Stonehenge a New Understanding (18 page)

In 1967, Geoff’s team of archaeologists dug right to the bottom of the henge ditch at the east entrance. There was so much soil to move that they needed mechanical help, especially at the start, since the uppermost layers had few finds. They even lowered a mechanical digger into the ditch to help remove the lower sediments. The Durrington ditch is so wide and deep that it took more than two thousand years to silt up: At a level about halfway up the filled-in ditch, the archaeologists found the bones of a woman and two children buried there around 300 BC, during the Iron Age.
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At the end of the job, the Neolithic work gang digging that segment of the ditch at the east entrance had literally downed tools, leaving them in a large heap on the bottom of the ditch. Geoff’s team counted fifty-seven antler picks.
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With one person to hold the pick and another to hammer its tip into the chalk, there must have been at least 114 workers doing the digging, together with an unknown number of basket-carriers removing the rubble, probably using ladders made from notched tree trunks. Perhaps two hundred people had worked in this one segment. Add another twenty for support staff (someone must have been doing the Neolithic equivalent of making sandwiches and putting the kettle on), and we get a grand total of 220 men, women and children. There is space along the henge ditch for about twenty-two segments. That would suggest that almost five thousand people were engaged, in one way or another, in digging the ditch. Alternatively, it could have been dug
sequentially by one gang, or just a few gangs, working their way around the whole perimeter.

During our own excavation, we wanted to get a better idea of whether multiple work gangs were involved, so we dug a trench into the chalk bank on its east side at the division between two ditch segments. The group who had worked on the north side of this division had dug their 40-meter-long section of ditch slightly wider than those on either side of them, and had piled up their chalk slightly higher so that their mounded rubble interrupted the uniformity of the henge bank. We nicknamed this the “maverick” segment. There was also something rather strange on the magnetometry plot. It showed that the mavericks had constructed some kind of enclosure here. There was something beneath the bank and therefore definitely built in the Neolithic, before the ditch-digging started. Whatever it was, its width was the same as the length of this ditch segment—so the two seemed to be related.

As we dug through the soil and rubble that form the henge bank, we found many chalk blocks with round holes in them, made by hammering in the tips of antler picks. There was even a piece of a broken pick. We could see how the Neolithic diggers had worked by looking at the vertical sides of our excavation trench. The appearance of these sections, cutting through and exposing all the different layers of soil, told us that the mavericks had started to pile up their chalk before the gang responsible for the ditch segment immediately to their south had even started work. Their head start had been only small, though: Their pile was just waist-high when the other gang started. Clean chalk throughout showed that both groups had worked without break until the job was finished. Had they taken a few weeks off during the work, we would have seen silting lines and erosion surfaces in the bank’s layers of heaped-up chalk rubble.

At the bottom of the henge bank, we discovered a small, narrow ditch, running perpendicular to the henge ditch. Only 0.6 meters wide and 1.8 meters deep, it was filled with chalk and must have been dug out very shortly before the major ditch digging began. This seems to have been a marker ditch, to show the boundary between the two segments. Just two meters south of it we found the cause of the strong magnetometry response: a bank of wood ash and domestic debris. We were presumably looking at a group—the mavericks—who had heaped up their rubbish
against an outside perimeter, thereby defining their own space within the huge village before the ditch was dug.

At the bottom of the henge bank we also found a rubbish pit that had been created by digging into a very large hole left by the falling of a huge, ancient tree. This hole had slowly filled up with soil; in the turf on top of it we found a leaf-shaped arrowhead from the fourth millennium BC. The tree had been standing perhaps a thousand years earlier, before the first farmers. Long after it had fallen, around 2500 BC, the hollow left by its toppling seems to have been used as a boundary marker between two different groups within the village.

When examining the finds from Durrington Walls, one of the things we’ve looked for is any supporting evidence for the village, or the ditch-digging, having been divided into distinct zones, or groupings. The potshards do show a particular distribution pattern. The Grooved Ware pottery from the middens (rubbish heaps) on the south side of the avenue has an unusual style of decoration, in which the grooves form spiral patterns. Though we have found much more pottery north of the avenue, there is not a single piece of spiral decoration from that area.

Spiral-decorated pots were also found in the lower layers of the henge ditch on the south side of the avenue, so this type of pot was in use in the area south of the avenue both before and after the ditch-digging. More intriguingly, the spiral motif is also found on pots deposited into the pits dug into the decayed posts of the Southern Circle almost two hundred years later, but only in its south quadrant. If spiral decoration was used by one particular group, this raises the possibility that a group specifically associated with one area of the village (and one segment of ditch-digging) might also have been associated with a particular segment of the monument, such as the Southern Circle. Perhaps this also happened at Stonehenge, with different groups responsible for separate sectors—a portion of the outer ring of sarsens, say, and a trilithon or two.

If the ditch-digging was indeed done by gangs working simultaneously, then we have a window into Neolithic labor organization. This helps us think about how Stonehenge itself could have been built. At the ground level were fairly large groups, perhaps organized and coordinated by a middle level of “management.” At the top, decisions must have been taken by a council, or even by a chief and his associates.

Choosing the right vocabulary is difficult when talking about prehistoric social organization. In normal usage in anthropology, a tribe usually numbers thousands of people, as does a clan. It is more precise to use the less familiar term “lineage group.” By this I mean a community that defines itself as the offspring of a single founding ancestor going back five or six generations (about 150 years). That is, your grandparents’ grandparents’ parent or grandparent. If the first and each subsequent generation produces four children per family, who themselves all reproduce at the same rate, numbers soon grow. The second generation has four new members, the next generation adds sixteen new members; such a lineage has over 250 members by the sixth generation.

