() - Long before it became
a world Heritage site and a global symbol of the
mysteries of unrecoverable pasts, Stonehenge was a biddable
icon for notions of British antiquity and identity. In the Middle Ages, it was given life in a
world of Arthur Merlin and British origin myths. In the 18th century,
it became recognized as a human monument, but one from an unknown past
defined by its opposition to the classical world. The stones had been raised
by the people Caesar invaded. In the 1960s to take one last example, it was drafted as a computational
observatory morphing into a confusion of earth mysteries, aliens and alternative
lifestyles, but its most enduring, modern evocation was shaped
in the first quarter of the last century. Whenever we have a national
crisis wondering what being British means, we invoke
Stonehenge, the centerpiece, the epitome of our past
and island identity. The stories we tell draw both
on research and on attitudes held by nation that once
boasted the world's largest and most culturally varied empire. The first scientific excavation
at Stonehenge occurred in the year Queen Victoria died
and the first modern book about it was written by a British
engineer of the Indian railways. That quarter century was
also the era in which modern archeology began. Ideas about Stonehenge were
reflected in wider visions of antiquity that continue to
dominate popular histories today. I propose to consider that
image of national antiquity and how it was framed at
Stonehenge by asking how the monument was built. I'll outline an alternative
to the popular vision that reflects the wealth
of new archeology. We judge pre-history as deficient
and thus by implication as we will see recent and modern peoples too. I will ask you to think about
prehistoric communities in a different way and I hope to convince you that what I propose is more
suited to modern Britain and to a global community. I need to start, however, with a quick introduction
to how archeology works. The common image of archeologists
is that we bumble along until we fall over a discovery
which changes everything we thought we knew. Archeologists themselves
seem to enjoy explaining how difficult it is to know
anything about the remote past. We give lectures about
it, write books about it. Now I understand if you're
not an archeologist, it's easy to imagine
that we make it all up. So here briefly is why
the opposite is the case. You need to know that archeology
is actually very good at writing history, though I should add that that's
not the same thing as saying that we always get it right. There are three parts to getting stories that were never written down. We collect data, we try to make that information
useful and we try to see the lives of real people
through those efforts. Each of these is being
continuously explored by a whole range of professions and sub-disciplines. So first we collect data. We survey sites, we dig things up, we analyze them and use a lot of science. Here's me collecting
data on the left in 1979, my first excavation at Stonehenge
and on the right in 2008 at another excavation at Stonehenge. Now this data, this fills
stores and libraries, but it's only the start or it's
only part of the beginning. For at the same time a great
deal of research and thought goes into how we can read those data, which are several steps removed
from the real world past. How and why does stuff get
buried and what doesn't? What happens to it when it's there, and which bits are going to
tell us things we actually want to know? And then there's what matters
most tonight given what we have achieved with all
the science and stuff, how can we read what people
in the past were doing and thinking. And here we can experiment,
we can make parts, we can grow rare crops,
we can build bridges, or we can see what other people do. Both of these have been very useful. We couldn't begin to understand
what was in the mind of a Homo erectus millions of years
ago when they were making a stone hand acts if we hadn't learned how
to make one ourselves. Alternatively, we could
go say to Mexico or Turkey and see how hand looms of a
particular type that might have been used in Iron Age
Britain work and so on. Doing this helps us escape the
very restricted mindset and the particular technologies
that the world in which we ourselves live. There's an old archeological
phrase for this using ethnographic parallels, we can go further than this
beyond the particular and seek to identify apparent behavioral constance. Telling stories and
making music, for example, seem to be universal. So we might imagine that ice
age people didn't just paint animals on cave walls,
they told tales about them. If I could go back in time and
see Stonehenge being built, I wouldn't ask, why are you doing that? I wouldn't expect to
get a meaningful answer. I'd say sing me a song. Archeologists often forget
that it is human to laugh. People need to sleep. Not everything we can know
about the past has to be dug up. Getting the right blend of
these tactics is tricky. Today's science dominates
advances in radiocarbon dating and DNA studies are allowing
us to map how people moved about and were
related to each other, the building blocks for
social insights undreamt of when I was a student. At the beginning, however, at the beginning of this quest
into the past there were only texts the Bible and for Britain, medieval mythology in which
