Perhaps the fires were pyres for cremating the corpses whose ashes were buried at Stonehenge—but we’ve found no cremated bones among the charcoal. In one of the stoneholes we did find a fragment of an unburned pig humerus (bone from the upper front leg) dating to 2670–2470 BC. This is particularly interesting because it is from the same period as Durrington Walls village and the sarsen phase at Stonehenge. It probably fell into the hole from the ground surface where, by the look of the pitting and cracking of the bone’s surface, it must have been lying around for years if not decades.
Once upon a time, the site of Bluestonehenge was a settlement, but this was long before the people of the Neolithic came here. In the mud underneath where the henge bank had been, Jim and Bob found a dense spread of flints. These were all mixed together in a single layer, but they include microlithic flint blades from the Late Mesolithic and larger blades from the Early Mesolithic, the periods before the Neolithic. Thousands of years before Stonehenge, this riverside spot was a campsite for hunter-gatherers living off the resources of the river and its margins.
Today a spring rises north of the chalk promontory at West Amesbury, on which Mesolithic people once camped, and on which Bluestonehenge once stood. Back then, when the water table was higher, the springhead was probably much further up the valley—perhaps not far from the Neolithic settlement on the slope of King Barrow ridge—so a stream would have flowed here. On its north bank, our test pits found more Mesolithic flints. We had located one of the campsites that could have been used by the people who put up those pine posts nearly ten thousand years ago.
By the time our excavations finished in 2009, we had come a long way. After seven years of searching, we’d found out a lot about Stonehenge, mostly by looking at its context—its landscape—as well as by re-evaluating what had already been found within Stonehenge itself.
15
WHY STONEHENGE IS WHERE IT IS
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One of the most incongruous aspects of Stonehenge today is the presence of a major road, the A303, running within 150 meters of its southern edge. At the point where it passes Stonehenge, this busy road has only a single lane in each direction, and on Fridays it is packed with long queues of drivers escaping London to spend the weekend in the southwest of England. And they must all come back again on Sunday night, for a second wait in the traffic jam.
Since 1992, the British government has been wondering what to do about this. As well as the economic cost of the traffic jams (there are formulas used to work such things out), this road is seen as a blight on one of the United Kingdom’s very few World Heritage Sites. New routes involving moving the road to the north or south of the monument have all been considered and all ultimately rejected. In the late 1990s, the Highways Agency proposed that the A303 beside Stonehenge should be hidden in a tunnel, constructed by the cut-and-cover method, in which a broad corridor of land would be stripped away and a tunnel created by covering a new, sunken roadway with a grassed-over concrete roof.
The cost of this method looked relatively inexpensive—much cheaper than boring a tunnel—but it would require a very large swath of land close to Stonehenge to be archaeologically excavated and then entirely removed in advance of construction. There was much opposition to the proposal, from a spectrum of interest groups ranging from local residents to those concerned with the wildlife of Salisbury Plain. Many archaeologists worldwide objected to the scheme because it would utterly destroy a huge slice of archaeological remains within the World Heritage Site, over an area so large that it would make the 1968 new road cut through Durrington Walls look tiny.
The government backed down and agreed to pursue the less damaging but far more expensive option of a bored tunnel. In 2004, the Highways Agency presented its proposal at a public inquiry in Salisbury. Archaeologists and conservation bodies were divided in their views. English Heritage backed the scheme strongly but the National Trust and many others thought the planned tunnel was too short: The proposal on the table was for a 2.1-kilometer tunnel through the 5-kilometer-wide World Heritage Site, which would require long and deeply embanked approaches leading into it; in addition the ground level in Stonehenge Bottom would need to be artificially raised to accommodate its height. Feelings ran high among archaeologists: For some, this deal—albeit imperfect—was the best that Stonehenge would ever get; for others, it was a half-baked solution, and the road problem was best left alone until the job could be done properly.
