New scientific discoveries: reinterpreting Stonehenge

[Music] do good evening everybody and welcome to our british academy british museum events uh new scientific discoveries reinterpreting stonehenge my name is chris gosden i'm professor of european archaeology oxford and a trustee of the british museum and we've got a fantastic lineup of speakers for you this evening in order of of um their appearance we've got mike parker pearson who's professor of british later pre-history at ucl who's worked on bonehenge a lot and and connected entities as you'll find out we've got eamonn baldwin who's a research fellow at birmingham university who's worked on the stonehenge hidden landscapes project susan greeney who is english heritage and is responsible for the visitors display center at stonehenge itself and last but definitely not least is alison sheridan who's former principal archaeologist at the research center for the national museum of of scotland um so it's a great pleasure to welcome all here today um and i would like to give the word to our first speaker who is mike parker pearson whose topic is the origins of the blue stones and the origins of stonehenge mike thanks very much chris it's uh great to be here in somewhere in the ether i'm going to talk about the very first stage of stonehenge and just to give everybody an idea of the chronology of the monument uh it really spans the end of the stone age into the beginning of the bronze age and i've marked in red on this slide that the key period of stonehenge its first stage around 3000 bc shortly after that and then a second stage around 2500 where we're starting to recognize the beginning of a copper age in britain very short-lived just 300 years before the early bronze age and after that second stage when those huge assassins went up there we've recognized three additional constructional stages now yes i've been working on stonehenge far too long it's 20 years and we started off with the stonehenge riverside project we're currently doing a stones of stonehenge project and these are my uh esteemed colleagues that have been working with me all these many years and we're um we're really looking at the the beginning of that monument uh a period that we can date really to within the 30th century bc um thanks to to radiocarbon dating and our excavation there in 2008 of one of these aubry hulls around the periphery of the monument suggested to us that these had once held that standing stones and from the shape and size of them we could compare them to holes with stones in the center of stonehenge to see that it's the the blue stones that have come from wales that we think were there at this very earliest stage as part of a circular monument of a ditch and a bank it wasn't alone in that landscape in terms of monuments because down by the river we discovered a second former stone circle that we named bluestonehenge at the end of the stonehenge avenue and although we weren't able to get absolute categorical dates we think that this was put up at the same time as stonehenge with some 25 blue stones as opposed to the 56 at stonehenge itself thank you simon uh susan will tell us about the and quarries but it's the blue stones that we're interested in they're of course much smaller no heavier than three and three-quarter tons and of course west wales 170 miles away where they seem to be sourced where we know that they're sourced is an extraordinary distance there are many different types of stone from dollar right through to rhyolite to volcanic tuff and sandstone next slide simon but it's thanks to our tremendous geologist robert sir richard bevinson i should also mention nick pierce it's been possible to identify the sources to the very outcrops of some of these as well as to characterize all the different types um the one of the other unusual stones foreign stones not a blue stone is what's known as the altar stone a great big sandstone uh monolith which lay in front of the the great trianathon triathlon we don't actually know where that came from it doesn't seem to come from priscilli like the other blue stones and it seems to be possibly south wales but maybe a greater range than that next slide but let's take a look at where the blue stains come from and robin richard and team were able to geologically provenance uh the greater quantity of spotted dolorite at stonehenge to this particular outcrop khan goydog and it was here we were able to excavate not only a platform in front of the stones but also extraction recesses where they come from and we were able to get radio carbon dates that showed that quarrying had taken place uh in the centuries up to 3000 bc with the culmination around the 30th century bc next slide and we found numerous tools these are some of them um these are wedges because uh the the the jointing in the natural rock makes it possible that if you can get stone or wooden wedges in behind those natural pillars you can then just force them off um next slide this is craig roosevelt this is rhyolite and you can see that the same principle works here that it too has formed these natural pillars once again we were able to get a series of radiocarbon dates indicated activity for the quarrying in the centuries before and around 3000 bc in this particular instance the geologists were able to identify one particular location at the end of the outcrop next slide and it's where i've got my hand there's a recess there and they could match the microstructure of the rock and the chemistry of the rock precisely to one of the types of rhyolite at stonehenge so one of the stones of stonehenge came from that very spot where i have my hand next slide what was even more extraordinary was that behind that um we had we discovered that they had left stone wedges in place and i've marked them with the red circles the bottom insert picture shows the view from the top these wedges were clearly left after they'd failed to remove the big bulky slide a big bulky monolith next to it and the interesting thing about the wedges is that they had doubt percussion damage tell from the type of percussion that these have been hammered in not with stones but with wooden sledge sledgehammers so um they were using some kind of mallet i imagine to to bash them into place to to open up the joint next slide we discovered well we've known for some time i suppose archaeologists have known that where the quarries are marked with red dots is in an area of considerable neolithic activity there are plenty of neolithic tombs most of them portal dolmens there are also a couple of neolithic enclosures and what attracted our attention was a group of four stones as a site called wine man marked by the red circle next slide here they are there's the art curving round and we decided to investigate whether archaeologists who recorded this a hundred years ago were right in describing this as a former stone circle next slide and what we discovered was beyond the ends of the current arc of four stones we had continuations of that ark in the form of whole sort of former formerly held standing stones and you can see in these uh the the the sockets that are left that they've ripped out the pillars but they'd actually left the packing which had originally kept them stable next slide and we can now see what we have to our surprise it was never a complete circle what we discovered was that not only had they removed stones but also they had prepared hulls around the southern part of the circuit to hold stones that they'd never put up in there so it looks as though the the project was abandoned mid construction what was interesting though by doing so this has given us a really interesting insight into how they built it you start the center marked by a big tree where they lit a fire and then you mark out mid-summer sunrise on the periphery on the boundary with a wooden post and then you create your entrance and then build your standing stones in basically segments and then in the middle of that process it failed next slide we have dates which place the circle's construction somewhere around 3300 bc but we're hoping for more precise dating we don't know when the stones that were removed were taken away um but we we think that it happened before the bronze age now what's interesting about the stones there is although they are of the unspotted dollar right our geologists have worked out that they're not from the same sources as the unspotted dolorite at stonehenge so we have the possibility that um maybe none of the stones at wineman actually went to stonehenge at all even if some of them did because it was an incomplete circle and only about a dozen stones were ever removed it could not have been many in in the first place next slide