Stonehenge was built by Merlin after flying the stones over from Ireland and classical observations of people on the fringe of empire. Roman descriptions of the British
emphasized their barbarity dressed in skins or naked
covered in body paint in a cold land of mists and swamps. A vague notion of barbarity permeated early anti Cree visions of ancient Britain. And to help them picture
those vanished people, they drew on reports from the new world. As Caroline Dodds Pennock
tells us in her new book on "Savage Shores", thousands
of indigenous Americans came to Europe from the
days of first contact. For anti Chris, these people
were walking illustrations of how ancient Britains might have looked and who better to show us this than John White artist
and governor in 1587 of Roanoke colony in Algonkin territory in what is now North Carolina, famously white drew many
Algonkin figures and scenes. He also illustrated ancient Britains, including these two pictures
of both were published together and explicit comparisons
were made between them. The juxtaposition showed, I quote "how the inhabitants of
Great Britain have been in times past a savage as
those of the of Virginia. Some argue today that there
was an underlying purpose to this to show a Europeans
European colonists that they had little to fear from the
Algonquins who were more civilized than ancient Britains. Their warriors bows showed
greater craft skills than the Britain's brutal swords. They dressed better and their
body paint was more subtle. While ancient British women
paraded naked with nothing but weapons, Algonkin
women also dressed well, prepared food and looked after children. Dress and body ornament
has told us, sorry, breast dress and body ornament
were important signifiers of identity in early modern England. Habit was how you dressed
as well as how you behaved. Even skin color perhaps
was a cultural choice. Here's another 16th century
view of Britain's at the time of Julius Caesar this time
drawn by Lucas Dahir, a contemporary of whites
then working in London, even if classical texts
do very occasionally say North Europeans were naked, and it is very occasionally, it's hard to think that
Dahir would've drawn this if he hadn't heard about people
who lived in warmer climates. And funny enough Dahir
was also the first person who we know to have given us a shot at a realistic depiction of Stonehenge. So we have early modern
Europeans observing other peoples in a way we might call ethnographic
rather than myth making. And we have the first anti
Cree, notably William Camden, who published his first
edition of Britannia in 1586 the year John White was
preparing to sail to Virginia, figuring out how to tell
stories about ancient Britains without falling back on medieval myths. The comparisons start at
precisely the same time and they're never given up. Over the following three
centuries anti Chris worked out ways of writing histories before history. They looked at standing
monuments like Stonehenge and chance fines of strange artifacts. They started to dig into earthworks, often finding graves
with more strange things. They realized these artifacts
could be arranged into a time louder, a stone
bronze, and then iron. The word prehistory was coined. In Denmark in the 1830s
excavation began to be treated as a science. And in 1901, a man who'd
spent most of his career in Japan directed the first
proper dig at Stonehenge. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In the 16th century, up to a point, there was no great investment
in the state of other people's Britains or Algonquins. They were just being observed. But any element of
disengagement soon fell away. Writing in the later 17th century, John Aubrey author of "Brief
Lives" and "At Stonehenge", the man after whom archeologists
named the Aubrey Holes, thought the early inhabitants
of Wilshire were as savage as the beasts whose skins
were their only Raymond. Their druidic priests
were described by Caesar and the stone circles at
eighth Bri and at Stonehenge were their temples. They had the use of iron, however, which made them and I
quote, two or three degrees, I suppose, less savage than the Americans. Such judgments soon became
commonplace analogies between observed peoples and imagined
ancients moved steadily back in time as the living were
deemed inferior to the extinct. Traveling on the beagle in the 1830s, Charles Darwin described people
he came across as savage, the lowest barbarians. And in Tahiti, those who'd quote would have
formed a fine picture of man inhabiting some primeval forest. Daniel Wilson, a Scottish archeologist who
coined the English word, prehistoric, developed his
interest in ethnography when he moved to the
University of Toronto. In 1862, he published a massive
work on prehistoric man, that's the title of his books. For him, North America
was like a distant planet viewed from earth so far away that what
he saw in his telescope was long past, its forests, its animals, and its peoples were yet to
suffer the oppressive effects of millennia of history
that a Europe had endured. Perhaps there he could identify
the primeval condition of man as he had existed after leaving Eden. So for example, on the
Pacific Northwest coast, he finds rude tribes living
in the simplest condition of nomadic savage life. And remember, Wilson's books
are about "Prehistoric Man", not modern peoples. Move forward a century in
Roger Fry's influential work on art published in 1920,
"Vision and Design", he compared ice age cave art in Spain to modern art in South Africa. The prehistoric art was better, he said, but the South African