Considering the logistics needed to keep our own fieldwork running smoothly, we could easily see that the Neolithic builders of Durrington Walls, and those of Stonehenge, would have
had
to have been well-organized. We had a digging team of 160 to 180 people, equivalent to one Neolithic ditch-digging work gang. Keeping the team functioning was a huge undertaking: We had six directors, a team of supervisors and their assistants (they called themselves “middle management”), a back-up crew running domestic affairs and finds analysis at our campsite, and a public-outreach team. Imagine another twenty such teams all involved in the same project.

One of the mysteries of Durrington Walls has always been where everybody lived while they constructed the henge ditch and bank. Although we discovered a previously unknown village, all the settlement areas that we’ve found were in use
before
the ditch was dug. Perhaps the ditch-diggers lived somewhere else entirely, or perhaps they set up camp further out, beyond the perimeter of the old village. A few years ago archaeologists found a number of Neolithic pits while monitoring the installation of a water pipe along the modern road north of Durrington Walls.
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Perhaps these pits were part of this later, henge-builders’ settlement.

Although the enclosure of the henge covered the houses of the old village under the new ditch and bank, the central enclosed area was still used after the ditch and bank had been built. Although the new bank partly blocked the old avenue, encroaching onto its southern edge, there was continued use of this routeway too, even as its flint surface became overgrown and buried under a thin layer of soil. Around 2400 BC or
later, new styles of pottery—known as Beakers—were deposited at the front of the decaying Southern Circle and in the nearby hollow where the large D-shaped building had once stood. We know from scientific analysis that Beakers in many parts of western Europe, including Britain, were used for alcoholic drinks, such as mead or ale. Research by chemist Anna Mukherjee has shown that the Durrington Walls Beakers contained lipids (fatty acids) deriving from dairy products.
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These could have been milk, butter, or curds and whey; we cannot rule out the possibility that they were fermented to make an alcoholic drink.

Beakers were first used in Britain about fifty to a hundred years after the Southern Circle was erected, but Grooved Ware remained in use. In about 2300 BC—at least 150 years after the posts were erected—the holes of the Southern Circle’s decayed posts were dug out so that special deposits of Grooved Ware pottery (together with a few Beaker shards), worked flints, bone tools, and animal bones could be put in each of them. Some of these new pits were quickly filled in but others, such as the one with two human skulls, took hundreds of years to fill.

A Beaker pot from a site called Naboth’s Vineyard near Cowbridge in Wales. In both shape and decoration, it is like those found at Durrington Walls.

The radiocarbon dating results show that Durrington Walls in its various stages was in use for three centuries, from about 2600–2300 BC (not
including some ephemeral traces of activity in the area during the previous millennium). What particularly interested us was the brief period of probably less than forty years (within 2500–2460 BC) during which it was the largest settlement anywhere in northwest Europe. Why did so many people come here? Where did they come from? Did they live here full time or did they come just for short stays at different seasons of the year?

We knew we could answer these questions if our excavations produced the right materials to analyze. The bones and teeth of the human skeleton, for example, preserve a record of our lives. Our diet can be reconstructed from microscopic wear-marks on our teeth, and from levels of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in our bones.
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Our tooth enamel forms in childhood: For the rest of our lives we carry in our teeth (until they all fall out) the traces of the geology and environment in which we lived when we were very young. By measuring levels of strontium, sulphur, and oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel, we can find out if people moved from one region to another after childhood, and sometimes where it was that they moved from.

We would be able to do similar analyses on the bones and teeth of the animals that the inhabitants of the Durrington Walls village had eaten there. In certain cases our specialists in animal bones—faunal analysts—could tell us at what time of year the herds were culled. By studying the range of foods consumed and their seasonality, we could also work out whether this was a full-time or seasonal settlement.

All the human bones that Geoff’s team found in 1967 have been radiocarbon-dated and have turned out to be much later than the time of the settlement. Our own excavations produced about eighty thousand bones but of all these, only three are human. A broken femur (upper leg bone), a skull fragment, and a toothless jaw date to the occupation of the village. The femur, belonging to an adult male, has two deep nicks in it.
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Our human bone specialists, Andrew Chamberlain and Chris Knüsel, have identified these as arrow wounds received around the time of death.

To suffer one leg wound in which the arrow went right to the bone was unfortunate, but to get two was really unlucky. I wondered how many other arrows had struck this individual—perhaps he’d been pierced like
a pin cushion, a veritable prehistoric St. Sebastian. Had he been executed by firing squad? And where was the rest of him anyway? Like the human skull and the mandible, but unlike the animal bones, this battered leg bone had been kicking around for a very long time. Perhaps it was somebody’s trophy, kept for years until it was left in a pit with cow and pig bones and other food waste.

Archaeologists are never surprised to find stray fragments of human bone in pits and other contexts on prehistoric sites. It may seem strange to us to keep a bit of human body lying around the house—nowadays we take great care to dispose of bodies as definitively as possible, by burying them or scattering cremated ashes, and find it hard to imagine deliberately chopping bits off to keep. It was definitely different in prehistory. From the Neolithic to the Iron Age, odd pieces of bone and skull turn up in contexts that have nothing to do with burials and funerals, often in rubbish pits and ditches, along with domestic waste and animal bones. Human remains must have been scattered on the ground around houses and villages. Some of these bones do seem to have been kept as special objects, especially skulls and long bones. Human bones weren’t “sacred” in our terms, though they had some sort of meaning for prehistoric people. To find just three human bones from among eighty thousand animal bones is surprising. It is actually a very low number for a prehistoric settlement.