now of course the journey is quite extraordinary and you can take your choice did they go by land or by sea and of course the extraordinary question is why did they do it and there are various possibilities is is it push or pull is it actually people coming from there to stonehenge packing these things in their luggage or is it as jeffrey of monmouth wrote over 700 years ago actually an act of conquest by the people of wessex who went to to go and claim those stones in his story he talks about the the giants dance uh that uh there was was to build a monument to commemorate the dead but or are we looking at some kind of active unification bringing these two important and growing centers of power and ceremonial together by merging the stones of one or more monuments slide we have a possible uh answer or beginnings of an answer because uh stonehenge of course was a major cemetery in this first stage occupied for somewhere between 500 and 600 years and usually it's it's dominated by women there are very few children and what we discovered from the strontium isotope analysis of people buried at stonehenge was that in the very first stages um four of these from the beginning of the monument uh their values are consistent with having grown up uh or having lived in the previous decade of their lives in west wales so one possibility is that they may have come with the stones that it may have been push rather than pull next slide so just to finish off um we have dates for the end of quarrying at both our excavated quarries that placed that somewhere around the 30th century the very moment that stonehenge starts and one possibility is that if wineman isn't in the picture which is looking increasingly so obviously it had a role because it's a major monument uh in in the making uh where the blue stones came from but did most or all of the blue stones go straight from the quarries to stonehenge or is there an another undiscovered dismantled stone circle that might be nearer the quarries so i'm ending this with some big questions for you all i don't know the answers to these but what i can say is that if there is one a dismantled undiscovered stone circle we are going to find it it may take some years but we have the experience we have the uh the talent and we have the technology so i think it's going to be very exciting what happens in the next couple of years or more thanks very much and i'll hand you back to chris thank you so much mike and i don't think anybody doubts that you'll find whatever whatever is out there we're struggling minorly against the technologies but everything's everything's looking good it get it gives you a sense of that these extraordinary monuments get more and more extraordinary all the all the time um in our next talk when eamonn baldwin will talk to us more about the the immediate area around stonehenge and his title is durrington walls and the role of remote sensing at stonehenge amen great great thanks chris and thanks for the opportunity to present some of the results from the stonehenge hidden landscapes projects um the project is a result of collaboration i should say first between um the ludwig boltzmann institute for archaeological prospection and and which is based in vienna and its partners and several institutes in in the uk including the universities of birmingham bradford and saint andrews so it's very much a collaboration and it's set out in 2010 to a map at a landscape scale the monuments and the the actual landscape the areas that don't have seemingly monuments in them as a with then an unprecedented high resolution so if we think about um conventional geophysics we have flux magnetometry we have um emi so electromagnetic induction and gpr and conventionally these are are sampled at a one meter crossline resolution so that's one meter between survey traverses the idea though back in 2010 was to improve on this to make uh develop motorized systems and apply them at the landscape scale using multiple techniques some of which map two dimensions some in three dimension to make a map the subsurface features also we were hoping to incorporate um a high resolution terrain model as well to use as a basis for all these data and so you can see in this slide a flip state magnetometer array which is coupled to a quad bike you'll notice there are um between eight to ten sensors on the back of this and the cross line resolution is now 25 centimeters so it's increased four fold so we're getting very high detailed and magnetic signature here and also worth saying that the the the speed of the quad bike has been limited to 30 miles an hour to ensure good quality data is collected on our next slide we see a vehicle that doesn't need limiting in any way in terms of speed it's a tractor that pushes the gpr um system from mala which is was already developed but had been designed for using to map utilities in an urban context so essentially it's a road instrument and it needed adapting and developing to to deal with some of the the top topography of working on and difficulties working on the chalk land and the resolution of this however it contains 17 antennas is down to um sub 10 centimeter cross line spacing so incredibly high resolution and gpr data so that's in 3d whereas the magnetometer is it gives a 2d map and laser scanning was also a huge component here is the the long-range laser scanner that can give a detailed um topographic map of its 25 meter centimeter resolution and these developments didn't come out come without difficulties as you can see the the the image on the left speaks for itself the image on the right that's not mud that is splatter from from cow dung and we can see and the the electronics need to be protected from it however all these difficulties were overcome and resulted in a 10 square kilometer uninterrupted magnetic map of the area centered on stonehenge which included durrington walls as well some of the highlights from from the the features which are all mapped in 2d here are a range of previously unknown and known monuments but you can see there's a much more detail given some of these are multi-phase and can be ascribed on on account of their form to maybe the the late neolithic early bronze age which informs us about some of the activities that might have been going on around the stonehenge monument in areas that were previously thought not to have any activity and here is the digital terrain model the result of the the laser scanning we can see in very high resolution so this is even better than any of the lidar data sets that have been previously collected for stonehenge on which to base uh incorporate integrate all our our new discoveries within um here the sums just to confirm 10 square kilometers of magnetometry just under 10 10 square kilometers laser scanning as well as um another five square kilometers of other methods including gpr and returning to discoveries and we wanted to focus a little bit on durrington no need to introduce darrington the stonehenge riverside project has has done um more than nothing in making this familiar with us and throwing new light on what's been going on there and establishing its link with stonehenge over the last 15 20 years however um it's worth saying that there was some um geophysical maps made of it as part of it by kate welling of of the university of bournemouth and also by english heritage andy payne which were excellent maps and and and were very informative but we felt that maybe we could contribute and and complement these maps by applying some of our higher resolution and instrumentation so the result was i think i skipped a slide with a gpr mark um of the whole area and that uh revealed an up till now unknown set of features underneath the southern bank of darrington walls so you can see here along the the the the bottom of the screen um a row of high amplitude anomalies which lie underneath the bank so it vindicates the the the approach of using 3d technologies we can start seeing underneath right material this is the interpretation and these were also found to be running under the northern bank as well and this led to a collaboration with the riverside project which uh and an excavation which showed that the anomalies were actually the consolidated chalk um packing or backfill of post holes massive post holes and so a completely new monument which i don't think anybody suspected maybe i'm wrong with their previously that predates the bank at durrington so that was very exciting however returning uh to a more landscape scale so moving away from the monument again and examining the areas between stonehenge and durrington we uncovered a series of very strange responses in the magnetometer so nine disk-like responses of a slightly