Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge
Page 6
As well as the long barrows, the same period saw the creation of far more, but smaller, portal tombs. These consisted of a close arrangement of standing stones, usually three or four, which supported a large capstone to form a burial chamber. The entire structure was then covered with earth to create a mound. Today, most of these burial mounds have eroded away, leaving only the skeleton of the original megaliths to appear something like a kind of giant stone table standing alone on the landscape. These exposed structures are commonly known as dolmens, a name thought to originate from an old Celtic term meaning “stone portal,” from where the archaeological term “portal tomb” derives.16
Dolmens exist in considerable numbers throughout southern Britain and Ireland, one of the largest being in South West Wales. Called the Pentre Ifan (Ivan’s Village) Dolmen, it consists of an 18-ton capstone that is 16 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 3 feet thick and is held 8 feet off the ground by three standing stones, while three other, smaller monoliths remain, which had once flanked and sealed the entrance when the structure was covered by a mound. Another typical dolmen, a 14-ton, 18-foot-long capstone supported by three 5-foot-tall upright monoliths, is Lanyon Quoit in the county of Cornwall, in the extreme southwest of England (quoit being another old name for such a monument). Also in the county of Cornwall, on Bodmin Moor, there stands Trethevy Quoit, which consists of a 12-foot long, 10-ton sloping capstone supported by five upright monoliths, the tallest about 9 feet tall. Poulnabrone Dolmen in western Ireland has a 12-foot-long, relatively thin capstone, held 6 feet above the ground by four monoliths. Spinster’s Rock in the county of Devon, in England’s West Country, has a 14-foot by 10-foot 16-ton capstone, supported 8 feet above the ground by three standing stones. In the county of Oxfordshire in central England, there stand the Whispering Knights, a collapsed dolmen consisting of four uprights, the tallest about 8 foot high, with its capstone now flat on the ground. And in the extreme southeast of England, in the county of Kent, is the quaintly named Kit’s Coty House, which consists of three 8-foot upright stones supporting a capstone measuring 13 by 9 feet. These are just a few of the hundreds of dolmens that still survive in the British Isles; most of them, however, only remain as fallen stones.
Fig. 3.2. The locations of just some of the long barrows and dolmens of the British Isles.
These dolmens date from 3600 to 3100 BCE, a time frame similar to that of the long barrows, and seem to have belonged to the same culture. Archaeologists believe that the mounds that covered them were built to a design similar to that of the long barrows: much longer than wide, with the burial chamber situated at one end. Essentially, they would have been less elaborate long barrows with an entrance leading directly into the chamber rather than being accessed by a passage.17 The reason long barrows have tended to survive as mounds, whereas the portal tombs have eroded, is that the barrow mounds were built from both earth and chunks of rock. These dolmens, or portal tombs, were probably built by smaller or poorer communities, where a lack of sufficient resources or labor prohibited the creation of the more elaborate constructions. Nonetheless, both structures would have been considerable undertakings. Large stones had to be quarried and shaped and then dragged to where they were erected, and the lintels and capstones were probably hauled into place once mounds of earth were stacked around them to form ramps.
Judging by their burial practices, it seems that the Barrow culture lived in stable communities where they planted crops such as wheat and barley and raised herds of sheep, pigs, and cattle. They had not yet learned to weave, so clothing would have been garments made from animal hide. From examination of the human bones of the period, it seems that the average life span was between thirty and thirty-five years. Permanent settlements were pretty much confined to coastal areas, where there was a plentiful supply of fish, while farming communities tended to move every so often. The intricacies of crop cultivation had not yet been mastered, so once the nutrients of a piece of land had been depleted, the settlement would move to some other fertile location nearby. After a while the land had lain fallow for long enough to regenerate, so the community could return to a previous settlement. For this reason buildings were made from wood, with stone structures being reserved for the dead.
Long barrows likely served a succession of generations whose settlements were moved regularly around them. The barrows and portal tombs probably served as the central point of a rotating community made up of just a few hundred people. Archaeologists have estimated that with the builders using simple Stone Age tools, construction of the West Kennet and Wayland’s Smithy long barrows, for example, would have been extensive and backbreaking endeavors but could have been accomplished within around a decade. As these tombs had movable stone “doorways,” it is possible that they were also used as shrines that could be periodically opened, not only for new interments but also for ceremonies concerning some kind of ancestor worship. It was not until around 3300 BCE that the people of the British Isles began to develop crop rotation, alternatively planting different types of crops in a system of divided fields so that the land would be replenished and remain fertile. This innovation had presumably occurred through trial and error, as it would be millennia before the chemistry of farming was understood. It led inevitably to permanent settlements of much larger populations—and, so it would seem, the beginnings of the Megalithic age.18
Over the years there has been much speculation concerning whether the Megalithic culture owes its origins to Brittany, although modern archaeology has pretty much ruled this out. We have already seen that the type of stone structures erected in Brittany were markedly different from those in the British Isles. Although there are chambered graves, often referred to as dolmens, in Brittany, they are also very different from those of the pre-Megalithic era in the British Isles. They consist of two parallel rows of upright stones, around ten on average, with a series of horizontal stones placed across the tops of them to form a tunnel, nothing like a portal tomb. There are one or two stone formations that do resemble dolmens, but these are of a later period, and the similarities could be coincidental, or they might even have been copied from those in Britain. The prehistoric culture in Brittany was indeed remarkable, having erected some of the world’s oldest monuments. But it seems to have had nothing to do with Megalithic stone-circle-building culture in the British Isles. There are small arrangements of standing stones in Brittany known as cromlechs, of which there are just a few dozen. But these are stone ovals, horseshoes, and squares; in fact, there is not a true stone circle among them. This name has led to some confusion as it is also applied to dolmens in parts of Wales. The word “cromlech” actually comes from an ancient Celtic term meaning “a collection of standing stones,” not a specific type of monument. The Bretons may have erected stone monoliths, as did other Stone Age people around the world, but they did not create the kind of stone circles, megalithic complexes, henge monuments, and the mysterious earthworks found exclusively in the British Isles (see chapter 1).
