Which Stonehenge?

A couple of summers ago I designed a module for the Interdisciplinary Science course, called Powers and Prophets. The brief I was given was “Do a module about Stonehenge, It has to have Physics, Geology and Archaeoastronomy in it with some Archaeology.” It was a fun, if intense experience as the course was to be taught by Problem-Based Learning, so I had to find out what that was too. Eventually the overall problem I set was “Could a new Stonehenge be built authentically and accurately at the new visitor centre?”

I’ve been thinking about it more recently, for reasons which may become apparent around June 20. I did think to write another theme, like A Celtic Calendar, for Stonehenge running between now and June 21. I’ve decided not to, for a couple of reasons. One is that the next batch of i-sci students might find this and decide what they find here is the ‘right’ answer. The other is that I don’t have the right answers and even writing up my best guess will take more time than I currently have to spare. However there are likely to be theories in abundance around over the next month, so I thought I could ask some interesting questions instead.

The first is when a researcher explains his new Stonehenge theory, which Stonehenge is he talking about? Phase One, dates from around 2950 BC. The end of Phase Three is beyond 1900 BC. That’s a thousand years difference and, as you can see from the plans below, quite a lot of rebuild.

Stonehenge plans from the Wikipedia

The first problem we set for the students was to identify which Stonehenge to rebuild. The phrasing is deliberately vague, we simply ask them for the most ‘dramatic’ version of Stonehenge. What I’m expecting is for people to choose one of the sub-phases of Phase Three with trilithon sarsons and bluestones. However a student could cause a problem by arguing that the start of Stonehenge is the most dramatic phase. Most people walk past this without a second thought as they leave the car park for the site. That’s because the earliest known building at Stonehenge was found in the car park.

The white patches marking the mesolithic postholes found under where the car park now is.

The white circles mark the places where postholes were found while building the car park. There are three of them, and there may be more because not all of the land surrounding Stonehenge has been excavated. They are without doubt the dullest looking bits of Stonehenge, but also possibly the strangest. What was found in them were fragments of timbers. Dating these showed that the holes held thick wooden posts around nine thousand years ago. This is strange because most archaeologists assumed monumental architecture started in the Neolithic, around six thousand years ago, in the British Isles. Before this period people were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Simple theory stated that you needed a tie to the land to want to build something monumental in a place, and you needed to be sedentary to have a tie to the land. The best guess is that these postholes held something like a totem pole, but there’s so little ethnographic evidence which can be safely applied to the area that it really is a best guess.

Stonehenge plan from the Wikipedia

What you or I would recognise as Stonehenge appears to date from around 2950 BC. The earliest phase was a bank and ditch monument with fifty-six postholes skirting the inside of the circle. These are known as Aubrey holes, after John Aubrey who first recorded them. Beyond that there’s not a lot to say. Certainly there are some deposition in the ditches which appear to be important, but there’s not a lot else there. This is why I’m sceptical when the next new theory comes along. It’s not that I think Stonehenge must remain a mystery. It’s just that most theories attempt to explain all things across all times. Did the people who built the first henge do so with an idea of what it would eventually look like a thousand years later?

Stonehenge plan from the Wikipedia

Later phases introduced wooden buildings and then stones from Wales into the circle. It’s Phase Three that makes it so difficult to construct a sensible story of the site. The bluestones were cleared out and replaced by Sarsen stones, the big ones, from the relatively nearby Marlborough Downs. Then later the bluestones were bought back in. There then follows a whole load of shuffling around. Circles are made, horseshoe shapes are made and reset. There’s a tendency to see these as steps along to perfecting the site. Another interpretation is possible.

It’s clear that the people who built this site were capable of complex planning. Hundreds of tons of bluestone didn’t turn up on Salisbury Plain by accident (unless you follow the glacial deposition camp, but that’s a post for another time). It cannot be that people were shuffling the stones round to experiment with how they would look in a new position. They were not stupid people. It seems the Early Bronze Age could have been a time of competing mythologies and interpretations of the world. How did they think of the site when they did this? Did they include the positions of the Sarsen stones in the site plans or did they see the bigger, and effectively immovable, as obstacles to work around? The bank and ditch never seemed to be very high. Was this to allow sight out the horizon, or did the bank and ditch cease to be important after the early stages?

What we see at Stonehenge is the end result of rebuilding again and again over the same site. We lump everything together as Stonehenge because that is what we see today. This is our Stonehenge. Would a Bronze Age person see it the same way? The amount of re-working showed they certainly periodically thought parts of the site were wrong, but would they demolish parts of the site if they were merely irrelevant to the Stonehenge experience? I can’t honestly say if a Bronze Age person at Stonehenge would recognise all the parts of the monument as being as important as we would. —–