enhanced magnetic signal surrounded by a halo of less magnetic material and you can see them in this diagram they are numbered one to nine uh followed by a for amesbury because they were all in the parish of amesbury and uh we found these very peculiar uh at first when we found one we thought maybe upon barrow but when we saw the arrangement of all nine and the spatial configuration over such a large scale large scale so this is 1.2 kilometers we were scratching our heads we really weren't sure what we were looking at however what was noticeable that there was a consistency in the response and the magnetic response and the consistency in the dimensions of these disk-like features so they all measured about roughly 20 20 meters across yes 20 meters across they also sometimes coincided with topographic depressions in the ground and you can see they cut right across the landscape so we're getting them on on the ridges and also in the dry valleys also of note was a row of um pits a massive pit alignment over 800 meters that could possibly be associated with these features however when we found this back in 2012 we weren't really sure what to make of them uh one of the suggestions that these were were two ponds i think this is a dupont from the berkshire downs so you can see why there was uh the similarities in terms of size and size and another suggestion was that could be something to do with military use of the land previously however it was about 2015 we became aware of other archaeological work in the vicinity and this is the result of work done by wessex archaeology housing development on mod land north of durrington walls you can see they picked up very similar anomalies four of them here in the magnetometer two more in the in the strip and map and and which were being interpreted as sinkholes we also discovered they had two further similar features in durrington town itself which had been excavated and the exciting news about that was they had got evidence for prehistoric activity including a date from the middle bronze age he also had a post-alignment post-hall alignment which they dated to the later neolithic so this made us very excited we started collating the data and uh you can see on the left some of their anomalies and on the right some of the nominal anomalies we had you can see the similarities together the spatial configuration is even more astounding they seem to to form a vast arc is not only centered on darrington walls but also incorporates the lark hill caused by enclosure in its perimeter i'm just going to skip those two slides so in 2019 we felt we had enough information to suggest that we needed to go back into the field with an adapted methodology we're going to apply gpr over several of the pits and coupled with electrical resistance tomography and we're going to do some mechanical coring to reveal soil profile depth of of of the features and also hopefully get some dating evidence and other evidence for analysis so these are the pits we targeted the ones in blue are from 2019 ones in orange 2021 so last year and the results of the gpr were very encouraging they all uh confirmed the dimensions of of the upper layers of the pits so we think we're dealing with weathering cones of of 20 to 80 meters across and then as the signal um goes downwards we can see that these pits are becoming narrower and more shaft-like so maybe 10 meters across and we suspect have steep sides this is confirmed by the profile views of the gpr and the modeling of the responses from within the the actual pits themselves the ert confirmed this also we did at varying resolutions this is a carried out by martin bates and richard bates um who general geomorphologists on the project and you can see pits 5a 4a 3 and 2a all have very similar responses all again very similar depths and the ert is mapping moisture so these are we're dealing with big pit-like features the coring was added also on eight of the pits in the end so we have a cores and some of the analysis that went with this and threw more light on the features we've got the depth the base of the features so here we can see feature 8a and a the base of the feature is that 8.4.8 meters down we also got a struct flint and some dating evidence and bone fragments and the carbon dates for that put it at into the late uh neolithic so it was very exciting and all the other the bases uh were of the features were of similar um depth about five meters however most interesting perhaps uh the chemical analysis and the um optical simulation um um analysis as well which examine the the the like properties of the of the sediments of the fill and the chemical the elemental um properties of the fill and the my colleagues tim canarit and alex finley have come to conclusion based on this that these pets with the exception of maybe pit 5 which is slightly different were open in the late neolithic they were kept open in the in the in the proceeding succeeding three to six hundred years and before they were then went through uh several rapid stages of filling so that was quite quite exciting and just to wrap up pit 5 seemed to have a different depositional history and it also had evidence for um some bone which was dated to the mid bronze age and our interpretation of that is that this represents a a later recut of the feature which ties in with maybe the end of monumentalization in the area so i better wrap up scene that i've gone over and however i i hope that you can see that the remote sensing has definitely um added to our to our knowledge of various monuments and also the spaces in between the monuments um so i better hand over to chris before i get ejected thanks very much thank you very much indeed amen that's uh that was absolutely extraordinary yes and then the more we we look at these landscapes the more major things there are are to be found um our next speaker is susan greeney who's going to speak on the topic of stone timber and earth a circa 2500 bc building frenzy susan thank you chris and thanks for inviting me to take part this evening um so yes i work for english heritage um as we said at the beginning in um the sort of public facing role but a lot of the research that i'm going to present this evening is um related to my phd which i've recently finished so that's why double logos on this first slide um briefly first at the beginning i just wanted to start with stone um mike's already explained his amazing research tracing the origins of the blue stones but it's not even worth talking about the work that has begun to pinpoint the origins and the extraction sites for the sars and stones um in 1958 the trilathon that you can see in the picture there was re-erected and one of the trilathons outright stone 58 had a very large crack down the side of it and it was decided that three holes would be drilled through it to enable it to be pinned together with metal rods the diamond cutting company that were employed to do that drilling were called vanmops and the main manager at the time decided to keep one of the cores that had been extracted from the stone and hang it up in his office and when he retired he took it with him to america which is where he retired to and we had a phone call a few years ago from one of his sons saying we've got a piece of stonehenge in america and you might want it back so he said yes please um so this that bottom picture you can see uh two of robert's sons lewis and robin handing back over the core to my colleague heather sabir and she's pointing up to where those calls were taken from in 1958. this was the first time we had a complete cross-section of one of the sars and stones at stonehenge and also the first time we had such a large piece of stone that we knew exactly which stone it was from now coincidentally at the same time um uh professor david nash at the university of brighton was conducting some research into the origins of assassin and he had been developing techniques that look at the trace elements within the stone to identify matching samples from the landscape this is his colleague jake zebrowski who is using a portable xrf x-ray fluorescence machine to identify the trace elements within the assassins and they'd been surveying at stonehenge when we got the call about the corps and we were able to say to them we've got this call would it be helpful to have a very small part of it to be able to do some more destructive analysis and to cut a long story short their sampling showed that the best match for the majority of the assassins at stonehenge is an area known as westwood's near marlborough which is about 15 miles to the north of stonehenge and this photograph shows some of the stars and stones that are still in the woodland there we know that