bushman had somehow held on to some of that ice age genius
as they were descendants of Paleolithic man though the achievements
were otherwise at the same rudimentary stage. Move forward to a couple of
months ago the conversation, a website promoting academic
research illustrated an article about the supposed origins of
language 70,000 years ago with photos of modern people
in southern Africa. Funny enough that bison on
the left is from the cave that Roger Fry was writing
about in "Vision and Design" but this is an older book. And this issue shows starkly in the work of the Victorian politician, banker and popular science
writer John Lubbock. Rightly hailed as the man who
created the concept of giving historic remains in this
country legal protection. His ancient monument's Bill
received its first reading in parliament 150 years ago this month. In 1865, he published a book
called "Prehistoric Times" as illustrated by Ancient Remains, it's importantness and
the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages went down well,
glowingly reviewed in nature. Its seventh edition was published in 1913. I'll tell you, I'd be pleased
at something like that. It was an extraordinary
detailed roundup of archeology. There was also a survey of more
or less contemporary people around the world whose live
sought Lubbock could help his readers understand the ancients
who were his main subject. There's some pretty rough stuff. The progress of science will
erase ignorance and so on, but he did have considerable
respect for the technological skills he was describing. There's plenty about
Stonehenge incidentally, which he compares to
megalithic structures in India. Now, Lubbock followed up this
book with another one about prehistoric people. First published in 1870, it too was popular and
reprinted several times, but this was no catalog of facts. Here, Lubbock was on a mission. The book was called "The
Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man". It has a revealing subtitle, the "Mental and Social
Condition of Savages". In later edition, Stonehenge features two opposite the title page. I suspect the publisher
was hoping to revive sales. Stonehenge always sells, but
it's nowhere else in the book. Instead, it's a lengthy polemic about the behaviors of living savages. Studies of the lower races
of man he says has direct importance in an empire like ours. Minds are impenetrable and
communication in this empire is often impossible. How can you govern like that? Answer. You need to understand savage life. Lubbock warns his readers to
expect facts which are very repugnant to our feelings. Yet still all this is wrapped
up in the idea that these wild uncontrollable people
that somehow Britain is trying to rule are in some
ways like prehistoric folk and can help us understand the past. It too was repeatedly praised
by reviewers in nature. And so we come to Stonehenge. By the turn of the 20th century, Stonehenge being bombarded by
endless debate about its age and purpose and in the
absence of any evidence, it was completely mystifying and random. A key question was where
had the stones come from, for example, but there was no answer. But there'd been little advance
in real understanding since the 18th century and the
days of the great anti Cree, William Stukeley. Meanwhile, the site had decayed. People had dug holes all over it, A cart track ran through
the middle, visitors, horses scattered manure underfoot and people left broken bottles. Some of the largest
megaliths had fallen over and stones within an easy reach
of being very badly damaged by souvenir hunters. Within 25 years, all that had changed. Began in 1901 with a small
excavation that remains one of the best ever conducted at the site. The project focused on
straightening a large stone people feared might fall on visitors and he was led by William Galland. He was a retired engineer, common form of wildlife at
Stonehenge who had worked in government in Japan. While there, he got really
interested in archeology and excavated megalithic sites. He's better known in
Japan for his archeology than he is here. His experience showed in Wilshire. Today, thanks to more excavation
and radiocarbon dating, we can see the monument was
changed at various points over as much as a thousand years. It didn't take a thousand years to build, it took a year or two to build, but then there would be a century or so and then they'd change it again and then leave it and
then change it again. But we still basically agree
with Galland's conclusion that Stonehenge had been built
at the end of the Stone age or at the start of the Bronze Age. We'd now say around 2,500 BC, give or take a few centuries. Now, soon after Galland's dig, the owner sold the stones
and in 1918 the buyer settled Chaba local barrister and
Worthy gave it to the nation. Stonehenge was now permanently protected, or to put it another way, any damage done was
authorized by the government. A larger conservation program
began accompanied by further excavations, which continued until 1926. Directed by William Hawley, who's the chap on the
right with the mustache who'd served with the royal
engineers in South Africa, these revealed most of what we know today as well as insights into
what lies underground. There were a couple of significant
spinoffs from this work. The stones of Stonehenge
