Stonehenge a New Understanding (49 page)

Middle–Late Neolithic cremation enclosures and related sites of the same date as Stonehenge occur throughout Britain.

In 1890, the antiquarian J. R. Mortimer dug into the Neolithic barrow of Duggleby Howe, on the chalk wolds of North Yorkshire.
¹⁴
This enormous mound measures 37 meters across and stands more than six meters high. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Mortimer found at the bottom of it an impressive group of fourteen skeletons of adults, children, and infants, and a woman’s bashed-in skull, recently dated to around 3400 BC.
¹⁵
These inhumation burials were followed by fifty-three or more cremation burials, three of which were accompanied by Stonehenge-style bone skewer pins. Unfortunately, Mortimer made the same mistake as Hawley: He didn’t know what to do with cremation burials either, so he poured all the Duggleby bones into a single big box.

Many years later, in 1983, archaeologists discovered that the Duggleby mound was surrounded by a circular, segmented ditch.
¹⁶
At 370 meters in diameter, it is even bigger than the ditched enclosures at Flagstones, Llandegai and Stonehenge, although incomplete on its south side. Only in 2009 was this ditch finally investigated, by Neolithic expert Alex Gibson.

As far away as Scotland, archaeologists have also found a cremation cemetery of this period.
¹⁷
It is near Edinburgh at Cairnpapple, West Lothian, where an arc of seven pits was associated with eleven cremations in and around them. A skewer pin from one of these cremations dates them to just before 3000 BC. This Neolithic cemetery was later covered by an Early Bronze Age cairn.

Llandegai, Flagstones, and the other sixteen enclosures have largely escaped the notice of archaeologists and others interested in Stonehenge. Some have been wrongly assumed to be later in date or, as in the case of Llandegai, the full account of their excavations languished unpublished for years. Only now is it possible to pull together the records of all these excavated sites and see the broader picture. What they show is that, throughout Britain during the centuries immediately before and during Stonehenge’s use, many other circular enclosures were being used for burial. Stonehenge was in the upper stratum as regards size and complexity, on a par with the slightly earlier burial enclosures at Llandegai, Flagstones and Duggleby Howe.

In the vast majority of cases, the burials within these circles were cremations. Stonehenge, Duggleby Howe, West Stow, and the Dorchester-on-Thames circles were the most densely used for burial, yet none of these contains enough cremated individuals to have been serving each site’s whole local community. It seems that most of Britain’s population during the period 3300–2400 BC was disposed of in other ways, with no lasting memorial. Who were these happy few buried in these prominent places? As with Stonehenge, I suspect that by and large we are looking at the burials of members of prominent local families, a pattern of use of these sites only by an elite that continued, at the larger cemeteries, over many generations.

Other burials are more mysterious. The Monkton Up Wimborne burial site is earlier than most of the others, and that burial of a woman with a group of children speaks more of violence or tragedy than dynastic memorialization. Duggleby Howe’s group of skeletons has also been considered, by Mortimer as well as others, to be a mass sacrifice on the death of a leader. However, new radiocarbon dates indicate that this was not a single mass deposit but a long-term sequence of burials, more in line with being a dynastic burial ground.

Another question concerns the shape of these cremation burial cemeteries—why do so many of them employ circular geometry in their plans? Archaeologists have been aware for some years that the digging of enclosures with perfectly circular plans started only after about 3400 BC, thereafter diversifying into a wide range of ellipses, ovals and sub-circular shapes. It is also a peculiarly British phenomenon. There are very few perfectly circular Neolithic enclosures of the late fourth and early third millennia elsewhere in Europe, which is odd because marking out a circle with a rope and peg is so very simple.

Perfect circles are present in nature in various forms: the iris of the human eye, ripples in still water, the sun and the full moon, for example. We will probably never know whether any or all of these were perceived by Neolithic people as sharing the same geometric property, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the sun and the moon were the two principal entities symbolized in circular enclosures. Elsewhere in the ancient world at this time, other cultures expressed less equivocal materializations of their religious attitudes toward the sun. Examples of these,
from very different times and places, are the sun symbols of ancient Egypt and the many sun motif carvings on flat stones found among former wooden-post circles at the Neolithic Rispebjerg complex on Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.
¹⁸

Some of the most enigmatic circular sites are the four Priddy Circles in the Mendips. These circular enclosures, each about 160 meters in diameter, have often been compared with Stonehenge because they have external ditches. Re-excavation in 2008 of a 1950s excavation yielded charcoal from within the ditch of Circle 1, dating the beginning of the ditch’s filling-in to 2930–2870 BC, close to the date of Stonehenge’s first stage.
¹⁹
Only further excavations will reveal whether these circles, too, are burial enclosures from that time.

Some archaeologists have talked of a religious reformation around 3300 BC, on a par with the sixteenth-century upheavals of early modern Europe.
²⁰
There is no doubt that choosing to bury the dead within these enclosures was very different from burying people inside long barrows and causewayed enclosures, the latter never being properly circular. The Duggleby Howe mound and ditch—with their similarities to Early Neolithic mounds and causewayed enclosures—are something of a hybrid, on the cusp between two mortuary styles, past and present.

