Stonehenge a New Understanding (71 page)
Read Stonehenge a New Understanding Online
Authors: Mike Parker Pearson
Tags: #Social Science, #Archaeology
discussed,
6n
formation of flint from,
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Grooved Ware spreads to,
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“rich” graves found in,
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soil fertility of,
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Wessex Archaeology,
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,
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Wessex Culture,
350
Wessex I and II burials,
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see also
Amesbury; Bluestonehenge
West Kennet,
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,
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Wicca,
177
Williams-Thorpe, Olwen,
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,
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witches,
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Wood, John,
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Woodhenge,
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5
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units of measurement of,
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Woodlands,
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Young, William,
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__________
MIKE PARKER PEARSON is a professor at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and an internationally renowned expert in the archaeology of death. The author of sixteen books and over 100 academic papers, he led the Stonehenge Riverside Project from 2003 to 2009. He has appeared in the National Geographic Channel documentary
Stonehenge Decoded
and in the NOVA episode “Secrets of Stonehenge.”
__________
a
Neolithic
means New Stone Age; it follows the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic). Neolithic peoples used stone tools, made pottery, and kept domestic animals.
b
BC is still standard terminology for European prehistory.
c
The lintels are the horizontal stones that rest on top of the upright stones of the circle. Most of them have been taken away over the millennia, but some are still in their original position; others are now lying in the grass around the feet of the upright stones.
d
The term
Wessex
has three major meanings. It is originally the name of the Kingdom of the West Saxons in southwest England, whose king was Alfred the Great and last earl (until modern times) King Harold. The name was used by Thomas Hardy for a (very large) fictional county in his novels set in Dorset and southwest England; Hardy’s revival of the term is the source of most modern uses of the word (e.g., Wessex Water, the regional supplier). The name is used most frequently by archaeologists as useful shorthand when referring to the southern English counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, and parts of Somerset, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire during the prehistoric period.
e
Jadeitite consists almost entirely of jadeite, the name by which jadeitite axes were formerly known.
f
This is Stone 27 according to the Flinders Petrie numbering system.
g
An archaeological plan shows all the things that can be seen in the ground—changes in soil color, shapes of pits and postholes, and large objects—and is drawn by standing over the excavation trench looking down at the ground. A section is a drawing of the edge of a trench as seen from the side. It shows a slice through all the layers of soil, from top to bottom. A plan is therefore a horizontal drawing, and a section is a vertical drawing. These scale drawings on waterproof paper are the most important of all excavation records; today they are digitized during post-excavation. After an excavation is published, the originals are sent to secure storage (usually in a museum), where they can be consulted by the next generation of archaeologists.
h
The Heel Stone is a large and unworked sarsen that stands by itself to the northeast of Stonehenge at the beginning of the avenue.
i
These stones survive only as stoneholes; two of them, known as Stoneholes B and C, were found by Hawley.
j
“cal BC” is an abbreviation for “calibrated years Before Christ” in which “cal” indicates that the date has been calibrated to account for variations over time in Carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere.
k
The solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year, at midsummer and midwinter. They are not to be confused with the spring and autumn equinoxes, when night and day are of equal length.
l
The tilt of the earth’s axis (the obliquity of the ecliptic) has moved slightly in relation to the sun since the third millennium BC, and the solstice alignment at Stonehenge today is therefore not the same as it was.
m
The end of a ditch is always called a “terminal” in British archaeology.
n
Two out of four Station Stones survive; they were laid out in a rectangle whose corners were on the circle of the Aubrey Holes. The Station Stones were erected in the stage after the Aubrey Holes were in use.
o
One archaeologist suggested at the time that perhaps the inward-facing earthworks of henges are “ghost-catchers,” designed to safely corral the spirits, keeping them in, away from the outside world.
7
p
Because today’s Druids consider themselves to be adherents of a religious belief system, the word is now spelt with a capital letter in this context (like Buddhist, Christian, etc.); this also usefully distinguishes references to modern Druids from information about Iron Age druids.
q
Julian Richards remained unconvinced, by the way. It is a disagreement in which we think we are right, based on our greater experience of excavating stoneholes. Without casting any doubt on Julian’s skill as a field archaeologist, we would argue that interpretation of features like this is not easy but a matter of experience and repeated exposure. We’ve simply dug a lot of very similar stoneholes and, purely by chance, Julian’s sites have never contained features like this one.
r
Archaeologists still use such “parch marks” today to identify sites that are otherwise invisible above ground. They are one of the main reasons for taking aerial photographs. If the ground is sufficiently dry, grass grows less thickly on buried structures. A similar effect is produced in fields of crops, to form “crop marks.” These are, of course, nothing to do with “crop circles” which are created by a dedicated band of mathematically inclined enthusiasts, masquerading in the public imagination as aliens.
s
A passage tomb is a stone chamber and entrance passage, covered by a mound; a gallery grave is a particular type of passage tomb with a long, gallery-like chamber. Passage tombs are not of the same construction as long barrows (their mounds are not so long); they are mostly found in Ireland and western Britain, whereas long barrows have a more easterly distribution.
t
A portal dolmen (also known as a cromlech in Wales only) is an arrangement of two or more upright stones with a capstone or lintel on top. Some archaeologists think that portal dolmens were covered by mounds of soil, like passage tombs, but it is more likely the stone structures were free-standing. Carinated bowls have a steeply angled belly; this style was in use around 3800 BC (the Early Neolithic), and examples of it have been found throughout Britain, including the Stonehenge area (at Coneybury and beneath Woodhenge).
u
That said, an internet hoax on December 28, 2008 (Spanish practical joke day, el día de los Santos Inocentes) claimed that Stonehenge was built by the Victorians.
