Stonehenge a New Understanding (11 page)

We found almost four hundred oblique arrowheads at Durrington Walls, a surprisingly large number. They were almost as numerous as flint scrapers, normally the most common tool on Neolithic settlements, used for scraping fat and bristle off animal hides. Another surprise was the very small number of bone points for piercing and stretching animal hides. Instead, there were bone and stone beads and lots of bone pins, several inches long and polished smooth, used to secure either clothing or hair. Clearly this was a different kind of settlement from the norm, since the everyday tool types used in daily farming life were so few. The large sizes of the broken pot shards and the fact that some of the animal bones had been dumped with soft tissue still holding them in articulation showed that this was rubbish collected after some sort of feast. The rubbish had been buried soon after each feasting event but, judging by the gnaw-marks on some of the bones and some preserved dog feces, not until after the dogs had rummaged through the party refuse.

The find that caught most people’s attention was a flint phallus. The flint of Wessex formed about eighty million years ago, as seams within chalk, derived from the calcium in tiny animals’ bodies decaying at the bottom of a long-vanished tropical sea. It seems that the silicate components of their bodies collected in seams at certain levels within the chalk and formed flint in all kinds of shapes, sometimes flat, sometimes nodular. It also formed occasional small spheres and elongated knobs.
These bizarre shapes have sometimes been further exaggerated during their formation by the impressions of prehistoric shells and sea urchins.

An oblique arrowhead from the ditch of the Stonehenge Avenue. This type of arrowhead was in use in the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic (2600–2200 BCE).

Prehistoric man (for I suspect it was he rather than she) seems to have had an eye for these natural oddities. Back in the 1920s a local archaeologist and antique dealer, Mr. A. D. Passmore, excavated a round barrow (a Bronze Age burial mound) close to Stonehenge; its central grave pit contained not a prehistoric skeleton but a collection of strangely shaped flint nodules.
¹⁴
From the bottom of a Neolithic flint mine in Sussex came
an impressively large penis-shaped flint nodule, its glans formed by a fossil echinoid, or sea urchin.
¹⁵
At other Neolithic sites archaeologists have found phalli carved out of chalk. There is even one from Stonehenge. They are generally unattached, anatomically speaking, but a rare find of a carved wooden figurine—the so-called god-dolly—from a bog in the Somerset Levels portrays a hermaphroditic individual with both penis and vulva.

Our Durrington Walls phallus was a natural nodule whose glans was formed by a fossil shell, with a possibly worked groove at the tip. It might have been nothing more than a chance geological quirk—more in the excavators’ imagination than noticed by prehistoric people—except that its context provided evidence for careful selection. This phallic object lay near one end of a narrow Neolithic pit, in close proximity to two testicle-sized, natural flint balls. Close to it, a small flint slab covered another unusual natural flint lying on the sloping side of the pit. This flint had a natural hole through its center and came to be called the “pelvis flint” by the diggers because of its shape. Perhaps we had uncovered a prehistoric sex-education lesson.

The flint phallus (and two flint balls) from a pit beneath the avenue at Durrington Walls.

Phalli are known from many different cultures, ancient and modern. The Romans, for example, used to provide them with wings and considered them symbols of luck and fertility. Perhaps they were similarly treated as fertility objects in the Neolithic. Back at the campsite our find soon took on the nickname of the “Durrington Dong,” and gave its name to the project’s improvised cocktail of the season—gin, Campari, and ginger beer.

Working out where we should dig in the next excavation season in 2005 was difficult. All our trenches in 2004 had been in the wrong places. Only the trench halfway between the river and the henge had found Neolithic remains, and even that trench was not quite where it should have been. Had we known in advance how severe the erosion was immediately upslope from the riverside, we would have positioned the trench westward, further up the slope, where preservation was better. In 2005 we could undo the mistake and put the trench in the right place.

This might be our only chance to look for what we had predicted in our theory about Durrington Walls. We had to open a trench that would produce undisputed evidence of concentrated human settlement. The pits that we found in the first year’s digging were full of feasting rubbish but that wasn’t enough proof – they could be the remains of some one-off event, like Coneybury. If we didn’t find an avenue or better evidence that Durrington Walls had been a place of the living, we’d have to pack up and go home for good.

If there were an avenue or roadway outside Durrington Walls, perhaps a new trench into the better-preserved zone, south of where we had found the pits, would pay dividends. If we found an avenue here, then we were on the right track; if not, Ramilisonina’s theory could be dismissed. It was also worth extending the trench northward beyond the group of pits. Kate Welham’s geophysics team had found an anomaly in this area. They had detected it using an earth-resistance survey, which measures
the resistance to electrical current below ground. High resistance is created by dense and dry features, such as walls, whereas low resistance is found in damper areas, such as the fills of ditches and pits. The anomaly north of our 2004 trench was a large circular area of high resistance; it could be a small henge or a round burial mound.