these are some of the biggest stars and stones in the area still remaining and we know that this area was also used heavily in more recent times for sars and quarrying so this looks like the beginning of the search really for the extraction sites for where the assassins come from and of course that enables us to go back to the debates about exactly um which route the assassins were brought from across uh the veil of pusey and if anyone's interested in how the stones were moved and raised i highly recommend mike pitz's new book how to build stonehenge which goes into some detail about the methods okay so everyone's um fairly familiar with the idea that stonehenge is a monument that's built with joints and it has what are in effect woodworking techniques it has the tenons that you can see on the top of one of the stones here um and that fits into the um the mortise and tenon joints and it has tongue and groove joints also that link together the lentils the blue stones also are shaped and worked in the same way some of them this is stone 36 which is one of the two blue stone lintels that we know of from the site so in effect one of the ways we can think about stonehenge is as a stone version of what seems to be a sort of timber monument and as part of my phd research i got quite interested in the links between stonehenge and timber monuments and stonehenge also has a timber phase of sorts we think um it's tricky to tell because we only have um roughly about half of the central area has been excavated but all of the red spots that you see in the middle here are post holes and the majority of them seem to predate the central stone settings and you can see that we've got a sort of arrangement if you maybe squint a bit you might be able to make out there's a sort of roughly square off-center arrangement with some approaches or porches and a sort of facade down towards the southeast so that in my mind i think this is a actual bona fider phase of stonehenge that we've got a timber monument on the site before the stones get put up in the middle now stonehenge has timber friends and relations it has some in the surrounding landscape mostly clustered in the darington walls area and these are monuments that mike and his team have been investigating recently the first phase of the southern circle is one of these the northern circle excavated in the 1960s at darrington is one of these we have two smaller examples just south of woodhenge and we have um an example that's tending towards the house-like um spectrum of these monuments in within darrington walls itself and we have the what's known as konibrihenge which has another of these timber structures in the middle now these timber structures tend to get called four post structures or square encircle structures um and you'll note that a lot of them have um that the kind of key defining feature of them are four central posts sometimes with a kind of facade sometimes with a porch arrangement often with two paired post holes that seem to make an entrance now we get these all over the um britain and ireland and here is just a few other examples this is balanci over in county antrim we've got example of macri moore on aaron this is a geophysical survey of the south west circle at stanton drew note that both macri moore and stanton drew have stone circles probably as a later phase as part of them and these um square in circle monuments are found across disparate but far reaching parts of britain island and there's a particular cluster in the stonehenge area but there's also another cluster over in the boyne valley and this one has been uh reconstructed at now in county meath so what are these monuments and what's happening at this stage that's linking all these places together i think alison will mention a bit more about that later um we don't have great dates for these where we've got dates they look to be around about 2500 bc so the same date that the assassins are being put up at the middle of stonehenge we it would be really good to get more dates because a lot of them are not dated and in fact um steve davis at uh university college dublin is currently doing some research um into the ones in the boyne valley he's finding more and more of them in his geophysical survey um so that's probably the place to look for more news coming soon now these monuments have a sort of orientation um if you take those paired post holes entrance ways um this is very preliminary work and a lot more needs to be done but they have a general south east easterly orientation um and i don't think that's i think that's consistent across britain island um and if you remember that structure in the middle of stonehenge it also has these porches or approaches entrances on the southeast side there is one monument there that doesn't fit the pattern that's the largest one of these square and circle structures in the boin valley quite close to new grange it's an enormous one so i think that one's a bit different but there's generally an association here perhaps with the rising sun um perhaps with some sort of astronomical alignment um that is a feature of these monuments we don't actually know what they are they are platforms are they buildings are they those four posts support something um they seem to be used a lot for the deposition of all kinds of objects and closely associated with grooved wear um but to my mind there's something about these monuments that helps us understand a little bit more about where stonehenge sits in its wider context these timber monuments sometimes get elaborated into much more larger and more complex monuments these are just to site four within mount pleasant down in dorset and a reconstruction there of woodhenge now my phd was on monument complexes um and these are clusters of monuments that we find in in relatively close proximity where we've got monuments of several different types being built over the neolithic period places that people return to again and again just go through some examples here all of those dots on the map are what i would class as monument complexes there are probably more and we've got examples such as the stennis vodka complex up in orkney quite famous for tv where we've got palisaded enclosure surrounding lots of other monuments uh thornbra henges in north yorkshire we've got three major henge monuments as well as one if not two curseless monuments um booner boy in the boyne valley where we've got the famous passage teams but also a whole series of henge monuments and enclosures and and several of these these square and circle monuments um the walton hindwell basin in palace um these i'm just giving you some examples because it tends to be that we focus a lot on stonehenge and particularly and avery because they've got existing standing monuments but these these complexes are all over the place and pretty um down here in the mendips um where jody lewis has been doing some really interesting work recently and finding a lot more monuments to add to that complex i'm just going to concentrate on this one down here which is where i've done most of my research which is dorchester so we're just turning away from stonehenge just briefly now one of the things that's crucial about these complexes is getting good chronology and getting the sequence of construction of these monuments so what part of my work at dorchester has been to get new radiocarbon dates and new precise dates using a array of samples but also using bayesian analysis to investigate them the monuments in dorchester sit within the confluence of the rivers froome and south winterborne i should point out that the stars on this uh plan are evidence of settlements like pits and in the early neolithic what we have is um a major cause weight enclosure which sits under the eastern end of the later major iron age hill fort at maiden castle and we have a short sort of long barrow cursus type thing we're not quite sure what it is it's a long enclosure known as ellington avenue these are both built roughly around 3500 bc moving forward um a few hundred years to 3200 so into the middle neolithic we have the construction of this enclosure here known as flagstones which is very very similar to the first phase of stonehenge and is associated with cremation burials and inhumation burials then we have a really big gap and really nothing happens construction-wise monument construction-wise in this landscape for perhaps 600 700 years and towards the end of the late neolithic around about 2500 bc we have an explosion of monument construction the henge at mumbi rings is constructed with amazingly deep shafts that dug down from the ditch we have a large palisaded enclosure just like the one that aim was just talking about underneath