had long been divided into two types. The bigger sassons, a local sandstone and the other small megaliths made from a variety of foreign rocks
that had come to be known collectively as Blue Stones. Suggestions as to where these
originated were not limited to Southern Britain, an
extended even to Ireland, Finland and Africa, Hawley's team found a lot of
rock debris and Herbert Thomas, the government's photographer,
had a good look at it. He definitively established
that almost all of the bluestones had in fact
come from Pembroke shire and the only way they
could have got to the site is by people bringing them. This is a model the geologists had made and is now in the science museum. Each of the stones is made
from rock collected at the sources he identified. While new studies backed by
new science have changed almost all the details of the original work, Thomas's two principles
remain Southwest Wales human transport. The other outcome was a
book published in 1924. It was called "The Stones of Stonehenge", and it was written by one Herbert Stone. There were two, funny enough, there are two archeologists
who had quite a big impact in the last century on Stonehenge
and both of whom had surnamed Stone. And I often wondered if
only they'd lived longer the three of us could have
written probably a often referenced article, but it's not talked about much these days Herbert Stone's book. Further restoration and
excavation occurred later in the century. One of the archeologists
involved then, Richard Atkinson, wrote a bestseller which
gave the impression it had all begun in the 1950s. In reality, most of his
data were drawn from the 1920s excavations
and Herbert Stone's book. Although Richard Atkinson
directed excavation at Stonehenge, he actually wrote the book
before almost all his excavations had begun. In any way, popular culture
had already absorbed Stone's ideas which were further backed up by the official guidebook, which from 1953 was written by one of Hawley's excavation assistants. The Stonehenge most of us
know today is pretty much a child of the 1920s. You probably can't see
it, I certainly can't, but if you've got really good eyes, you could see that stone two. Herbert Stone two was an engineer. In fact, he was a very
distinguished engineer. He studied math and science
at King's College London and spent most of his
career working in Asia. First at similar in Calcutta, then on the Rangoon Railway in Burma, I'm using obviously names of the time, and finally as chief engineer
of the East India Railway based at Hyderabad. Here is a station on a line he worked on and below is what is now
the Nerucetu railway bridge, another of his schemes when
built the longest in India and said to be the second
longest in the world. On projects like these, he will have visited Stone
quarries and he would've heard from other colonial staff in India, especially in the Northeast, about people who were then
creating megalithic monuments, which could be compared to Stonehenge. I suspect his wife would've
said that after retirement, Stone became obsessed with Stonehenge. In his book he describes
a quarry at Hyderabad. Here is granite broken
up with stone hammers that he calls mauls and
that he characterizes as the native system. Here is another view in the
same quarry where steel hammers have been used, which one imagines many seeing the photo at the time
would've read as British order and efficiency, but on the
far left is a rounded boulder. This is a native stone mauls. They were used to split
off a layer of granite for building use. A row of men, says Stone, each holding a mauls between
two hands above his head stood along the rock face. At a signal from a foreman, they brought down their
maul simultaneously and a crack would open up. Back in England, the railway engineer found
that the megalith at Stonehenge had also been carved with mauls. Many had been found in
the recent excavations. In the center are a couple from his book and on the writer selection
in the British Museum Stonehenge exhibition last year. Now megalith says Stone was
split by hammering with mauls aided by setting a line of fire, which will be dowsed with water. Such use of fire had been
reported to the Royal Anthropological Institute
in London in 1871, observed by a man who was an
aide de comp in the second Anglo Burmese war and later
joined the survey of India. And here it is, a quarry scene
drawn by Brian Hope Taylor, an archeologist who is
also a talented illustrator for a 1960 National Geographic feature. Here are the mauls and the lines of fire. What we also see our
timber levers and rollers. The use of these have been described, especially in Indonesia where
people have been photographed moving megaliths in 1915. And here from Stone's book in
1924 is a model illustrating the use of rollers. He made these little
models and took them around when he gave lectures, they
must have been wonderful, but sadly they don't
seem to exist anymore. Now he wasn't the first to show this. This striking scene is from
the romance of early British Life by GF Scott Elliott,
a well-traveled botanist, born in Calcutta. Published in 1909, the books a fantasy, often comical in its
absurdism anachronisms one of the things these
ancient British do is they make wine, although it's
not very good apparently. But the Great King offers the people, and I quote the privilege
of volunteering to help in building Stonehenge. The work went on for years,
neither slave nor volunteer. Now here Scott Elliott
puts the word volunteer in quotation marks, ever