So the Barrow culture of the British Isles seems to have developed independently from the stone-monument-building culture in Brittany, as did the Megalithic era that followed. The question then is, Where did the Megalithic era begin? One might assume that it started in southern Britain, where the majority of the earlier long barrows and dolmens are found. It seems not. Astonishingly the first stone circle was built far away from both Brittany and southern Britain—on the Orkney Isles, off the northern tip of Scotland.
4
The Beginning
The Stones of Stenness
THE OLDEST DATED STONE CIRCLE in the British Isles is found approximately 700 miles north of Stonehenge, on an island called Mainland. With an area of about 200 square miles, it is the largest of the Orkney Isles, which lie some 10 miles off the northern tip of Scotland. Known as the Stones of Stenness (after the name of a nearby village), the monument now consists of four stones, up to 16 feet high, standing in a semicircle, with two smaller standing stones and a third lying f
lat grouped together just inside the arrangement. Now called the cove, these smaller stones were only erected in the early twentieth century as a tourist attraction. Wealthy sightseers would be told that the flat stone was an altar where human sacrifices were made. It was partly dismantled in the 1970s. However, archaeological excavations have determined that although the cove never formed part of the original megalithic monument, its stones were probably fragments of fallen monoliths from the ancient stone circle, rearranged to form the supposed altar in 1907. As with many stone circles over the years, stones have been toppled and broken up for building materials or smashed apart by religious zealots. In fact, in 1814 a newcomer to the Orkneys, one Captain Mackay, who leased the land on which the stones stood, deliberately attempted to remove the entire monument. Apparently, he was angered by local people who were performing “rituals” there. What kind of rituals is not recorded. Outraged, the islanders managed to put a stop to the demolition before the Stones of Stenness were completely destroyed.
From the radiocarbon dating of organic material found beneath the stones still standing, the circle seems to have been erected around 3100 BCE, and from telltale signs in the soil, it seems that it once consisted of twelve monoliths, equally spaced in a circle of just over 100 feet in diameter. Archaeologists have found evidence that a further stone, probably a king stone (see chapter 1), long since moved or destroyed, stood about 200 feet outside the circle to the southeast, which happens to align with the midwinter sunrise as seen from the center of the ring. These standing stones would probably have been between 16 and 20 feet high, but although they were as tall as some of the largest megaliths elsewhere in the British Isles, they would have been relatively light. The type of sandstone from which they are fashioned is known as flagstone, a sedimentary rock divided into natural layers, making it comparatively easy to quarry into slabs. The remaining monoliths are only about 4 feet wide and 1 foot thick, giving them an elongated, tablet-like appearance, different from the hefty look of monuments such as Avebury and Stonehenge. They are thought to have been quarried near what is now the village of Finstown, about 3 miles to the east, where, interestingly, a modern quarry still exists today. There are many other standing stones in the area (see chapter 6), but these have been dated to around five hundred years after the Stones of Stenness.1
The Orkney people who erected the Stones of Stenness also developed their own style of pottery, known as grooved ware. It gets its name from the characteristic grooved designs that decorated the rims of the unusual, flat-bottomed, straight-sided pots, the remains of which have been found in and around the Orkney settlements and monuments of the period. For some years scientists have been able to date ceramic material using a process called thermoluminescence. When pottery is fired it undergoes a change in crystalline structure that alters over subsequent time and can be measured to determine how long ago the item was made. However, thermoluminescence dating is only accurate to a limited extent: low levels of radiation from certain types of rocks or exposure to ultraviolet rays from sunlight, for example, can contaminate the sample and render testing unreliable. In recent years a new and far more accurate technique has been developed to date pottery. Called rehydroxylation dating, it measures how much water pottery has absorbed since the time it was fired.2 By using a combination of these techniques archaeologists have now dated the first grooved ware to around 3100 BCE—the same time that the Stones of Stenness were erected. This has led to the name Grooved Ware culture being applied to the inhabitants of the Orkney Isles who built what appears to be the first stone circle.3
Grooved ware is found at other Neolithic sites in the British Isles, spreading quickly from north to south, over a period of around a century. This couldn’t have been though invasion —the population of the Orkneys was too small to pose any kind of threat to anyone else—but rather it was the result of a rapid expansion of cultural influence. But it was not only the new type of pottery that was systematically adopted elsewhere in the British Isles but also the building of stone dwellings, and, more importantly, the creation of stone circles. Grooved ware ceramics have been found at nearly all of the earliest stone circles, very much implying that they were linked to the same cultural innovations that began on the Orkney Isles. Grooved ware pottery is actually found at Stonehenge, dating from around 3000 BCE, implying that those who built the first stone circle at the site (see chapter 1) had adopted the culture that began on the Orkneys only a century before.4
Since so many grooved ware pots—from small drinking vessels to the size of buckets—have been found at the earliest stone circles and in contemporary burial sites, it is likely that their design held some special, perhaps religious, significance. And as the oldest examples are found on the Orkney Isles, it would appear that this new thinking—spiritual, social, or whatever—that led to stone-circle building actually originated there. Some commentators have argued that such cultural innovation could not have originated in such an isolated area with a limited population. The argument is sound, but the problem is that there is, so far, no convincing evidence that it originated anywhere else. We have already discounted any direct influence from Brittany (see chapter 3).