the bank at darrington walls known as greyhound yard and we have the kind of multi uh phase and uh complex mega henge at mount pleasant which includes that concentric timber monument called site four so we have a lot of activity monument building activity going on at this final period in the neolithic and from what i understand and i think research is kind of adding to this and we'll we'll refine this more clearly over the next few years is that many of the monument complexes across britain and ireland do have an explosion and a kind of what i would call a monument building frenzy towards the end of the late neolithic so what on earth is happening and how does that relate to stonehenge well stonehenge is is built in that monument frenzy around about 2500 bc the sauce and phase of it here that we're looking at and if we plot that out so um one of the big things that obviously is happening here we have the end of the stone age the end of the neolithic the beginning of the early bronze ages as mike referred to at the beginning of the kind of copper age or chalcolithic this is just a plot of what happens at mount pleasant in specific terms so um the various colors the beginning there are the different parts of building mount pleasant and its various components but what's important is the pink triangle that is the date for the start of beaker burials in southern england so this is the time when people are being buried with the first metals with the new type of beaker pottery which comes across from the continent and these individual burials are a complete change in the way that people are treating their dead and you can see that it's very close on the heels of the monument construction and the alteration that's happening at mount pleasant so this is the really interesting period this this kind of transition between the neolithic and the early bronze age we've got big monuments like stonehenge and darrington walls and mount pleasant being built and lots lots of other places across the country um and there's a kind of what seems to be a kind of return to monuments we get a lot of big pottery deposit monuments um and people seem to be kind of reusing them but there's no monument building in the same way that there was at the end of the latent earthquake the major communal projects really come to an end and i find this period just fascinating and what on earth is happening which causes such rapid change in almost all areas of life at the end of the late neolithic one of the clues that we can help to understand this is coming from dna and i'll just really briefly summarize this because it's it's not my work this is the work of tom booth and joe brooke who have been looking at the early um bronze age burials in the stonehenge landscape and one of the key findings that they've got are that these people are um often related to each other um and that they don't seem to be in general terms intermarrying with the existing neolithic population so that suggests that we've got a really interesting period where there might be two parallel populations living in close proximity to each other but not necessarily intermarrying and into mixing for a couple of hundred years so this big building frenzy around 2500 bc i think there are kind of two ways to look at this one is that people are aware that there's change coming there's an imminent arrival they can see new people coming of course remember they have to die before they get buried so there'll be a while before they actually get interred so these these this is a kind of threat and it causes people to kind of knuckle down and build bigger and better and even more impressive monuments more complex and larger monuments to impress um perhaps each other and also to kind of you know their religious beliefs would be part of that or the other way of thinking about it in my mind at least is that this complete frenzy of building perhaps involving competition between different people or religious fervor brings about some kind of resistance and rebellion and people think actually this isn't the way we want to live and there's some sort of collapse in the authority at the time or the belief system and that creates a bit of a vacuum into which new people and objects can arrive from the continent and hopefully over the next few years we'll get much more evidence dating information all kinds of scientific techniques to help us understand what's happening at this really crucial time in prehistory thank you thank you so much susan added a whole series of of extra layers and and extra questions we'll discuss some of these things in a minute or two but but now alison sheridan's going to give the final paper of the afternoon exploring the wider world of stonehenge long distance connections and movements alison thanks chris well anyone who's seen neil wilkin and jennifer vexel's superb stonehenge exhibition cannot fail to be blown away by the amazing stories that the stunning objects on display have to tell and one of the recurrent themes is the long-distance movement of objects ideas and people and the interconnectedness of widely separated communities around and indeed before the time when stonehenge was built and used we've already heard about some of these long distance connections in mike's and sue's presentations and what i'll try to do in my talk is to explore the what the how and the why of these movements and connections in order to see what made society tick in the wider world of stonehenge because time is short i'll be focusing in on the period when the first phase monument was created at stonehenge around 3000 bc setting it within its broader context and i'd like to start by highlighting one little artifact which is easy to miss in the display with which has a big story to tell it's this exquisite small mace head a symbol of power just 55 millimeters or two inches long which was deposited in one of the aubry halls alongside cremated human remains in the earliest phase the monument it's made of louisian nice rock from the outer hebrides in scotland over 800 kilometers away as the crow flies and it will have been made in scotland not necessarily on the island of louis quite possibly in orkney since other contemporary mace heads made from the same stone have been found in orkney and we know that mace heads were being made in orkney at that time and this isn't the only evidence linking the stonehenge area with scotland around 3000 bc for example just 10 kilometers away from stonehenge at bulford phil harding recently excavated a sizeable assemblage of a distinctive kind of pottery flat-based pottery known as grooved wear this kind of pottery was invented in orkney and so similar is the bulford assemblage and some other assemblages in southern england to what was in use in orkney around 3000 bc that you could easily lose this among the pottery that's been found at the nest of brodgar or at barnhouse or at the stones of stinness likewise this tiny little pot um found in one of the aubry holes at stonehenge which could have been used as a chafing dish to bring burning embers to lighter cremation pyre is decorated in a style reminiscent of arcadian grooved wear it's only about 50 ml in diameter so look out for it when you go around the exhibition moreover on king barrow ridge just 800 meters east of stonehenge a pit was found to contain arcadian style grooved wear pottery along with these two small chalk plaques bearing the kind of decoration seen carved onto buildings and on movable stones at scarabray and the nest of brodgar in orkney note the distinctive saltire design within the lozenges these and other links with orpney are so striking and so specific that it's hard to avoid the conclusion that some people from wessex had actually made the long and arduous journey by land and sea up to orkney bringing back esoteric knowledge and exotic objects they were not alone elsewhere in britain and ireland there's plenty of evidence of people going to orkney around 3000 bc as we shall see in a minute so what on earth was happening up there well to cut a very long story short there's evidence that from around 3200 bc the heart of orkney was becoming a major ceremonial center featuring imposing monuments and ceremonies to mark midwinter solstice and other auspicious times certain prosperous ambitious and innovative arcadian farmers succeeded in creating a new world order that put them at the top of their social ladder there had been rivalry between different groups of arcadian farmers as to who could build the grandest and best monuments for their dead that have been going on for several generations since at least as early as 3500 bc it was an inflationary spiral of competitive conspicuous consumption and the out and