As for the age of the individuals, Hawley remarks in his records that he reckoned that only two of the cremations he found were those of children5 and Christie’s findings reveal no more than four or five children of various ages. Jacqui had been very skeptical of Hawley’s ability to distinguish men, women, and children among the cremations—he had no training in anatomy—but he may not have been too far wrong in simply attributing clusters of very small bones to children as opposed to adults.
The picture that Christie is beginning to reveal is of a burial ground reserved predominantly for adult men. This is not a normal demographic picture. Before modern medicine, childhood mortality was very high, and most deaths in any population would have been those of children.6 Thus if all members of a community were buried at Stonehenge, without discrimination, most of them should be children. Furthermore, half of the people should be women but, according to the identifiable sex traits among the adult bones, they are not there. In other words, there were strong biases at work in selecting people to be buried (as cremated remains) at Stonehenge.
Might the men whose remains were buried there have been sacrificial victims? We can look at the comparative examples of Neolithic and other prehistoric bog bodies from Scandinavia and northwest Europe; many of these show good evidence for having suffered a violent death, and archaeological opinion is very strongly in favor of their having been human sacrifices.7 In contrast to the Stonehenge people, the bog bodies include a high proportion of women and children as well as men. Our overall knowledge of cremation across Britain during the Neolithic indicates that this was the standard burial practice for everybody, with some burials being provided occasionally with grave goods.8
The most likely explanation is that the people buried at Stonehenge were drawn from an elite. They could have been rulers, born into the office, or chosen by their peers, or even ritual specialists who mediated between the living and the supernatural. The presence of a macehead and an incense burner in two of the burials gives weight to the idea that some sort of power, political and religious, was held by at least two of them.
The good preservation of the burned bone fragments has allowed Christie to find out about Neolithic illnesses and diseases. While none of the bones has produced evidence of violent trauma, several individuals had arthritis. This was not of the rheumatoid form (a disease that seems to have developed much later in human history) but was osteoarthritis. Christie has so far found it in the lower backs of some individuals, visible as patches of wear on the spine caused by degeneration of the cartilage between the vertebrae. One individual suffered from a soft-tissue tumor behind the knee. It was so large that it affected the growth of the tibia (the larger of the two lower leg bones) but was benign; it might well have caused a limp but not premature death.
The selection of samples from the Aubrey Hole cremations for dating is a mathematical puzzle. We know that there are fifty-nine burials (although some of these may contain more than one individual) in the form of fifty thousand fragments of human bone. How many bones need to be radiocarbon-dated to get a representative sample? We have to be sure that we don’t date the same individual twice. To avoid this, Christie and Jacqui must establish the minimum number of individuals (MNI) present and select one bone from each. This standard technique used to analyze all archaeological bone—human and animal—means finding out which anatomical part of the skeleton is most regularly represented; we will then radiocarbon-date each example of that.
Jacqui reckoned that the petrous bone (the outside of the ear cavity) is the one most easily identifiable, but we’d have to be careful not to destroy the actual cavity structure itself when sampling from the skull around it. So, if Christie finds twenty-five left petrous bones and twenty right petrous bones, our MNI will be twenty-five. If every one of these bones came from a different individual, there might be as many as forty-five individuals represented, but archaeologists have to ignore this number and work with what can be proved—in this example, the left-side bones would definitely come from twenty-five different people, so we would radiocarbon-date all the left-side petrous bones, and none of the right-side bones (which could be duplicates, belonging to the same people). The dates from these twenty-five individuals would give us a range for their deaths, and we would have to hope that this was a representative sample of the dates of death of each of the fifty-nine people.
