Scientific projects in archaeology have none of the glamor and immediacy of discoveries made during excavations: Television documentary makers just don’t know how to make a good story out of people looking at computer printouts. The work is slow and it takes a very long time to obtain results from the various labs. Only six years after the beginning of this project on the Beaker people are we beginning to get enough results to be able to see the full picture. The diet in the Beaker period—as reconstructed from values of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the bones—was surprisingly uniform from Scotland to Kent.27 No one was eating marine fish or seafood in detectable quantities, even though lots of the burials analyzed were from coastal areas of Scotland, Yorkshire, and Kent. Animal protein—either as meat, milk, or blood—was a central part of the diet but not massively predominant.
The wear marks visible microscopically on the Beaker people’s teeth can also tell us about their food.28 These marks are minute scratches and pits on the teeth’s grinding surfaces that are constantly being erased and renewed, and show what a dead person’s diet was like in the last few months of life. Interestingly, the Beaker teeth show no sign of the characteristic wear marks caused by eating stone-ground flour. Plenty have microscopic pitting of the sort most likely to be caused by the tiny grits that lurk inside green vegetables when they’re not thoroughly washed. Finally, Lucija Šoberl’s separate study of the lipids, or fatty acids, in the Beaker pots shows that these mostly contained dairy products—whether milk, cheese, or curds and whey, we cannot say.29
Like the results so far from the Aubrey Hole bones, the Beaker skeletons have revealed that most individuals led lives of good health. Only a handful, like the Stonehenge Archer, buried in the ditch with arrow wounds all over his body, died violently. In fact, the number of woundings that have left traces on the body is far greater among the burials in the Early Neolithic long barrows, more than a thousand years earlier than the Beaker burials.30 The low level of violent injury on Beaker-period bones belies the archer’s equipment frequently found in Beaker graves. One man in eastern Scotland had had his arm broken from being sharply twisted, but it had healed long before he died. Arthritis was common at a low level, like the cases seen on some of the Aubrey Hole remains. There was no evidence for malnutrition; had there been episodes of famine, these would have shown up as enamel hypoplasia, ridges in the teeth relating to periods of starvation in an individual’s life.31
One of the completely unexpected discoveries was that a small number—fewer than half a dozen—of the Beaker skulls show evidence of head-binding during childhood. The human head can be easily distorted into a chosen, socially preferred shape by wrapping an infant’s skull very tightly to constrain its growth. Archaeologists are familiar with this practice elsewhere (it occurred frequently among the ancient Maya and the Huns, for example), but it has rarely been documented for prehistoric Britain.
The answers to questions about mobility and migration are to be found in the isotope levels within people’s tooth enamel. As well as using strontium and oxygen isotopes, the project also developed the study of sulphur isotopes. The value in the human body of sulphur isotopes varies with exposure to sea spray: The further inland people live, the lower the value. Using this technique we hoped to see if people buried inland had ever lived nearer the sea. Overall, the isotope results show that about half the Beaker people studied grew up in an area different to that in which they were buried. Fewer than seven people from Britain (including the Amesbury Archer) had isotope values indicating that they could have grown up outside Britain. This was not a population that had moved lock, stock, and barrel from mainland Europe, nor are we looking at a population of completely sedentary farmers, growing up to marry the boy next door and never leaving their home village.
It was slightly disappointing to discover how few of these Beaker people were likely to have been immigrants to Britain. For the Amesbury Archer, it is his unusual oxygen isotope value that shows he is likely to have grown up on the Continent. Unfortunately, anyone growing up on the Continent within a couple of hundred miles or so of the English Channel would have an oxygen isotope value no different from someone growing up on the British side. Two burials from Kent may well be those of immigrants, because their dietary isotope values are different from others in Britain, but we cannot be certain that they were incomers. Three burials from the Peak District have strontium isotope values higher than expected for Britain. Quite possibly these could also be immigrants.
When we think about migrations, we often envisage successive waves of incomers whose second, third, and successive generations would have been born on British soil but continued the traditions of their immigrant ancestors. The results of this project suggest that a small number of immigrants from Europe arrived in Britain at the beginning of this new cultural phase, around 2400 BC, but that they were not followed by a series of subsequent migrations over the next five centuries. The Amesbury Archer is perhaps a “founder” burial from that initial phase of migration. These arrivals might well have been very few in number, in contrast to their many descendants born in Britain. Equally, many of indigenous British ancestry would have adopted Beaker fashions of lifestyle and burial rites. There is certainly very little evidence for successive waves of immigrants during the Beaker period, except for the small group that ended up in the Peak District a century or two after the initial Beaker arrival, having left a homeland (as yet unidentified) very different from that of the Amesbury Archer.
The analyses have also highlighted unforeseen problems with the techniques. The oxygen isotope results show that current theories about certain Beaker individuals having traveled very long distances from the Continent must be revised. Development of a new method of calibrating oxygen isotope values places the Amesbury Archer’s origins not in the Alpine foothills but somewhere further west. He is more likely to have come from eastern France or western Germany; the middle Rhine is a good possibility, since cultural links in Beaker styles between this area and Wessex have been recognized by archaeologists for more than fifty years.
