Kipling kept "six honest serving-men": What and Why and When, and How and Where and Who. Put to Stonehenge, five of them have answers backed by evidence. This page is the companion to the short film Stonehenge in six questions, with the sources behind each card.
Where
On Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, about two miles (3.3 km) west of Amesbury and eight miles north of Salisbury, in a landscape dense with Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, above all round barrows. Durrington Walls, about two miles to the north-east, is a far larger henge; houses excavated there may have sheltered the people who built Stonehenge (Parker Pearson et al. 2007).
What
A circular bank and ditch, the earliest part of the monument. Inside it, a ring of sarsen uprights capped by a continuous circle of lintels; within that, a horseshoe of five trilithons; and among them the smaller bluestones, set as a circle and an inner horseshoe. Stonehenge gave its name to the class of monuments called henges, yet fails the definition: its main bank lies inside its ditch, not outside (see Is Stonehenge a henge?).
When
The bank and ditch were built about 3000 BC. The sarsens and bluestones were set up in the centre about 2500 BC; the bluestones were rearranged two or three centuries later; and the Y and Z holes around the circle are dated between 1800 and 1500 BC (English Heritage; Darvill et al. 2012 set out five stages).
How
Fifty of the fifty-two surviving sarsens share a geochemical signature with West Woods, about 25 km to the north; typical uprights weigh around 20 tonnes (Nash et al. 2020). The bluestones come from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, some 220 km away in a straight line. The Altar Stone is a sandstone from much further north: Clarke et al. (2024) point to the Orcadian Basin of north-east Scotland. On the evidence so far that is a search area rather than a source outcrop (see The Altar Stone Zircons, One Sample at a Time). How the stones were moved is still debated; the distances here are straight lines, not routes.
Who
The builders were farmers whose ancestors had crossed from the continent around 4000 BC; ancient genomes show that Britain's Neolithic transition "was mediated by incoming continental farmers, with little gene flow from local hunter-gatherers" (Brace et al. 2019). About 64 cremations have been found at Stonehenge, and perhaps as many as 150 people were originally buried there (English Heritage). Isotopes in pig bones from Durrington Walls suggest animals were brought from across Britain for feasts, though the authors note that "it is not possible to define origins with confidence" (Madgwick et al. 2019). From about 2450 BC newcomers associated with Beaker pottery arrived, and within a few centuries about 90 per cent of Britain's gene pool had been replaced (Olalde et al. 2018).
Why
Unknown. The one fixed clue is the axis: from the centre, the midsummer sun rises just to the left of the Heel Stone, and the midwinter sun would originally have set between the uprights of the tallest trilithon; the final straight stretch of the Avenue follows the same north-east to south-west line (English Heritage). Proposed purposes include a temple to the sun, a monument to the ancestors (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998) and a place of healing (Darvill 2006). The evidence does not yet choose between them.
Notes on the film
- Dates are rounded from radiocarbon ranges.
- Bluestone positions on the plan are taken from the stone-number points on the Rees 1989 sheet (via the georeferenced plan); they mark positions, not shapes.
- The maps use the NOAA GLOBE land mask. Lines join a source to Stonehenge; they are not routes.
- Music: original.
Sources
- Brace, S. et al. 2019. Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain. Nature Ecology & Evolution 3: 765–771.
- Clarke, A. J. I. et al. 2024. A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. Nature 632: 570–575.
- Cleal, R. M. J., Walker, K. E. & Montague, R. 1995. Stonehenge in its Landscape: Twentieth-Century Excavations. London: English Heritage.
- Darvill, T. 2006. Stonehenge: The Biography of a Landscape. Stroud: Tempus.
- Darvill, T., Marshall, P., Parker Pearson, M. & Wainwright, G. 2012. Stonehenge remodelled. Antiquity 86: 1021–1040.
- English Heritage. History of Stonehenge; Understanding Stonehenge. english-heritage.org.uk
- Kipling, R. 1902. The Elephant's Child. In Just So Stories. London: Macmillan.
- Madgwick, R. et al. 2019. Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs and across Wessex drew people and animals from throughout Britain. Science Advances 5: eaau6078.
- Nash, D. J. et al. 2020. Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge. Science Advances 6: eabc0133.
- Olalde, I. et al. 2018. The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe. Nature 555: 190–196.
- Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2007. The age of Stonehenge. Antiquity 81: 617–639.
- Parker Pearson, M. & Ramilisonina 1998. Stonehenge for the ancestors: the stones pass on the message. Antiquity 72: 308–326.
Regarding fixed clues as to the 'Why' of sarsen Stonehenge, there are other clues.
ReplyDeleteOn the axis standing upright behind Stone 80 (the Altar Stone) was the carved bluestone number 67. In its final reshaping a best attempt was made to render it as a phallus.
The Altar Stone bears female symbolism on account of its horizontal attitude and the medial vertical line on the side which faces the phallus. This is known through an English Heritage photograph of 1958 (likely taken by Richard Atkinson) and carefully redrawn for publication by Tim Daw a few months ago. The line seems to be a quartz-filled groove which had been identified by a Late Neolithic mason who ensured that the longitudinal shape of the stone would be cut in such a manner that the straight groove would finish by being central and vertical. The consequence is that the sacred inner space of Stonehenge is quasi-centred by a symbolically male-female stone pair on the solstitial axis of the monument.. Such stones can be recognised as a fertility shrine, seeing that across the last 4500 years, maybe a million Hindu temples have been constructed with a male-female shrine inside the sacred space of their interiors.
It follows that at the summer solstice, if Stone 67 was re-erected, the rising sun would illuminate this phallic stone, often with red sunshine. At the same time the shadow of the Heel Stone would unite with the female-symbolic Altar Stone. The fertility-worshipping component of the people's religion is finally exposed, and Stonehenge revealed as an Ancient British Temple to the Sun. A book with this title has just been printed, for which a press release is planned soon. A copy was put in the post today to Tim.
Thank you very much, I look forward to it. Another fascinating set of clues to "why".
ReplyDeleteI sent it with three other recent books because they interconnect and cross-refer with the contents of the Stonehenge book. The research volume "The Stone Circles of Cork and Kerry" is especially relevant.
ReplyDelete