out winners were the individuals who during the 32nd century bc made the long sea journey down to the boeing valley in eastern ireland to join other visitors from far and wide to witness the amazing enormous passage tombs of newgrange mouth and darf that had just been built and to participate in the mid-winter solstice ceremonies at newgrange these would have been the wonders of the ancient world and folks in auckland would have got wind of them thanks to an extensive network of contacts along britain's western seaboard that had existed for several generations the people who were responsible for building the boyne valley mega passage tombs had themselves been engaging in the same process of competitive conspicuous consumption on honouring their dead with ever bigger and better monuments and they too had made long-distance sea journeys to brittany from where they adopted elements of tomb design and of passage from art such as this motif of a goddess protecting the dead in the innermost part of the tomb they also went to iberia from where they brought back exotic sacred objects including this magnificent and enigmatic portuguese style idol that you can see in the exhibition the anthropologist mary helms came up with a term to describe this remarkable long-distance voyaging she called it cosmological acquisition where powerful members of the community are able to enhance their power by undertaking heroic journeys and bringing back esoteric knowledge and exotic objects that wouldn't have been available to their neighbors and that's precisely what the members of the arcadian elite were doing in their voyages to the boyne valley having participated in the amazing midwinter solstice ceremonies where the rising sun shines along the passage and into the chamber at newgrange thereby reawakening the dead on the shortest day of the year they proceeded to recreate newgrange on a more modest scale at may's hell complete with its cruciform chamber and its long passage here though it was a setting sun on and around midwinter solstice that was a target of the tomb's orientation elsewhere on opni they built other similar passage tombs and incorporated the sacred symbols of the boin valley tombs into them adopting the spiral possibly a symbol connected with the movement of the sun and signifying the infinity and giving it a uniquely arcadian twist in the form of the horned spiral as you can see here on this magnificent lintel slab from a passage tomb at pierrewall on westray they also incorporated designs from irish passage tombs on their grooved wear pottery most notably on this famous shirt from the settlements at scarabray whose design matches that on the curbstone around the back of the new grange passage tomb opposite the entrance and positioned directly on the axis of the rising mid-winter solstice sun while we may not be able to decode the meaning of the symbols we can be sure that they would have profound significance to the belief system and the way people made sense of the world and it wasn't just people from orkney who were going to ireland and indulging in cosmological acquisition appropriating sacred symbols we can see it on this magnificent carved stone ball about the size of a tennis ball found at towie in aberdeenshire in northeast scotland with its new grains triple spiral this was a symbol of power with the ability to deliver a physical as well as a social impact meanwhile down in east anglia the spiral appears yet again on this antler mace head from garboldeschem in norfolk another kind of symbol of power and here on anglesey you can see an entire irish-style passage tomb at bar claudia igares complete with irish passage tomb art and irish style bone shroud pins this is one of several irish style passage gyms in and around north wales going back to our arcadian adventurers what's even more impressive when they undertook their heroic long-distance journeys they didn't stop at ireland some voyaged yet further to the continent where thanks to dna analysis we can say that they literally took on board their boats these little critters known to us as orkney voles as a handy rapid breeding self-generating food stock for the long sea journey home volo von anyone i can hear you groan thanks mike we know that people at orkney vols because at scarabray work by andrea romagnuc has identified the tell-tale pattern of burning of the extremities showing that they were roasted on a stick and we could also say thanks to elsa pancioroli's ct scanning of nearly 5 000 year old dog turds at scarabre the dogs were also eating the vowels crunching up their bones before pooping them out there you go the joys of archaeological science i digress anyway in creating their new world order the orkney elite innovated as well as adopting and adapting ideas from the boyne valley they built a new style of monument the stone circle enclosed by a bank and ditch at the stones of stems reminiscent of the contemporary first phase monument at stonehenge but around a third of its diameter and distinctively arcadian in its design they invented grooved wear pottery as a brand new style as we've already seen they were ostentatious chunky jewelry made from a variety of materials including whale bone and sperm whale ivory their large dress pins riffing on the long pins that were used in ireland they also made use of an array of funny shaped carved stone objects which could well have been used as weapons and we know this because there are roughly contemporary skulls in orkney with bash marks that could have been caused by a blow with one of these but these are also very much weapons of social exclusion individualized symbols of power and we could also say that these ambitious arcadians introduced new practices and elaborated on the symbolism associated with their beliefs we know that stone mace heads were made at the nest of brodgar and that these precious possessions were deliberately broken during ceremonies and this tiny figure of a woman or goddess found at links of knotland on westray the so-called westray wifey has a distinctive eyes and eyebrows that are also found uh carved into a tomb on papua stray perhaps this particular motif symbolized the ever-present gaze of the divine ancestors watching over the living these people also adorned their houses and their furniture with incest in in size packed carved or painted designs and while some of the motifs echo passage tomb art a distinctly arcadian style quickly grew out of this the so-called rodger butterfly that you can see at the bottom of this slide is one such motif and if you want to find out more about these designs i can recommend antonia thomas's excellent book most remarkably the settlement at nest of brodgar developed into a major center where many people came together feasted and carried out religious ceremonies the brilliant and ongoing excavations by nick card have revealed that increasingly large and elaborate buildings were constructed over the course of the 31st century bc within an area delimited by sturdy walls and these buildings would have been spacious enough to accommodate large numbers of people the sizable rubbish dump associated with these structures attest to feasting on the huge cattle that would have underpinned the wealth of the local elite cattle that had been deliberately interbred with wild oroxan in northern scotland to maximize meat yield to me it seems likely that the people who stayed there would have been important visitors from far and wide pilgrims if you like guests of the orkney elite attracted by the fame of this sacred landscape in oakley and by the spectacular mid-winter festivals just as people have been drawn by the magnetic attraction of the boeing valley monuments and in exactly the same way that people would then later get drawn to stonehenge there's plenty of evidence from many parts of britain and ireland that these visitors to orkney went back home inspired by what they had seen and experienced there for example peter people started to make arcadian style grooved wear on the scottish mainland in cumbria in wales in ireland as we see here at naf in the boyne valley in southern england as we've seen before and elsewhere too we can also see a southward spread of the practice of building stone circles inspired by the stones of stennis such as this one at callanish on the isle of lewis with its grooved wear bowl buried beneath beside it this suggests that people were adopting the beliefs and ceremonial practices of orkney as well as the new style pottery and exotic arcadian artifacts this map just here shows you just the examples on the west coast of scotland but there are plenty on the east coast and further south in britain too and also there are the stone circles including