As for the south of Britain: if Grooved Ware culture originated there, how did it spread through the British Isles, beginning in the far north? Although various exotic ideas have been proposed, such as seafaring migrants from the Mediterranean or the Middle East, perhaps the early Egyptians or Sumerians, the kind of dwellings, building techniques, ceramic ware, and monuments found on the Orkney Isles bear little similarity to anything from that contemporary part of the world. From a geographical perspective, the only reasonable possibility that it could have begun somewhere other than in the Orkney Isles is that it came from Scandinavia, about 300 miles across the North Sea to the east of the islands. However, nothing has been found in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden anything like the culture on the Orkneys. The contemporary Scandinavians are known as the Pitted Ware culture, named after the ornamentation consisting of horizontal rows of depressions that decorate their pottery. Not only do their ceramics bear no resemblance to anything found on the Orkney Isles, they also were chiefly a hunter-gatherer people, still in the Mesolithic age.5 They certainly never built any stone circles. So even though it seems highly improbable that the Megalithic culture emerged on the isolated Orkney Isles, it has to have started somewhere and—at present—no other logical conclusion can be reached.
The Stones of Stenness seems to have been the first stone circle built anywhere in the British Isles. So what is known about it, historically? As the Romans never conquered this far north, we have no records from them concerning the Orkney Isles. The Vikings from Norway settled there in the ninth century CE, and when antiquarians began visiting and recording the stones during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, local people seem to have believed that the site had been a temple associated with the Norse god Odin. However, it dates from four millennia before the Vikings arrived.
Fig. 4.1. Northern Europe.
Incredibly, a settlement that housed some of the very people who built the Stones of Stenness still survives, virtually intact, due to a storm that buried it in sand around 2500 BCE. Called Skara Brae, this Neolithic village stands on the coast, some 6 miles northwest of the stone circle. It has been uncovered by archaeologists and found to have consisted of a group of clustered stone wall dwellings, set into the ground with only their thatch-covered roofs visible above the surface. The layout of this astonishing underground settlement, with its houses connected by a series of tunnels, was a clever way to keep warm and dry in the cold, damp climate of the windswept Orkney Isles. Occupied from around 3100 BCE, it is the best preserved site of its kind anywhere in the world. Not only does it date from the same time as the Stones of Stenness, but scientific analysis also has shown that pottery found there precisely matches similar fragments excavated from beneath the circle’s monoliths. This ancient village is unlike anything found anywhere else in the British Isles da
ting from before 3100 BCE. When Skara Brae was being established, the inhabitants of the rest of the British Isles had yet to create permanent, stone-built settlements; elsewhere dwellings were made primarily from wood (see chapter 3). Although such buildings occasionally had stone foundations, they were nothing remotely like those at Skara Brae.6
So who were these people? They certainly had no direct connection to the Barrow culture hundreds of miles to the south. Not only were they separated geographically from the inhabitants of southern Britain and Ireland, the distinctive long barrows and dolmen tombs of the period also are completely absent in the Orkney Isles or, for that matter, anywhere else in the northern British Isles.7 DNA analysis of human remains from the period can tell us only so much, and that is that the people of the Orkneys were indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the rest of the British Isles at the time (see chapter 11). Archaeological work, though, does suggest that the Grooved Ware culture emerged among those formerly living on the Orkneys. Before the building of Skara Brae, the site was already occupied. The houses were built around mounds of human domestic waste known as middens, basically heaps of discarded shells, animal bones, and other items associated with past human occupation. Such settlements on the Orkney Isles, dating up to the building of Skara Brae, are located close to the shores, implying that the inhabitants made their living primarily from the sea. This is supported by excavations revealing that their diet consisted mainly of fish; mollusks, such as crabs and lobsters; and various shellfish, along with edible seaweeds, such as kelp, carrageen, and laver, while clothing was made from the skins of marine mammals, such as seal and walrus.