One of the most exciting moments of archaeological excavation is the removal of plowsoil by mechanical excavator to see what lies beneath. However much research has been done above ground to work out what is there, the mechanical digger always reveals surprises. Machine stripping of topsoil is a delicate task: Take off too little, and what remains has to be laboriously removed by hand; take off too much, and you’ve destroyed valuable archaeological layers. It all depends on the sharp eyes of the archaeologist and the skilled hand of the digger driver.

The 2004 season had shown us that well-preserved Neolithic remains lay immediately at the base of very shallow plowsoil, buried as little as 0.15 meters (six inches) deep. As I watched the hired digger prepare the trenches in the summer of 2005, the driver gently removed the topsoil to reveal a layer of black soil filled with animal bones and potshards. This was an entire ground surface that had been preserved for more than four thousand years—a complete surprise. Not only was the ground strewn with settlement waste (what archaeologists call “midden”), but it had also survived four millennia of weathering and erosion.

The chalklands of Wessex are famous for their archaeological remains of all periods, but normally an excavator sees only the lower parts of features, such as pits, ditches, and graves, that have been cut into the chalk bedrock. The uppermost layers have usually been destroyed over time by natural and man-made processes. Rainwater percolating through soil on to the surface of the chalk reacts with the calcium to form a weak hydrochloric acid that eats away at the upper layers of chalk; meanwhile plowing not only breaks the surface to accelerate this weathering but also actively erodes the chalk. Most of the uplands of Wessex have been plowed since prehistoric times, and studies have shown that nearly a meter of chalk has been removed. We therefore rarely see a view of the Neolithic at the original ground level—this has vanished completely—but are instead usually looking at things that were once below ground. We now know that, even at Durrington Walls, parts of the henge interior have lost
at least half a meter of chalk since it was first constructed. So how had the ground surface in our new trench been preserved?

Ground-surface preservation can be expected beneath substantial earthworks, such as a henge bank, but our new trench was at least 10 meters from the edge of Durrington Walls’ bank. It soon became clear that the bank had been quarried into a couple of centuries ago by people in search of chalk to puddle into cob (a traditional material for making walls) or lime (to spread on the more acidic soils of the river’s floodplain). The quarrymen, who left behind a button and pieces of their clay pipes, had spread chalk rubble well beyond the edges of the henge bank, inadvertently sealing the Neolithic ground surface beneath.

It was this circular-shaped spread of more recent rubble that had shown up on the resistivity plot. It had provided protection from nineteenth-and twentieth-century plowing, but how had the old surface survived earlier erosion? We later discovered that this small part of the field, in front of the henge entrance, had for some reason been spared the plowing that had commenced in the Iron Age. Evidence of the farming landscape of the Iron Age can still be seen today: The hedge lines of Iron Age fields are preserved at Durrington as lynchets—ridges still visible in grassland today throughout Britain—formed by plowsoil accumulating against a hedge line on the upslope and by plow erosion against the downslope of the hedge.

As soon as the digger was off the trench, we troweled off the last of the protective chalk lumps, and could then see a blackened surface that extended beyond the limits of the trench. Within it were heaps of burned flint, low mounds of piled-up chalk (the up-cast from Neolithic pits) and spreads of ashy soil. The southernmost of these ash spreads extended just as far as the edge of our 2004 trench. As we troweled over the top of it, we could see that the thin layer of ash lay on top of a square area, just over two meters across, of solid chalk plaster, at the center of which was a circular depression. This was where some of the soliflucted chalk extracted from the Neolithic pits we found in 2004 had been deposited. Both Colin and I recognized what we were looking at: This was a house floor, not very different from the ones that we’d been digging for the last fifteen years in Orkney and the Outer Hebrides. More than that, it was very similar in size and plan to the Neolithic houses that Colin knew so well from Orkney.

The floor of House 547 at Durrington Walls. The white rectangular area is the chalk-plaster floor in the center of the house. Within it, the dark circular area is the hearth. A line of stakeholes, showing where the wattle-and-daub wall once stood, surrounds the house.

As we excavated further, we realized that this was the center of a house measuring about five meters by five meters. The ash layer and the plaster floor were surrounded by a line of holes that had held small upright stakes. These stakeholes showed us where the wattle-and-daub walls of the house had once stood. There were even small pieces of daub surviving on the floor. Between the wall and the edge of the plaster floor, the ashy soil had filled in shallow grooves that had once held horizontally laid logs or planks. These beam slots were all that was left of the furniture—they were the foundations of box beds and storage units, like those crafted in stone in the Orcadian houses. Our 2004 trench had been too small for us to see that these ephemeral traces were the remains of a house. By extending and enlarging the trench we could finally appreciate what we were seeing.