The Stonehenge Enigma

After yesterday’s review I thought I’d add another of an episode of Meet the Ancestors. I’ve been ambivalent to Meet the Ancestors since its early days. It looked like BBC2 executives had examined Time Team thoroughly and decided what made it so popular was it had a gimmick. So Meet the Ancestors had a gimmick too. They reconstructed the face of someone found at the site during the course of the programme. It was a mixed success. It was interesting the first time, tolerable the second. By the later episodes in the first series you knew that after Julian Richards had intelligently explained the mysteries of rural life in early Christian Ireland and the limits of what we can know from the archaeological evidence that he’d wheel out a portrait “…and here’s what she looked like!” He also did Blood of the Vikings, a history of Viking Britain. The gimmick being that it tied into a genetic survey of the country. If the BBC ever decide to investigate archaeological sites whilst breathing helium from party balloons, you can bet Julian Richards will be first choice for squeaky-voiced narrator.

And that’s a shame because this programme showed that if he can talk about the archaeology itself rather than a bizarre attention-grabber then he’s pretty compelling. This is even more remarkable when you consider than Stonehenge is something that would be hard to cover in a series, let alone one 45 minute programme. What I like about Julian Richards is he has an enthusiasm for archaeology which comes across on television. Almost embarrassingly so in fact. I wish I could get out bed with that kind of zest. It seems to come from a deep respect for the people he studies. At no time in the programme did he talk about primitive society at Stonehenge. Right from the off he stood in awe of people who worked stone like wood to create the site and marvelled at their skill. This respect for people is solidly built upon in the early minutes. He explains that we have some fascinating artefacts from the area, but that the antiquarians that hacked the barrows had little interest in the people who made the artefacts.

I particularly liked the dating sequence. “How old is it?” is usually the second question you get asked on an archaeological site, sandwiched between “What have you found?” and “How can you tell?” There was a nice animation showing the relative phases show what was found, and the next sequence looking at radiocarbon dating showed answered the remaining questions. I don’t know exactly how the date ranges were narrowed down, but at least I can accept that the dates 3000 to 2920 BC weren’t dates plucked from the air for the first phase of Stonehenge.

He also gave an excellent explanation of the importance of context. I struggled to begin with went he went off to Portugal to look at a Beaker fort, but after thinking about it I can see why. He demonstrated that the kind of skill that erected the stones at Stonehenge was no fluke but endemic in Bronze Age society. Again he was bringing the people to the fore. This led on to a discussion of mobility in prehistoric times and the nearby burials of both immigrants and locals from this period.

The weakest segment of the programme was the discussion of the geology. The identification of the stones as bluestones from Preseli was very convincing, including a sequence at the British geological Survey HQ in Nottingham showing exactly how the stones were identified. Explaining how they got from Wales to Wiltshire was less successful. A field trip with Geoffrey Wainwright to Wales identifying the source was in stark contrast to the geological identification. The case for human transport of the stones looked weak. Wainwright argued that a stone circle of Bluestones in Preseli was exactly like Stonehenge in one of its phases. Yes, maybe. But stone circles up and down the country were built from local materials and laid out like Stonehenge. The circle shown didn’t seem to be outstandingly closer. However, this is an accurate reflection of the state of evidence. So far the strongest argument for human transport appears to be that the alternatives are impossible.

The strongest part of the programme was the discussion of astronomy. They gave Clive a decent slot and didn’t edit him badly. He gave a succinct but persuasive argument that it was the alignment to midwinter sunset rather midsummer sunrise which was of primary importance. From the approach the midwinter sun would appear to be setting in the circle. That’s not the best bit. The best bit was when Julian then explained why midwinter matters. Once again he put the people who used the monument front and centre.

There were one or two nice animations, but by and large the programme looked cheaper than How Art Made the World. But that didn’t matter, because what was being said made sense and was well planned. True there were things skipped. The engineering problem of raising trilithons made no appearance, but in 45 minutes, which is about 5000 spoken words, if that, what can you do? For this programme it was clearly remembered that the study of Stonehenge was a means of learning about the people who built it, not an object to be studied purely for itself. It’d be nice if it got a repeat on mainstream TV in a month or so. —–