There seems to have been an intervening period between causewayed enclosures and circular burial enclosures, from 3600 BC to 3300 BC, when cursuses were fashionable. Although our interpretations favor cursuses having a funerary dimension, linking the living and the dead, we have little idea where the actual remains of the dead went during that period. There is no evidence at all of anyone being buried within the cursuses. As we found at Amesbury 42, the long barrow at the east end of the Stonehenge Cursus, only a very few people were buried in the long barrows associated with the cursuses.

After 3300 BC there was an explosion of stone circle construction. In Orkney, off the northern tip of Scotland, people built one of the largest circular monuments of the age—the great stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar. With probably more than sixty standing stones arranged in a single circle inside a 123-meter-diameter ditch, it is one of Britain’s most impressive stone circles. In 2008, Colin and Orkney archaeologist Jane Downes dug a trench into its massive 3.5-meter-deep ditch to try and get
samples for dating.
²¹
Though they were ultimately unsuccessful, they think the Ring of Brodgar was built shortly before 3000 BC. To the east of it, along a narrow peninsula half a mile away, lie the newly discovered Neolithic settlement complex of the Ness of Brodgar and the settlement of Barnhouse, excavated by Colin in the 1980s.
²²
Beyond these is another, smaller stone circle from this period, the Stones of Stenness, set within a henge ditch and bank.
²³
Colin thinks that a central fireplace and other structural features found within the Stones of Stenness were once part of a large house that was turned into a stone monument.

The Ring of Brodgar is one of Orkney’s many Neolithic monuments. In its first stage, Stonehenge would have looked very much like this, with its bank and ditch and ring of bluestones in the Aubrey Holes.

At the Ring of Brodgar, archaeologists have tried to explain the absence of a bank to go with the ditch as being the result of the ditch’s contents being used for the circle’s standing stones. Colin can tell that the rock here would not have been solid enough to work into megaliths—and, anyway, he has found one of the quarries for the Brodgar standing
stones a couple of miles away. He also suspects that the stones dug out by the Neolithic builders from the Ring of Brodgar’s ditch went into building the masonry walls of the Ness of Brodgar houses.

There is no doubt, from Nick Card’s recent excavations at the Ness of Brodgar, that thousands of tons of stone were required to build the houses and halls of this enormous village.
²⁴
Colin thinks that the copious use of stone in Orcadian Neolithic houses was more than just the result of a shortage of timber on these treeless islands. Working on the stone circles at Calanais (Callanish) on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, he came to appreciate that these two similar environments, both rendered treeless in the Neolithic, gave rise to two entirely different types of house and settlement. The Neolithic communities of Orkney and the Hebrides developed along very different pathways after the arrival of farming.

In the Outer Hebrides, habitation was transient and people used turf as well as whatever wood they could find—driftwood and small timbers—to build their houses. Stones were used in the foundation layers but the superstructures were built of perishable materials. In Orkney, Colin reckons, habitation was sedentary, with stone providing a potent metaphor for permanence, and a material manifestation of attachment to place. Perhaps Orcadian Neolithic people’s identity was rooted in their relationships to particular places and expressed through stone architecture. Whereas the places of the living within the rest of Britain were constructed in metaphors of impermanence, Orkney was different—tombs as well as places of the living were made of stone.

We can now see that Stonehenge incorporated elements of design and use that were current across Britain. Its Aubrey Hole bluestone circle is similar to the Ring of Brodgar, its various elements can be found in a different configuration at Llandegai, and it shares many similarities with other cremation cemeteries. The distance traveled by the bluestones, however, is truly remarkable and requires explanation.

If we accept the role of human agency in moving the stones from Preseli and other parts of Wales, we need to explain why people did this. One of the interesting aspects of west Wales archaeology—and the Brecon Beacons—is the presence here of a significant concentration of Early Neolithic monuments: portal dolmens, long cairns, and a
causewayed enclosure. Between 3800 and 3600 BC, this was a thriving Neolithic society. Recent research by Alison Sheridan, of the National Museums of Scotland, has shown that the west coast of Britain may have provided favored landfalls for Continental farming groups arriving in Britain as early as 4000 BC.
²⁵

We normally think of invaders and immigrants to Britain coming across the shortest route from Calais to Dover, and there is evidence for some very early Neolithic people here, including a megalithic sarsen tomb at Coldrum in Kent.
²⁶
Otherwise, however, the closed chamber tombs and short passage tombs—thought to be among the very earliest Neolithic monuments in Britain—have a distinctly westerly distribution, from Pembrokeshire and northwest Wales to the west of Scotland. Alison has also looked at the pottery of these earliest farmers. It is in some west coast sites in Britain that the styles of pots are closest to those used in northern France and Brittany. For example, she is certain that a pot from the burial chamber of the Carreg Samson closed chamber tomb is of a style identical to that made in Brittany before 4000 BC. She reckons that, in large measure, the Neolithic way of life was brought by migrating Continental farmers as a package rather than just its separate components being imported by the indigenous hunter-gatherers. Once farming had arrived in Britain, it was adopted by the locals. Two hotspots of surviving Breton-style tombs within Britain are in north Wales and in Pembrokeshire.
²⁷
These areas might well have been points of origin for the earliest immigrant farmers, who colonized the valleys that run down to the coast and exploited the adjacent uplands for grazing.