Another Early Bronze Age skeleton—the boy with the amber necklace—has a local origin in Britain even though he has an unusual oxygen isotope signature, comparable to people living in the Mediterranean. This fourteen-to-fifteen-year-old, wearing ninety beads of Baltic amber, was buried on Boscombe Down, not far from the Amesbury Archer, and at first glance his oxygen isotope values are much higher than would be expected for anyone living east of Land’s End in Cornwall. Yet, when the archaeological scientists compared the results of all his isotopes with those of the Beaker People Project’s individuals from Wessex, it became clear that he was actually a local, one of many whose origins were on the Wessex chalk. The mystery is why the Wessex chalk-dwellers, and indeed all of the Beaker people in the study, have such high oxygen values relative to the regions where they had grown up. The project has clearly discovered a problem with the calibration. A likely explanation for the unusual values can be traced to what these people were drinking.
Oxygen isotope values are mapped geographically from aquifers—below-ground water that appears as rivers and streams. If we were to measure oxygen isotope values of rainwater or “processed” water (i.e., milk, beer, or boiled food) from those same areas, we would find that these values are significantly higher than ordinary drinking water. If people were deriving their liquid intake mostly from cows’ milk, beer, boiled foods, and even dew ponds when their molars were forming, then their oxygen isotope values would be correspondingly higher. We have to take into account the fact that people’s liquid diet has a major effect on their oxygen isotopes.
Putting all the evidence together, we can see that we are looking at people who were probably descendants of both a single and perhaps small wave of immigration, and of indigenous inhabitants who adopted Beaker ways. Their culture and economy centered on cattle and on the products provided by them. They were semi-mobile, often moving long distances with their herds, and settling far
from where they grew up. We know from what is found on their settlements that people of the Beaker period did grow cereal crops, but they must have consumed them either as boiled porridge or as an alcoholic beverage (or both)—the lack of microscopic scratches on their teeth indicates that they had no querns (grinding stones), and thus could not have made flour for bread.
14
BLUESTONEHENGE: BACK TO THE RIVER
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One of the Stonehenge Riverside Project’s key objectives was to investigate the end of the Stonehenge Avenue—or, rather, the area where we thought the avenue should meet the River Avon, if indeed it extended that far. When we started work, the avenue was certainly known to stretch as far as today’s riverside village of West Amesbury, but there it possibly petered out. In the 1920s, the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford saw in an aerial photograph of West Amesbury some earthworks that he thought might be the avenue’s banks continuing right to the river.1 Survey on the ground during the 1980s showed that these earthworks are actually later land boundaries, probably associated with the remains of West Amesbury’s Medieval village.2 One of the avenue’s ditches was located 170 meters from the river in 1972 by George Smith, digging in advance of new housing in the village.3
Some archaeologists reckoned that the avenue never actually went as far as the river but came to a stop on the high ground to the west, just beyond the 1972 dig. If they were right, then our theory about places of the living/places of the ancestors was wrong: If the avenue didn’t link Stonehenge to the river, then the Avon didn’t link this landscape of the dead to the wooden circles of the living upstream. This was a key area to explore. The land by the river here at the end of the avenue in West Amesbury is a grassy field, but there was no guarantee that we would get permission to survey and dig.
The riverside field has not only been listed as an ancient monument, on the off-chance that the avenue really did extend this far, but is also owned by Sir Edward Antrobus, a descendant of Sir Edmund Antrobus—a former owner of Stonehenge who had prevented Flinders Petrie and various other senior archaeologists from digging at Stonehenge during the nineteenth century. To our considerable relief, however, today’s Antrobus family was happy to let us see whether there was anything on their land.
We threw everything we had at trying to detect the avenue and any other likely prehistoric remains beneath the riverside field. The first resistivity survey produced such poor results, largely on account of the dry ground, that we had to do it again. Even then, nothing showed up that could be considered a likely candidate for the avenue. The only intriguing feature was an area of high resistance that, we wondered, might be an area of paving, perhaps a cobbled ramp, leading down to the river.
The magnetometer and radar surveys were no more informative. The field was full of the remains of banks, ditches, and leveled platforms from Medieval times when this area was occupied as part of the village, but there was no way we could put hands on hearts and swear that any of it looked promisingly prehistoric. Perhaps the avenue never reached this far; if it ever did, it could have been destroyed by the Medieval houses and ditches.
An auger survey was more hopeful. We located a pair of ditches in roughly the right place for the avenue ditches but only an excavation would reveal whether they were prehistoric or Medieval. In 2007, we opened a long, thin trench near the river to examine these ditches. To our disappointment, one of them was Medieval. This could not be the Stonehenge Avenue.
We could have given up then and there; the weather was atrocious and the clay subsoil turned to mud, making digging extremely difficult. Sieving the excavated soil to extract any finds was a nasty job: The diggers had to push and squeeze the mud to try to get it through the perpetually clogged mesh of the sieves. In such circumstances, one often wet-sieves the soil, running water through the sieves to wash away the mud, but this process was out of the question at West Amesbury because of the problem of what to do with the muddy runoff involved. The River Avon is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and the Environment Agency is very firm about not allowing water to enter the river.
