to choose the first. (Henige 2009, 226)

We should further consider that the British situation is likely to have differed from these cases drawn from Australia, Vanuatu, the pre-Colombian Americas and elsewhere. While these can be characterised as Indigenous cultures with long-term continuities of tradition, there is evidence for substantial cultural and population discontinuity across the last four millennia of Britain’s prehistory and early history, starting with the arrival of the Beaker people in the mid-third millennium bce (Olalde et al. 2018Parker Pearson, Sheridan et al. 2019). We have to conclude that, in the case of Stonehenge, an oral tradition surviving from around 3000–2500 bce until the twelfth century ce is most probably beyond the limits of survivable transmission.

Archaeology’s long-term relationship with folkloric studies has diverged in the last few decades, despite the need for collaboration between disciplines (Paphitis 2013). For the time being, at least, we have to keep the legend separate from the archaeological evidence, even though, as the archaeologist Stuart Piggott observed long ago, they have intriguing points of correspondence which may just be too remarkable to be dismissed as mere coincidence (Piggott 1941, 306). On the one hand, Geoffrey’s tale cannot be used to ‘flesh out’ the bones of the archaeological story. Yet on the other – just maybe – aspects of the legend might help us peer into the vanished world of prehistory.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the Barony of Cemaes, Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru (Natural Resources Wales) and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park for permissions to excavate at Waun Mawn. The excavations and research in 2017, 2018 and 2021 were funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (grant Nos: AZ 11/V/17, AZ 08/V/18 & AZ 66/V/19), the Rust Family Foundation, the NERC Radiocarbon Panel and Raw-Cut TV. The field project was co-directed with Josh Pollard, Colin Richards and Kate Welham, with help from Richard Bevins (geology), Chris Casswell (excavation), Kevan Edinborough (radiocarbon dating), Rob Ixer (geology), Tim Kinnaird (OSL dating), Clive Ruggles (astronomy), Jim Rylatt (excavation), Dave Shaw (excavation), Ellen Simmons (charred wood analysis) and Adam Stanford (aerial photography). Finally, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments which have helped substantially to improve the initial draft.

Conflict of interests

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work.

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Author and article information

Journal
ai
Archaeology International
UCL Press (UK )
2048-4194
30 December 2021
: 24
: 1
: 144-164
Affiliations
[]UCL Institute of Archaeology, UK
Author notes
Article
10.14324/111.444.ai.2021.09
72185a6e-98d0-4033-8fb0-6d7c55147ea2
Copyright © 2021, Mike Parker Pearson

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.