returned to his native village. A stone is prized from a
quarry with wooden wedges and dragged over giant rollers. They eat unleavened bread rather
like the chapatis of India. This is supposedly prehistoric Britain. Now the artwork is by Lancelot Speed, who among other things
illustrated Edward Buller Litton's "The Last Days of Pompei". This is not a huge distance
from Alan Sorrell's vision on the right, drawn for a Ministry of Work's
guidebook in the late 1950s. In both we see rollers, half naked men being ordered about and an overall sense
of dark drama and fear. And here taking stone's idea
to its ultimate conclusion is a full size model
megalith on rollers at the Stonehenge Visitor Center. You can test your strength
by pulling on the rope. So the megaliths are
dressed at the quarries, put on wooden rollers and pulled
by men on ropes until they reached the building site. Here Herbert Stone tells
us they were raised with sheer legs. And this is how that looks
in English Heritages 2022 Stonehenge guidebook. Quite complicated stuff, but the people who built
Stonehenge as the 1920s guy book says, were a primitive race. So how did they do it? Herbert Stone agreed that
the stones were erected by a primitive people, but they were told what
to do by an expert. This "architect and engineer was a man of extraordinary ability. The words of a man who'd
overseen construction of India's railways and was probably a foreigner, a wise man from the east". So we have a bunch of ideas
about how to shape move and erect large stones. All of these have been imported from Asia, mostly by colonial officers
who had recorded local people making megaliths. Sheerlegs alone, I think came from Stones own engineering works. We also have a judgment about
the sort of people who did it. Native Britains were a primitive race, but they pulled off the
extraordinary engineering achievement of Stonehenge
because they were directed in the mere manual labor,
not quite as slaves, but neither were they volunteers by a higher being from another land. And "a primitive people
under the immediate guidance and supervision of an expert". Now far-fetched as that might sound, it was espoused in the
1950s by Richard Atkinson in the guise of a priest
from Bronze Age Greece. And as such it survived
well into the 1970s and you can still find
it kicking around today in odd corners. Let's recap a bit more. This Stonehenge vision, a civilized man abroad
directing primitive laborers was created in the 1920s by
a former Imperial Indian railway engineer. He was 22 when the first
edition of Lubbock's book about savage minds and lives was published, a book which not only compared modern with prehistoric people, but advocated their study as important because it would make them easier to rule. I don't think archeologists
at the time or since were explicitly conscious of this pedigree in the way that say John
Lubbock would've been. They just thought this is
what happened at Stonehenge. They didn't think that
Stonehenge people were like the modern subjects of
empire up to a point. They may have done it
with innocent intentions, but archeologists throughout
the last century turned to modern people around the
world as models for antiquity. Excuse me. We have round houses in Arnage Britain. They build round houses in
Kenya. Let's look at those. They use stonex blades
in Neolithic Britain. They use Stonex blades two in New Guinea. Let's look at those. Aura has happened on the
conversation in 2022. We want to illustrate a story
about the origins of speech 70,000 years ago. Let's use modern photos of
quote the indigenous San people in the Kalahari desert. Brian Om, a distinguished
archeologist now retired, wrote a book for her colleagues about ethnographic parallels. Published in 1981 defines anthropology as the study of primitive societies. Unconscious, I think. But both antiquity and
modernity are being judged. They are deficient. Just as the image of ancient
stone hinge is informed by modern peoples that comparison
judges modern peoples. It works both ways. One person who made no bones
at all about the primitive nature of the prehistoric
world was a popular writer on stone circles, the late Aubrey Burl. In a 1987 book, he
compared Stonehenge people "short-lived, superstitious,
sun worshipers who lived in dirty hobbles in a dark land and feared death but feared the dead more" to "19th century Zulu in southern Africa". I'd like to say I made
that out, but I didn't. And here's the rub. When it came to Stonehenge,
Herbert Stone got almost everything wrong. For a variety of reasons, none of his proposals now
enshrined in modern Stonehenge mythology could have worked. Now all this might seem like
nitpicking, but bear with me, we're going somewhere. Fire would not have worked on
the Stonehenge types of rock and there is no evidence
for its use in this way. The roller idea had long been
supported by ethnographic records in Indonesia, but this
was based on a misreading. In this photo on the left,
taken around 1915 in Sinatra, the stone is not being pulled over rollers as everybody said it was, but along a fixed track and the
poles are pegged into place. And despite best intentions, experiments which are really quite common always show rollers to be a
barely controllable liability. And as for sheerlegs, as for sheerlegs, much loved by experimenters, they would've been
impossible at Stonehenge. There just wasn't room. It might have worked for one
or two stones in a field, but not in the confined