the one at machimo that sue mentioned another aspect of this southward spread is that distinctively arcadian style designs turn up turn up far away from home including this horned spiral pecked into the living rock at achnabrak on the west coast of scotland glowing in the light of the setting mid-winter solstice sun and in the boyne valley in ireland which had been the source of inspiration for the arcadians we see clear reciprocal orkney influences around 3000 bc not just in the grooved wear pot that accompanied cremated bones and the miniature mace head pendant at now but also in the beads at now that a miniature teeny tiny versions of scottish carved stone balls of a type found in orkney the most striking evidence of these orkney island links comes from the fact that stone mace heads started to be used in ireland around 3000 bc following the practice in orkney and the piece de resistance is this superb example from mouth complete with its distinctively arcadian horned spiral design along with a more irish shape of spiral on another face while the flint from which it's made doesn't occur in orkney nevertheless this mace head could have been made there using imported flint and was perhaps presented as a diplomatic gift from a high-ranking arcadian to a member of the boyne valley elite around 3000 bc elsewhere in yorkshire these amazing and enigmatic chalk objects found in children's graves at folkton and burton agnes also speak of inspiration from orkney not in terms of their overall shape but rather in the style of their carved designs including the iconic eyebrow move teeth on two of them which you will remember from its arcadian representations and also present are examples of the broad butterfly motif what is so wonderful about the stonehenge exhibition is that the most recently discovered example from burton agnes is being seen by the public for the very first time and it's thanks to exhibition curator neil wilkin that a radio carbon date has been obtained from one of the three children in that grave securely dating it to the 30th century bc the peak period for pilgrimages to orkney perhaps these peculiar drum shaped objects like the western wifey were representations and embodiments of supernatural beings who could protect the living and the dead in other words they were sacred objects believed to be imbued with divine power and perhaps a small chalk ball that was found in the burton agnes grave was also believed to have magical power a similar chalk ball was found in the bullford pit near stonehenge and indeed similar smooth stone balls are known from earlier irish passage tombs so duly unrolled presented to you with a dramatic unroll of the drums this is the world within which the people who built the first phase monument at stonehenge were living a highly sophisticated highly interconnected socially differentiated world where certain people got to travel long distances taking part in major ceremonies and adopting and adapting ideas beliefs and practices from far away and where the power and the influence of the living was inextricably mixed up with beliefs about supernatural power and especially the power of the sun and the ancestors this helps us to understand why certain people on salisbury plain felt it was essential to make the heroic journey to wales to gather the sacred blue stones to erect at stonehenge just as it was essential for them to go and take part in the winter solstice ceremonies in far away orkney these were acts of cosmological acquisition that not only kept their world turning around but also ensured that folks would still be talking about these in extraordinary people some five thousand years later my time's at an end and i've only just scratched the surface there's so much more that could be said about the fascinating movements and connections in the world of stonehenge over the next two millennia and so much that we continue to learn now thanks to new discoveries and the application of scientific techniques to learn more about the world of stonehenge i urge you to take a deep dive into neil and jen's wonderful breathtaking inspirational exhibition and don't forget to buy the book thanks for listening folks and back to you chris thank you very much indeed alison and that's given us a a sense of a really extraordinary world um if any of us ever thought that the the societies of the past were simple um then then we've been disabused of that now we're we're we've got so much to talk about and so much to think about i'll just pose a a few brief questions to to the speakers um and there are all sorts of really good questions coming in from you the audience so in a minute or two we'll we'll move to them um but first of all um so so there are various themes that you've all picked out movement of people and materials as an incredibly mobile world the importance of different materials different types of rock of rock versus wood the the cosmological aspects of these worlds the movement of the sun moon and the stars and various deities that may inhabit these these things and of course underpinning our understanding of all these things is the role of archaeological science um alison touched at the end there on on issues of of movement it and and i mean how far did the team think that everyone was able to move were there were there special people who moved were there things like pilgrimages that that people embarked upon any any thoughts about the nature of movement in these worlds well perhaps i should come back and say yes i think that by and large it was only certain people who got to do the long distance movements and that was part of their power strategy but then having having established these places you then get lots of people coming in from from far and wide uh i don't know mike what do you think about people well we're starting to get some interesting results from isotopes and as we could see you know we we know that was it forty percent of the people that we've examined uh from the stonehenge cremations had had obviously uh moved from uh uh uh uh onto the chalklands from somewhere else um and i th yeah i was keeping a sort of tally of where we're getting for dates to different periods uh in the beaker period we're looking at about 40 mobility at least and i think the figures are coming out similarly for uh earlier parts of the neolithic too so you know if we've got a representative sample of the population it's almost half a showing evidence of lifetime movement now our results from isotopes are parsimonious because if you grow up in the same geology in the same environment and move somewhere else if you go from the yorkshire chalk to the wessex chalk that's not going to show up at all so you know i think we can say that the 40 is a minimum and you know my guess is that it's probably less elitist than allison's been suggesting and maybe actually uh that that there's a wider part of society that are on the move sorry yeah sorry i was going to say i just i think i would agree with that in that there's so many different variations in the types of construction activity materials that are being used decorative styles that there seems to be a lot of backwards and forwards movements going on but there's also this interesting pattern of where we've got that those things cropping up so there's lots of parts of britain island that are blank that have not got you know our dots on for whatever you might want to use to plot so we may have large parts of the population who would never even consider taking part in these and we just haven't we're just not really picking them up perhaps um so in a way there's um an interesting debate to be had about how these connections happen are they they're quite long distance and sort of jumping like whether you know so there is quite rapid movement of ideas and objects um between certain places and then not so much elsewhere so i think that's a really intriguing kind of pattern so were they sort of individual connections do you think sort of partnerships and people who might have known each other in various different ways i mean obviously impossible to to say but it's it's it's interesting to try and sort of piece this world together a little bit isn't it yeah i mean i don't know whether it's personal collections but certainly established links perhaps that build up over time and i mean i love allison's ideas that what happens is that there's a rolling um pattern almost of um major monuments impressive monuments getting constructed and then everybody coming and seeing them you know it's kind of like our tourist model perhaps where that that and that precipitates all kinds of change and interaction and new ideas that then jumps on to the next place so there's there's