In his report, the planning inspector gave the green light for the short tunnel. By that point, though, the cost of implementing the scheme had doubled, to around £500 million. A particular cause for concern was the state of the chalk deep below Stonehenge—it appeared to be unstable, and expensive techniques would be required for its safe removal. Even at the height of the early 2000s’ economic boom, the British government couldn’t afford it. For those who like to know the price of everything, this was more than Stonehenge’s scenery was worth. It is estimated that the government had to spend more than £30 million on consultants and lawyers’ fees for us all to end up exactly where we started. Fortunately, a tiny proportion of that money did go into something of lasting value.
As part of their proposal, the Highways Agency commissioned archaeological contractors to carry out field evaluations along the proposed road line. A huge strip of land immediately to the south of Stonehenge, from one end of the World Heritage Site to the other and even beyond, was given a magnetometer survey and also trial-trenched. Even though the long, thin, machine-dug trenches only represented about 2 percent of the proposed road corridor, the total area excavated by these two hundred or so trenches was vast—the greatest area ever excavated within the World Heritage Site, except for the 1967 dig at Durrington Walls. The results were an almost total blank.1 The only new prehistoric feature of any significance was one Beaker burial.
There is an absolute rule in archaeology that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There could once have been prehistoric remains here, since destroyed by plowing, for example. However, the absence of Neolithic, Copper Age, or Early Bronze Age pits—what we now know to have been integral to settlements such as Durrington Walls—makes it likely that nothing of importance was missed by these trial trenches. The excavators concluded that this area to the south of Stonehenge had been largely devoid of activities, monuments, or settlement sites in the fourth to second millennia BC.
Years before, archaeologists had noticed that Stonehenge sits at the center of an area, up to a mile across, that contains far fewer Bronze Age round barrows than the areas slightly further out from the stone circle. The round barrow cemeteries are concentrated in a wide, doughnut-shaped circle on the skyline around Stonehenge.2 They sit on the edges of a central, empty envelope of visibility immediately around the stone circle, within which there are fewer than forty barrows. Since the trial trenches were within the envelope of visibility, their emptiness supports the existing evidence that this area closely encircling Stonehenge was deliberately avoided both by Neolithic and Copper Age inhabitants of the area, as well as by the Early Bronze Age builders of the round barrows.
As our own excavations at Durrington Walls came to an end, our next task was to look at the landscape west and north of Stonehenge for evidence in this area of settlements occupied at the time of Stonehenge. Julian Richards’s survey team had recovered lots of worked flints, including Neolithic arrowheads, from a large field on the rising ground immediately to the west of Stonehenge.3 Here, in fact, was one of the two densest concentrations that he found in the entire survey area.
We also hoped to solve a mystery that had arisen when the visitor center was installed in 1967. Back then, Lance and Faith Vatcher had carried out a small dig and found the end of a long, straight ditch heading off from the parking lot area southward, past the west side of Stonehenge, which had held a palisade of closely spaced timber posts.4 The Vatchers found nothing to date the ditch or the palisade, but they knew that the timber posts were
long decayed by the time that a man’s corpse was buried in the ditch terminal at some time in the period 780–410 BC (the Early Iron Age). There was a possibility that this timber palisade was part of a huge Neolithic enclosure, like the ones dug by Alasdair Whittle at West Kennet, near Avebury, in 1987 and 1990—Josh had been there, too, on the team as a student.5 If this was a Neolithic enclosure, it could have contained a large settlement.
In planning an excavation on this site, the work of the Gaffney brothers was important. Quite a few archaeologists have a relative in the business: Second-generation archaeologists are fairly common (archaeological children seem to either love or utterly loathe their summers necessarily spent hanging around excavations) and pairs of siblings aren’t unknown. In the case of the Gaffneys, older brother Vince, of the University of Birmingham, has been interested for many years in the Stonehenge palisade, and younger brother Chris, of the University of Bradford, is a geophysicist. They had just developed the prototype of an improved magnetometer, mounted on a handcart with an on-board GPS. It can cover ground much faster than conventional machines, and provides sharper resolution of below-ground anomalies. Wheeling his cart across the field, looking like an ice-cream vendor late for an appointment, Chris was able to track the course of the palisade ditch as it continued southward up the hill, split into two and headed off to both the south and the west.