We already have an inkling of how the burials should be distributed though time, so we know broadly what their numbers should look like from 3000 BC, the beginning of Stonehenge, to around 2400 BC, the latest date of Atkinson’s three cremations. This is because Hawley recorded not only where but at what depth he found each cremation burial within the Stonehenge ditch. Thanks to English Heritage’s dating of the ditch’s layers in 1994, we know the rate at which the ditch filled up over time. Our radiocarbon specialist, Pete Marshall, has been able to refine the chronology still further, by fine-tuning the statistical model. The cremation burial found by Hawley on the bottom of the ditch is likely to date to soon after its digging, around 2950 BC. Just two cremations were buried in the intermediate, secondary fills of the ditch; these ought to date to 2900–2600 BC. Fifteen were dug into the top of the ditch and can be expected to date to 2600–2300 BC.
A similar statistical exercise is also possible, but less certain, for the cremations from the fills of the Aubrey Holes. Up to eleven cremations (like the one found by Atkinson in Aubrey Hole 32) are probably primary burials from around 2950 BC. These deposits of cremated bone were later disturbed by the removal of small standing stones from these pits. Another twelve cremations are likely to have been inserted after the stones had been withdrawn and the pits filled in, perhaps around 2600–2300 BC. Thirteen of the cremations found by Hawley had been put into isolated pits that are impossible to date within the Stonehenge sequence, so no estimates of their dates can be made.
We also have to bear in mind the likely number of people buried at Stonehenge. Extrapolating from the number of known burials, Mike Pitts estimated in 2000 that it could be as many as 240. Although previous excavators have investigated about 50 percent of the area of Stonehenge, Mike reasoned that many undiscovered burials may lie under the outer bank and even outside the ditch. These are areas that have never been excavated, so there is no existing sample of burials to work with. My guess for the total number is slightly lower than Mike’s, at around 150.
The Stonehenge stratigraphy shows that very few people were buried there at the beginning of the sequence of construction, and lots were buried there toward the end of the monument’s use as a cemetery, about five hundred years later. The overall pattern of this stratigraphic dating of the cremations suggests that only a minority of the Stonehenge dead (around ten out of 150) were buried at the beginning, with the numbers growing exponentially to around ninety cremation burials in the centuries around 2500–2300 BC.
Andrew Chamberlain, an expert in human osteology and ancient demography, estimates that this pattern of burials at Stonehenge could be created by a small kin group burying their dead over a five hundred-year period. The cemetery starts with a small number of founder graves. As the living offspring increase in number over about twenty generations, what started as a small family becomes a large number of families, or a lineage, descended from common ancestors. This may sound like a lot of people but, at a uniform rate of mortality, the number of burials at Stonehenge would derive from only one death every three or four years.
This gives us a model for what to expect from the results of the radiocarbon dating: We should find very few early cremations and a lot of later ones. If that is not the pattern, then there has to be something we have not accounted for—the unstratified burials may all belong to the early period of use, for example, or there may have been more primary burials in the Aubrey Holes than Hawley recognized.
If Andrew is right about Stonehenge being a place of burial for a lineage, who were these people whose burial place was so illustrious? They were provided with
no grave goods, except in one or two special cases. Hawley found one burial with a stone macehead, near the south entrance. Maceheads are ground and polished stones, drilled through the center for mounting on top of a wooden handle or staff.9 The British Isles’ most beautiful example of a Neolithic macehead is an ornately carved specimen from the eastern chamber of the great tomb at Knowth in Ireland.10 Another dates to about 1900 BC, probably some five hundred years later than the Stonehenge example, and was found just half a mile away from Stonehenge, in the richest prehistoric burial known from Britain. It came from Bush Barrow, a burial mound that lies on the skyline to the south of Stonehenge, and was excavated by Colt Hoare in 1808.11 For many years, until Stonehenge’s re-dating in 1995, archaeologists wondered if the man buried in Bush Barrow had been responsible for the building of Stonehenge, since his grave goods were so rich and rare.12 As well as a gold lozenge-shaped ornament, a gold buckle, and bronze daggers with gold handles, he was provided with a macehead that had once been mounted on a staff decorated with chevron-shaped rings of bone.
The polished stone macehead found with one of the cremation burials at Stonehenge by William Hawley. It would have been attached to a wooden handle through the shaft-hole.
