Hawley's Excavations Reappraised

With the centenary of the end of Hawley's Excavations at Stonehenge next month, I thought it worthwhile to reappraise all his excavation reports. (Simon Banton was of inestimable help in supplying digitised versions of the reports that I have in hard copy) 

Between 1919 and 1926 Lt.-Col. William Hawley excavated roughly half of the Stonehenge enclosure on behalf of the Society of Antiquaries, publishing his results in seven reports in The Antiquaries Journal (1921–28). Those reports are among the most heavily mined and least often read documents in British prehistory: they are quarried for individual facts — the Aubrey Holes, the Y and Z Holes, the Preseli provenance — while the observations that sit between those facts go unread. This paper reads all seven reports in sequence and in full, including the appended discussions, and sets out what a continuous reading recovers. 

Available at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/411785797_Hawley_Stonehenge_Reports_Reappraised

https://www.academia.edu/171340889/Hawleys_Stonehenge_Reports_Reappraised

Three things Hawley saw at Stonehenge that have been forgotten.

Everyone cites Lt.-Col. William Hawley's seven excavation reports, published in The Antiquaries Journal between 1921 and 1928. Almost nobody reads them end to end. Do that, and things fall out that a century of summarising has quietly dropped. Start with the Heel Stone. The standard account has Hawley finding one pit beside it in 1923; he actually found two, both about 24 feet from the stone, joined to it by a nine-foot trench cut in the chalk. And by 1928 he had reversed his own published position, concluding that the Heel Stone "was probably one of two rough stones standing in rather shallow craters to the south and south-west of its present site, and seems to have been moved from its first position." That is, in essence, the argument that has run ever since Mike Pitts found Stonehole 97 in 1979 — and it was in print fifty years earlier.

Then there is a detail so mundane that everyone has walked past it. Digging round stones 1, 29 and 30 in 1921, Hawley kept hitting a layer of finely crushed flint, fifteen to twenty-four inches deep, spreading toward the interior of the circle. He traced it again in 1923 across the whole approach to the stones, and again in 1926 inside them. His explanation is entirely practical: flint gravel laid down "on account of the disturbed and muddy state of the ground whilst the work was going on." A prepared hard standing, that extensive, is direct evidence of how the site was managed while the sarsens were going up — not ritual, not occupation, just the logistics of moving fifty-ton stones across wet chalk. It has no place in the story we usually tell, so it isn't told.

Best of all is stone 30. Laid bare to its base, it showed a natural crack curving six and a half feet down the south side — and the builders had known. They had set timber baulks beneath the curve to carry the weight of the cracked portion, backed by a row of about nine outer posts "evidently to support the inner ones," the holes still holding the brown stain of decayed wood. The crack is also why they left the base untrimmed and cumbersome. Hawley's response, in 1921, was to place baulks of timber under the curve "as the builders had done long ago" before securing it with steel cable. A prehistoric engineering problem, a prehistoric fix, and a modern engineer independently arriving at the same answer — all documented on one page. That is what happens when you read the reports whole instead of mining them: Hawley turns out to have been a far better observer than his reputation allows, and the reports turn out to be richer, more timbered and more provisional than the tidy version we inherited.