spaces of a building site. You'd have to do the sort
of things the illustrator John Civic does here. Now I'm not blaming John Civic for this. He will would've been doing
what he was told to do to suit what an
archeologist had written for a magazine feature. But what he does is he
moves the tall triathlons, which are on the far right. There's two uprights with
a single stone over the top to slightly taller than the rest of them. He moves them so far out that
they touch the stone circle. He shrinks the workforce literally. And as you still don't
have the distance to get the leverage, you push the
stone up from the back. Just one more. I'd love these. These fabulous scenes are
from a 1961 Lady bird book drawn by John Kenny splitting described at one Indian quarry, but geologically inappropriate in the UK, rolling and ramping. Earth ramping was another thing
that Herbert Stone picked up from India. He proposed it as a way to
raise the horizontal lentils at Stonehenge. If it had been used at Stonehenge, there will be physical evidence. Sadly, there is none. Now I puzzled over these
illustrations for some time, Lady Bird books often go
awol with pre-history. But where did the inspiration
for these illustrations come from? They are so vivid. I thought he hasn't just made
these up and then I found it. Raper Nui, the photo is from
Toge Doll's bestselling book about East Land and published in 1958, so just a couple of years
before the Lady Bird book came out, obviously
based on the photograph. Now in fact it's only something like this that would've been
possible at a Stonehenge. By sheer accident this illustrator
had hit on more or less the right thing. Now we don't have the
evidence for earth and ranch, but the same effect could have
been achieved with timber. And we do know that people
then were in the habit of using and working very large timbers with skill. Now you might be thinking neolithic people got the stones up. These are just details. But there is a bigger point. The ideas that came from
observations in Asia weren't really thought through. Stone and other archeologists
didn't look carefully enough at what was being done in India neither did they think
they had to get close to the stones at Stonehenge to
understand their materials, to scrutinize the evidence
for how they'd been dressed and to imagine not just one
stone being pushed about but an entire complicated monument. All of that came only this century. We now know where at least
some of the large stones came from. This is West Woods, 20
miles north of Stonehenge high on the Morba downs. This gives us the chance
to look for quarries. We have much to learn. It means we can map the
journey the stones took knowing each end point. This shows a wooden
track early last century made for dragging large timbers
out of forest in Malaysia. In northeast India, people
used to carry small megaliths in wooden frames. These are both viable
techniques in Neolithic Britain. I can't imagine how you could
get 75 sassans to the site from more or less the same location averaging 20 tons in many
weighing more than 30 and tied to a 10 ton sledge
without a fixed track. And we do know that people were
laying wooden tracks at more or less this time elsewhere in Britain. Study of the megalith
surfaces at Stonehenge just revealed them to be
far more heavily shaped than we had realized. And people didn't just
bash with large mauls, they used tools of varying
sizes in a sequence of ever finer dressing, grinding and smoothing were
as important as hitting. The evidence was always there. It was just that like Lubbock, Herbert Stone had a mindset
that encouraged him to think that he, the engineer was the boss. Everyone else was a laborer. Primitive hands in need of
instruction to understand the simple technology you needed
to do no more than give it a quick glance. It didn't occur to anyone that
superstitious sun worshipers might be able to do things
the archeologists could not. And the final irony is if
they'd looked more closely in India, they might have got it right. When Herbert Stone in retirement
was defining a Stonehenge for the 20th century, social and cultural
anthropology were taking shape. Bronislav Malinovskin Britain and France, Boas in North America were
promoting the idea that peoples or cultures could only be
understood on their own terms. They could not be judged. There was no point and it was meaningless and it led to misunderstandings. Partly they were reacting
against that very dismissal of other people's as savages. The living counterpart, the
archeologist, primitives, Lubbock's lower races of man. Now archeology two was
taking shape at this time, but here emphasis was self-consciously on the new sciences of
excavation and artifact study. Archeology had something to
prove that it was a proper field of study and it did that
by focusing on digging. The earlier reliance on
knowledge of other peoples rapidly fell away. As a result, Stonehenge
archeologists missed what was going on in anthropology and more immediately in India. Some people there continued
to move and raise large stones and some of the new
observers recorded them, in particular, John Hutton. Hutton joined the Indian
Civil Service in 1909. He later became commissioner
for the Census of India, encouraging officials "to
produce descriptive accounts of the tribes and backward communities with which they were familiar". He resigned in 1936 to become