certainly links that we can kind of start to trace now much more clearly between these different areas and could we just have a second or two on thinking about materials because obviously the materials that people used were were vitally important you don't you don't drag or bring stones from from west wales to wessex if if the materials from which they're made are not important has anybody got any thoughts as to how we might address these sorts of issues of the importance of and we've seen many many materials mentioned in in the various tools well in a way just just as with the amazing um north the alpine jada tight axe heads that uh appear from much earlier time in the neolithic that appear in the exhibition uh which were believed to actually have magical power themselves because they are part two richard bradley's phrase they're a piece of place they are part of a monument i do wonder mike whether the there was a belief that the blue stones had magical numinous power in in them and this power came from the fact that they they were from a very special place so that they they had you know agency in their own right yeah so just just to qualify that i'm sure that has to be a significant factor you know these are not just stones these are emblematic icons and you know i think a lot of that comes from people's sense of place and i think this is where as you were mentioning ancestry is just so important for these people that this is a part of who they are because of where they come from and you know i'm quite interested to find out what it is that was so special about that particular part of west wales that it has such a it has such a power uh when when there's that um to move those stones so much to talk about and said a little time i'll come on to the audience questions in just a second but but just to ask ayman is your project at an end now are you going to do more geophysics and and if if so where and where and when well um as as with many archaeological investigations i mean the results always throw up more questions and um i feel that there's there's lots we could do but it's it's obviously equates to it with cost as well and and i think as susan was pointing out that you know there are other monuments in other landscapes that are also worthy of of investigation so you know i i don't um i feel we've been at stonehenge long enough so i think there are avenues for for investigation that would be very interesting to to follow but equally i think there are other landscapes other other monumental landscapes but also landscapes that haven't been investigated at all that and nobody's considering because they're not being developed or they're far away from from from monuments that are known so it might be time to start thinking a little bit outside the box about how to approach by getting information on this and if i may mention this very interesting project based in the university of glasgow that's looking at overlaps between archaeological perspective and precision agriculture and one of the reasons is because precision agriculture uses a lot of remote sensing technologies and so there are farmers out there who are mounting remote sensing sensors onto their tractors and uh several times in a season uh you know mapping soil health and plant health and these data could potentially have an archaeological interest to us as archaeological archaeologists and accessing these data is is a huge huge huge problem um okay yeah no no that's that's great but yeah so as i say so much to talk about and so a little time i'll just i'll just bring in some of the the audience questions because there's fantastic ray of questions out there and i'll only be able to cover a couple of them a really interesting question which i'd like to know the answer to about how you archaeologists collaborate so the question is given so many complex analyses and projects around stonehinge what is the organizational structure used to manage cooperation to ensure that information is shared efficiently and in a timely fashion i don't know maybe mike it's the organizational structure i don't think it's particularly rigid and that we don't have to report to a commissar to uh to tell each other how it's going uh a lot of the links between the various teams are relatively uh um yeah also yeah that they're basically exchange of information it happens at conferences because it hasn't happened so much recently because of kovid and it happens through publications uh and yes so i think it's just a wave of knowledge if you like that uh and it it is uh it's it's as much competitive as it is collaborative right yes no so there's a i don't know susan if you've got any thoughts from a sort of english heritage perspective as how things come together i mean one of my roles at english heritage is to try and stay on top of um well stonehenge research but actually i'm tend to be the only prehistorian for the whole of english heritage so actually you know i was interested in thornbury and avery and silvery hill as a stonehenge but um yeah staying on top of it is actually quite tricky and it's mostly through actually personal networks what's coming out next you know who's who's got the another paper coming out and it's really helpful to us at english heritage if we know a tiny bit beforehand so that we can prepare our usual statements that we have to give to the press um but yeah i mean generally this is a small world isn't it it's archaeology so we talk to each other a lot and um you know i think everybody shares a lot more um behind the scenes than might look like we do um and and the publications once they come out um you know cement that and enable us to move forward with the next questions great thank you and the a question for alison but i think anyone could tackle this alison mentioned heroic voyages and pilgrimages between orkney and iberia how could you tell that you're thinking about that sort of thing rather than say continual trade or or movement of objects we're very lucky with the orkney vol because the um genetic uh the genome of the orknevole is unique to orkney and the geneticists have said that it can only have come directly from the continent probably in a single boat journey yeah and then when once they arrived because there were no competitors they then sort of bonked away and reproduced and spread all over orkney um so they are our great gift to be able to say actually we can say for sure that there was direct seabourn voyaging between orkney and the continent um we can argue the toss as to where on the continent uh they came there was there was a genetic um project that concluded it could have been belgium but actually when you look into it they weren't able to get many ancient samples from the very areas of the continent where we think they probably came from which is either brittany or iberia um and in fact the belgian stuff was from a medieval nunnery so that doesn't really count um but otherwise i mean a lot is surmise um by being able to source stones that's grand uh you know and try to do as much sourcing as we can we use um isotopic analysis of human remains to try and track human movements and also the human dna is very useful for for tracing that as well um but inevitably we do have to you know a lot of it is guesswork but what we're trying to do is we got these pieces of amazing jigsaw puzzle and we're trying to make as um plausible a story as possible and yes we are all friends and we do compete but there's the neolithic studies group as well which is a great forum for like-minded neolithic um nutters to to to talk and in fact they're having a meeting soon called leveling up the neolithic and uh let's not all talk about stonehenge and orkney all the time oh very good yes as you say archaeologists love to debate and argue and a lot of knowledge moves forward by by conversations in the pub and various various other other things and as you can see we've got we've got an enormous amount to to talk about one way or another um so unfortunately we're out of time now um so i'd like to thank very much uh our speakers mike eamon susan and alison for giving us such a a wonderful array of of um of things to think about and things that i'd never never thought about or known about before and i urge you all as alison mentioned to go and see the the world of stonehenge exhibition which is on in the british museum until the 17th of july um well worth seeing one of the best exhibitions i've come across for a long time so thank you all very much indeed um and thank you also to the audience for being such a great um series of participants and we can now say goodbye from the british museum [Music] you

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Published: Thu May 05 2022