In 2008, we set out four trenches in this huge field, using the geophysics plot to decide where to put them. One trench covered the junction where the palisade ditch split in two. The second was positioned south of it, where a recent pipe trench had obscured the magnetometer’s plot of the ditch. Both areas were at the heart of Julian Richards’s worked-flint concentration, so we hoped that we might pick up traces of a Neolithic village. The third trench was placed by the palisade ditch far along its west fork, beyond a section in which the ditch appeared to have a couple of gaps. The magnetic anomalies here, we thought, might just be pits in a settlement. The fourth trench was further north, closer to the A344 and the visitors’ center; here we wanted to find out whether a line of magnetic anomalies were more Mesolithic postholes, like those under the nearby parking lot.
In the field west of Stonehenge, we dug a number of trenches to explore the enigmatic palisade ditch. Stonehenge is visible to the right beyond the cars.
The field is owned by the National Trust, which insisted that we remove the turf and plowsoil entirely by hand. We were aghast. For Josh and fellow site director Paul Garwood, Vince Gaffney’s colleague at Birmingham University, this was a Herculean undertaking. Their team had to lift the turf and sieve all the topsoil across an area half the size of a football pitch—and they had to do it fast. We spent a lot of our grant money building a battle fleet of new sieves, and raided the storage areas of five universities to round up enough shovels, spades, and buckets. Even with a small army of students and volunteers, it took two whole weeks to get to the point where we could begin to excavate the archaeological features beneath the topsoil. Working conditions on this exposed slope were often miserable, and we felt the students were never going to forgive us.
We counted up everything found in the sieves and recorded, grimly, that we could have estimated the total quantity of worked flints in the plowsoil by sieving just a sample of it. As our geophysics and augering had shown (and as aerial photographs, the tenant farmer, and Julian Richards’s old Stonehenge Environs team had confirmed many times), this field has been heavily plowed for centuries. Although the worked flints survive plowing, more fragile remains, like bones and pottery, don’t.
We felt our hand-digging had been a waste of time and effort (not to mention money); we could have dug an appropriate number of our customary meter-square test pits and then machined the topsoil and come up with the same result. Months later, though, as we studied the flints in the lab back in Sheffield, we realized that the laborious sieving of the field’s topsoil had been worthwhile: Many of the flints recovered were long blades from the Mesolithic. We had discovered the location of a Mesolithic campsite close to the site of Stonehenge and just 400 meters south of the pine posts under the parking lot. Long before the Neolithic, people had camped in this small valley; perhaps this was where they lived when they erected those gigantic posts.
In terms of Neolithic remains, however, the results were disappointing. The palisade ditch had been cleaned out and re-used in the Middle Bronze Age as a boundary that formed part of a Bronze Age farming landscape of fields. We couldn’t find anything to date the palisade ditch, but the fact that its line was continued by the Bronze Age ditch makes it pretty likely that it’s only a little bit earlier. There was no trace of any Neolithic activity, so the density of flints recovered on the surface was indicative mostly of later activity from the middle and end of the second millennium BC. Even when knowledge of metallurgy spread and bronze tools became available, people continued to work flint. Unfortunately, the vast mass of Bronze Age flint work looks no different from the worked flints of the previous millennium; it can be impossible to tell them apart unless you find diagnostic tools, such as arrowheads, whose distinctive shapes change through time.
After the field ditch had silted up, around 1250 BC, Late Bronze Age people buried three infants in the top of it, together with a whole pot and a beautiful carved small chalk pig. The Stonehenge pig is an endearing little object that attracted a surprising amount of media interest. Someone thought it looked more like a hedgehog, so the British Hedgehog Society was contacted to share its views. On the other hand, most of the diggers agreed that the little figurine’s long flat ears left no doubt that the artist had intended to represent a pig.
A carved chalk pig, dating from the Late Bronze Age, was found in the upper layers filling the palisade ditch. The pig has four “button” feet, a snout, and floppy ears.