Maces could have been used as stone clubs, but there are good reasons for thinking that their role was primarily ceremonial. Even today in Britain, we recognize the mace as a symbol of power. The British parliament, local councils, and the Lord Mayor of London all have maces to proclaim institutional authority. Perhaps the Stonehenge mace had a similar purpose.
There is another peculiar grave good from among the Stonehenge cremations. This is a ceramic “incense burner”13—a small circular disc with concave surfaces on top and bottom. Holes on the sides show where it was suspended by string, and whatever substance was burned in it has left a sooty stain. Such items are known from all around the world as the paraphernalia of shamans and other ritual specialists. Ramilisonina and I have excavated such items, in use until a hundred years ago, that were once used by Malagasy medicine men and diviners.14 The Stonehenge “incense burner” is almost unique—only one other is known from the British Neolithic. Perhaps it tells us that some of the people buried at Stonehenge were ritual specialists as well as political leaders.
We might be tempted to ask why most of the burials had no grave goods—does this mean that these were not important people? But putting grave goods in the burial of an important individual is far from universal, across cultures and across time. Anthropological studies of traditional societies around the world have found that only in 5 percent to 40 percent of cases was social status signified by grave goods.15 A lack of grave goods in a prehistoric burial is not an indication of lack of status; it all depends what the cultural traditions meant. On balance, given the small number of burials and their extraordinary location in this dramatic monument, it seems most likely that the people buried at Stonehenge were the elite of their day—rulers and shamans, perhaps forming a succession of powerful dynasties.
The Beaker people
At the same time as Christie Cox Willis began to examine the cremated remains from the Stonehenge Aubrey Hole, I was coordinating a team exploring the lives of the people buried in the period afterward, from 2400 to 1800 BC. This project was not focused on the Stonehenge area but covered the whole of Britain.16 Many of the skeletons from this period of the Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age were found with the distinctive form of pottery known as Beakers.17
Ever since the nineteenth century, archaeologists have thought that the Beaker people were probably immigrants to Britain. Anatomists measured their skulls, pronouncing them to be round-headed (brachycephalic) in contrast to the long-headed (dolichocephalic) skulls from the Early Neolithic long barrows and, therefore, according to some, members of a different race.18 Archaeologists saw these immigrants as the bringers of knowledge: It was in the Beaker period that metallurgy, horse-riding and brewing all first occur in Britain, spreading from the Continent.19 The well-appointed Beaker burials often include not only the characteristic pottery but also archery equipment in the form of barbed-and-tanged arrowheads, and stone wrist-guards.
The unique, drum-shaped, small pottery object found with one of the cremation burials at Stonehenge and interpreted as an “incense burner.”
Beakers were used by communities across Europe, from Spain and Morocco to northern Denmark, and from Hungary to eastern Ireland.20 They seem to have first appeared in Spain around 2800 BC, and there are also early dates from the Netherlands.21 Their distribution across northern Europe, however, was patchy rather than uniform. Certain areas, such as much of France and southern Denmark, have never produced evidence for Beakers. In Britain, their footprint is similarly partial. Very few Beakers are known from Wales, for example, but certain areas such as eastern Scotland, Yorkshire, the Peak District, Wessex, East Anglia, and Kent were densely occupied by Beaker-using communities.
All of these areas are well-known for Beaker funerary sites, where the dead were buried either under round mounds or in flat burials with no earthen monument to mark them. It seems that the earliest burials, around 2400 BC, were placed in flat graves or within small circular, discontinuous ditches, like miniature henges.22 Only later, around 2000 BC, were large earthen mounds—round barrows—built over a grave.