Our two supervisors on this trench, Jim Rylatt and Bob Nunn, are made of strong stuff and weren’t going to stop until the job was done. They located the second ditch indicated by the auger survey and saw from its alignment that this could not be part of the avenue either. It was, however, curving rather than straight, a good sign that it might be prehistoric. A curving ditch could be the remains of anything from a Bronze Age barrow ditch to a gully surrounding an Iron Age roundhouse.
As they dug into the curving ditch, Jim and Bob started to find prehistoric worked flints, but there were also small pieces of Medieval pottery. Earthworms were clearly the culprits for the mixing of material of different dates in this layer at the top of the ditch. Lower down, the thick clay layers contained virtually nothing except the occasional cattle bone.
The last day of digging arrived and we weren’t much the wiser: Perhaps this was the ditch of an Early Bronze Age barrow. On the resistivity plots we could see a faint outline of a circular feature; it was fairly unconvincing and only the benefit of hindsight made it at all visible. The problem with interpreting geophysics plots is that the features they show aren’t usually clear-cut; it’s always easier to fully understand what the geophysics shows after you have dug the features. In this instance, it was only after we’d found the curving ditch in the ground that we could see that this faint circular area on the printout wasn’t our imagination but was really there. It was the right size for a barrow, and Jim reckoned that a platform of natural flints he’d found inside the ditch was possibly the last remains of its destroyed mound.
We really needed something datable but we had run out of time. Reg Jury, the helpful and interested local contractor who provided mechanical diggers from the very first season of our project, had by lunchtime arrived with his machine to fill in our trench. I had resigned myself to disappointment—there would be no dating evidence for the ditch—and went off to fry up an egg sandwich in a spare wheelbarrow, ready to feed it to Jim as soon as he’d labored through the very last of the sticky clay in the ditch bottom. Then, over the noise of Reg revving his engine, I heard Jim yell—he’d found the broken-off tip of an antler pick right in the bottom of the ditch, literally in his last shovel-full.
When, after months of waiting, the radiocarbon date for this pick came back from the lab, we were delighted to find that it was too early for a Bronze Age round barrow. Our ditch was part of an undiscovered henge dating to 2460–2190 BC, the same date range as the Stonehenge Avenue. Jim and Bob’s perseverance had paid off.
We’d planned to finish all excavation work in 2008, to give ourselves maximum time in which to analyze and write up the project’s results over the next four to five years, but it was clear to everyone that we needed another, final season of excavation. A ditch wasn’t enough—we needed to know what was in the center of this henge. Jim had noticed that an ornamental bridge crossing a small ditch next to the Avon’s main channel has piers constructed from broken-up sarsens. There’s no sarsen in the area, so there is a possibility that these bridge pillars came from a destroyed standing stone. Going back to the second resistivity survey, we could see four almost circular patches of high resistance arranged in a square inside the henge ditch. We wanted to find out whether these were pits that once held standing stones.
In August 2009, we were back. Ramilisonina came too, on a six-week visit from Madagascar, to see what his insight more than ten years before had led to. This was the longest time he’d spent in the UK, and he was fascinated by all aspects of British life. Some of his observations were unexpected and instructive. There were no poor people living in Britain, he concluded, because no one was trapping and eating the squirrels in London’s parks. When told that there were indeed poor people and that many of them suffered from obesity, he patently thought such an idea was quite ridiculous. He marveled at Britain’s wildlife, so rich in contrast to Madagascar, where anythin
g outside a nature reserve gets eaten. The sight of autumnal elderberries, blackberries, crab apples, sloes, and many other fruits lying ungathered in hedgerows left him saddened by the waste of good food. He thought that there couldn’t be many people actually living in Britain—the roads that we drove along weren’t lined by shanty towns of hawkers selling fast food to passing motorists, nor did we pass through any sprawling towns or cities: The overpass and the highway are not elements of Madagascar’s infrastructure. On one of the few occasions that we bypassed a town visible from the road—in this case Northampton, with a population of 200,000 people—Ramil remarked that it was interesting to see a big village in the distance.
It was sometimes startling to see England through Ramil’s eyes, and we wondered what he would make of the archaeology at West Amesbury, and of the project team. Even though the project’s directors had not worked together in the same trench since 2004, we discovered that we could still all get along in a confined space without too much arguing. There were also many more professional archaeologists than students in the team for this final year. Over the years, our students had graduated and gone off to jobs in commercial archaeology—this was now their busman’s holiday, spending time on the research excavation where they’d first learned to dig. The weather was fine, the campsite dry, and the excavation site was one of the most beautiful spots in Wiltshire, sheltered by riverbank trees beside the gently flowing Avon. We even discovered a swimming hole, halfway between West Amesbury and our campsite, where we could wash away the daily dirt before going home for supper.
Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument Page 22