Paul Garwood found that where he was digging, over in the westernmost trench in this field, was part of a Middle Bronze Age settlement. In the lee of a deep ditch was a group of postholes and small pits containing Bronze Age pottery. In the northern, fourth trench, our possible line of Mesolithic postholes turned out to be four tree holes of Roman and later date; the fact that there were four in a line was pure coincidence.
We were all disappointed not to find any Neolithic activity in this area west of Stonehenge, but we had learned an important lesson. This high chalkland, far from sources of fresh water, was not a place for Neolithic farming, even though it had been the site of an earlier hunter-gatherer settlement. Only when people had become fully sedentary farmers, from 1500 BC in the Middle Bronze Age, did they properly colonize this dry landscape, dividing it up into fields for their grazing sheep and plowing up the grassland for arable fields of wheat and barley. A good proportion of the huge quantities of worked flints in the topsoil is likely to date from this period, much of it brought onto the fields in garbage carried from the settlements to be spread as manure.
We now understood that the palisade ditch was the first land boundary to have been laid out across Stonehenge’s open grasslands. Although it stopped in the area of the old visitor center, after a gap of about 400 meters it then continued northward alongside the Stonehenge Avenue before curving westward across the ruined banks of the Cursus. The northern stretch is called the Gate Ditch; California Dave led a team digging a short section where it runs alongside the avenue, and found that it too had held the posts of a timber palisade.
Julian Richards’s Stonehenge Environs Project showed that, after the Copper Age, the entire area around Stonehenge was encroached upon by these Bronze Age field systems, visible from aerial photographs.6 Once known as “Celtic fields,” they have nothing to do with Celts. These lattice arrangements of field ditches mostly date to the Bronze Age, but continued in use into the Iron Age.
Interestingly, although the palisade ditch passed close to Stonehenge, the Bronze Age farmers gave Stonehenge itself a wide berth, leaving it untouched within an island of open ground that extended northward to beyond, where the av
enue changes direction from its solstice axis and heads east toward the river. Stonehenge was evidently still treated as a place of respect at this time, and it was still visited even though construction had ended. In fact, all excavations at Stonehenge put together have recovered nearly as much pottery from the period 1500–700 BC as there is for the period 3000–1500 BC.7 Most of it comes from the interior of the sarsen circle and from the ditch.
The late summer of 2008—the year in which we dug both the palisade and the Aubrey Hole—was wet and cold. In previous years, our campsite beside the Avon at the Woodbridge Inn in North Newnton had been a happy haven of sunshine and tranquillity, but that season it turned into a quagmire of mud and misery. With a team of 160 diggers living there, our feet soon churned up the grass. We tried scattering bales of straw to dry it out but the straw soon rotted into a fetid mess. The floor of the tent where we ate our supper turned to liquid filth.
Everything was covered in mud—tents, equipment, and clothing. The vans and minibuses, perpetually stuck, made things worse spinning their wheels in ever-deepening ruts. Having to push seven heavy vehicles out of the swamp every morning made a bad start to each day. The sewage truck emptying the portable johns had to be towed out by a tractor—he wouldn’t be coming back. Outbreaks of trench foot were reported. The students either coped—when the going gets tough, the tough have another party—or wimped out. It was crunch time: Do you want to be an archaeologist or would it be sensible to consider a rather more indoor career?
Although the campsite was horrible, conditions in the trenches were perfect. Plenty of rain on the free-draining chalk soils brought out the color contrasts and kept the ground soft. In an entire month we lost only half a day’s digging because of the rain. On the north side of Stonehenge, our main aim that year was to reopen and extend trenches dug by Richard Atkinson into the Stonehenge Avenue, to find out more about its dating and sequence. Atkinson had left barely any records of six of his trenches—just two plans, a single section drawing, and two photographs.8 Half a century later we intended to finish the job of recording his excavations. Two of his trenches, dug in 1978, had been properly recorded, and even published, by John Evans, a colleague of Atkinson at Cardiff.9
Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument Page 24