professor of anthropology at the University of Cambridge. But by then he'd been able to
conduct substantial field work among people living in the
Naga Hills in the northeast. Here he recorded megaliths
being created in vivid detail. What's striking is how much
what he observed seems relevant Stonehenge as he himself recognized. And I'll mention just one thing, how stones were raised upright. Hutton saw no sheerlegs. Instead he described how
people gathered around a stone and by pushing and pulling
wedging and levering with poles and a bit of rope, they
just warred it into place, which is pretty much what
we see here on the left. On Rappa Nui, says Heldo, it took 18 days to get
a small statue upright from horizontal. Hour by hour, it was barely
possible to see anything move. It was a very gentle human affair. And Stonehenge nudging stones
up with timber frames, levers, and short ropes has to be
the only realistic option. We get the megaliths upright
with timbers and are seen here on the right in West Sumber,
another island in Indonesia, we use timbers to lift
the lentils and people. Because labor is not a costly resourced to be managed and minimized but the social engagement of
entire communities who actually want to be part of the project, whether or not they're need it. Because Stonehenge bonkers as it is, an undeniably and architectural
and engineering challenge is more than anything about
people, politics, religion, sharing and being seen. The more the better. Contrast that with sheerlegs. This is a scene during filming
for a BBC broadcast in 1994. First a stone is rocked
into a pit with the help of a large weight. Then it just pulled
vertical with giant poles and long ropes. This project is the inspiration behind the English heritage
guidebook illustration. Once everything's in place, the actual erection is over
in a matter of minutes. It happens fast with an an
element of genuine danger. Now I've already pointed out
that you couldn't do this at Stonehenge because there's no room and too many stones in the way. But what I want to draw
your attention to here is the distance between the
stone and the people moving it somewhere far out of frame are
gangs pulling on the ropes. Contrast this with the Rapa Nui scene where people are close to the statue. Here there is an intimate
affair between laborers and stone drawn out over half a month. There were close to the stone
in Hutton's description too. In all he writes about megaliths in India, creating them is not
just about engineering. There's an understanding
between people and stone, a slow careful respect. In one of his articles, Hutton described people
erecting wooden memorial posts. In 15 pages, only two are
actually about carving and raising posts. The rest is about ceremonies, symbolism, ritual preparations, drinking
and sacrificing animals. This is not, of course, just
about a few people in India. Any construction of a ceremonial
or religious monument where we have information is
a huge social event. We're seeing here, I think
one of those universals that as archeologists we can bring in as a working hypothesis
that entirely changes the way we think about
how Stonehenge was built. It's about people, stupid. Another man who looked at living
peoples in the 19th century and through them thought he
could see prehistoric times was Edward Tyler. Inspired by John Lubbock, he
wrote an influential book, "Primitive Culture"
first published in 1871. Searching through, and
there's lots of quotes here, records of the low races of mankind, he contrasts lower tribes
and higher nations. He identifies progress and degradation and he comes up with a scheme. Primitive culture steadily gets
better so that over time all peoples might progress
from a stage of savagery through barbarism to civilization. In the present, some
people remained primitive, others had regressed. In the Mississippi Valley, writes Tyler, native tribes in modern
times do not rank high even as savages though in the past they were
a somewhat advanced race. In the states, Louis Henry
Morgan did something similar in his book published in 1877. This was explicitly a
historical scheme that began 60,000 years ago with lower savagery. While Tyler was happy
to compare his stages to the three archeological
ages of stone, bronze, and iron and Morgan less so, there are clear parallels. Here were schemes in which
the past and people in the present assessed are somehow still living in that past were judged. The further back in time,
the less sophisticated, the less complete. Morgan and Tyler aren't
themselves now history, but the three ages live
on in popular narratives and in academic thinking. Nominally of course ages of stone, bronze and iron are just
handy ways of dividing up an immensely long past. Yet it's hard to escape the
impression that an element of judgment remains even among archeologists. The further we go back into the past, other things being equal, the less there is for us to dig up. Early populations were smaller, they had less of a physical impact. Early technologies
generated less varied waste, age decays, less survives
from remote times. For the archeologist,
it's undeniable that this has the effect of making
older records at once less complicated and harder to read. That easily becomes a version
of lives were simpler then, and when you're in the habit of thinking about culture changes over millennia, it is also easy to slip
into an unspoken version of Morgan Tyler progression. And all that happens in the