For years, archaeologists have argued about the Beaker people. Were they really a tribe or tribes of migrants sweeping across Europe, perhaps forced westward into the Netherlands and Britain by other groups expanding out of the east? Or were archery equipment and the distinctive Beaker itself—items so often found in burials—some of the trappings of a lifestyle that cut across ethnic boundaries, part of a package of material culture that was adopted enthusiastically by those aspiring to the Beaker way of life?23
Arguments based on the shape of prehistoric skulls subsided many years ago. There is no way to tell if the apparent difference between the shapes of skulls found in long barrows (dating to around 3800–3400 BC) and skulls from burials dating to the beginning of the Beaker period (from 2400 BC) is the result of the invasion of Britain by a large number of people with a different genetic heritage. The long period between the long barrows and the Beaker burials—a time when very few people were buried and thus lacking in unburned human remains—makes it impossible to judge whether the preponderance of more rounded skulls is the result of gradual physiological change (known as genetic drift) in an existing population, or the result of a new migration.24
The arguments about migrants and the Beaker package had quieted down when a remarkable discovery was made in 2002 by Wessex Archaeology during the development of a new housing estate in Amesbury, just three miles east of Stonehenge on the other side of the Avon. The skeleton of an adult man lay in a grave with more than a hundred grave goods, including five Beakers, a dozen barbed-and-tanged arrowheads, three copper daggers, a boar’s tusk, a small stone anvil for fine metalworking, two gold “earrings” (perhaps twists for braided hair), and two wrist-guards.25 This is the largest collection of grave goods ever found in a Beaker burial anywhere in Europe. The Amesbury Archer, or at least the people who organized his funeral, had considerable means and social standing. Nearby, a second flat grave contained the skeleton of another man, equipped with a pair of gold earrings.
The discovery of the Amesbury Archer couldn’t have happened at a more awkward time, late on a Friday before a holiday weekend. Andrew Fitzpatrick, in charge of the excavation, had to decide whether to leave the grave open to potential weekend plunderers or to dig through the night. He couldn’t take the risk of leaving the site so, working by the illumination of car headlights, his team pressed on for hours, patiently recording, plotting, and removing every single item on and around the skeleton.
Radiocarbon dating has revealed that the Amesbury Archer died in the period 2470–2280 BC. Analysis in the laboratory of his teeth tells a fascinating story: From the evidence of the strontium and oxygen isotope values of his molars’ dental enamel,
we know that this man spent his childhood years (between the ages of about ten and fourteen) far away from Britain, somewhere on the Continent and possibly as far east as the foothills of the Alps.26 Andrew Fitzpatrick suggested that the region around Bavaria might have been his homeland. The tabloids had a field day—Stonehenge built by the Germans! For a while, the Amesbury Archer was dubbed the King of Stonehenge, ousting the inhabitant of Bush Barrow from this ever-popular title. Some archaeologists wondered if he might have been the architect behind the building of the sarsen circle and trilithons, until it was pointed out that these had been erected before his time.
The Amesbury Archer and the artifacts buried with him as grave goods, excavated by Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology.
The discovery of the Amesbury Archer reignited interest in the Beaker people’s origins. DNA was not going to help answer the question. There are too few available skeletons from which ancient DNA could ever be extracted, and there are no skeletons from the centuries before the Beaker period to form a control group of “resident British citizens” with which to compare the DNA of the possible immigrants. The only way to find out if the Beaker people were migrants, or just local residents adopting new technology, is to analyze strontium and oxygen isotopes to see where people came from. Are there others like the Amesbury Archer, definitely immigrants from Europe?
In 2004, I put together a team of scientists to find out not just where the Beaker people had come from but also what their diet, their health, and their geographical mobility had been like. My codirectors were Andrew Chamberlain and Mike Richards. Andrew is an expert in biological anthropology, especially the study of human bones; Mike is an expert in isotope analysis. We recruited our team and talked to museums across Britain to track down Beaker skeletons. Our researchers identified over four hundred Beaker skeletons in various collections, but only 360 of them were suitable for our work. Children are too young for the isotope analyses on teeth to be worth doing, and we also had to exclude many of the elderly—sadly, the old folk didn’t have enough dental enamel left on the surfaces of their teeth.
Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument Page 21