context of the archeological profession that began with
judgments about modern peoples, which is we've seen at
Stonehenge remain embedded in popular imaginations. And of course it's not
just about Stonehenge. In 1911, the Illustrated London News ran a feature about a newly
excavated R and H village at Glastonbury, very important site. It was headlined, not
the word dobbed savage of the old history books, the
civilized ancient Britain. After more than a century of research, which has transformed
understanding of the past, that line is still being used. Every week something
turns up to show us that ancient people were not
as primitive as we thought because we do think ancient
people were primitive. And that is a judgment
not just on the past, which has no voice. Our understanding of prehistoric
people is so tied up with reports of recent people, that is also a judgment on
anyone alive whose technology, culture, or lifestyle
is not the same as ours. On at least two occasions, men from Africa turned the argument around and in doing so, exposed its nonsense. Olaudah Equiano in his
memoir, published in 1789, used it to counter slavery. And I have no doubt he
would've been able to deliver this line better than I can but, let the polished and
haughty a European recollect that his ancestors were once
like the Africans uncivilized and even barbaras. Did nature make them
inferior to their sons and should they too have been made slaves? Every rational mind answers no. Nearly two centuries
later, primitive Britains were again invoked to admonish
the patronizing British. In this case it was Hastings Banda, premier of what is now
Malawi, then Niceland. Addressing his parliament, he criticized white missionaries
for calling out dancing as savage and sinful and
wonderfully, he names Stonehenge. "I wish" he said, "I could
bring Stonehenge Niceland to show there was a time
when Britain had a culture that was savage." We are back with John
White and is Elizabeth and counterparts imagining the inhabitants of ancient Britain to be as savage as the people of Virginia. But the solution to this is
not a primitive shouting match. It is to drop such terms altogether and not just the vocabulary, but most importantly to escape
the whole judgmental thing. The world of Stonehenge was
very different from our own or from that of any other people today, including the appearance
and the genetic makeup of the Stonehenge people themselves. But here is my key point. We must recognize that
those differences were down to history and choice. The particularities of time and
place not to any qualitative failings either in culture or
individuals in Britain then, or I need to add in view
of the way some people approach Stonehenge today. Now, if we can achieve that open curiosity that wonder for such alien
differences in our midst, bereft of judgment, then we can claim Stonehenge to be part of the past of everyone, anywhere. - Thank you. (audience clapping) - We have time for one or two questions depending on the length of the answers. According to tradition, we always give the first
question to our online community. And I'm going to take the
biggest one from that, which is in a few sentences, Mike. Now what do we know and don't
we know about Stonehenge? (all laughing) - That was the question? Well, what do we know? God, for goodness sake, we know a great deal about Stonehenge. We know a lot about the
materials, about the chronology, the complex history of the
structures that were built at Stonehenge, the people who lived in the
area and where they lived and what they were doing. What we don't know is what we
would learn were we to conduct new excavations actually out the monument. There are a lot of details in that history that are completely mysterious to us, but there is an extraordinary amount. I mean, give one example,
DNA is a really ancient, DNA is a really new field
and so we're still feeling our way with it. But already we've discovered
that under burials in the Stonehenge landscape
that are are contemporary with a later history of the monument, we've actually been able
to identify individuals who are related to each other. So here in one part of Wilshire, there's somebody who is
an uncle of somebody else who was a cousin of somebody
else in a different burial. I mean, it's just utterly extraordinary. And we've just begun this. - [Member] Napoleon has
been suggested as being the father of modern archeology. Is that something you
agree with or don't agree? - I think I sort of, yes and no. I mean certainly if you're
French, you probably say yes. I don't think there's really
a father or a single person. I think archeology it's
such a huge, complex thing and he embraces just
absolutely everything. I was talking to the man who
taught me a-level archeology when I was at school the other day, and he said what he liked
about archeology was that it was multidisciplinary
teaching it at school. It was geography,
anthropology, math, physics, science, statistics, anything you call geography,
anything to think of. And so archeology emerged from
all these different fields of study and it worked best even today when you have dozens of people coming from different backgrounds, bringing their different
perspectives working together. But yeah, Napoleon was
a big figure, not Lisa. Of course it's a collector. - Thank you. I wonder if you got any
comment on the way in which Stonehenge is kind of
appropriated by people now ranging from sort of new age
equal warriors on the one hand to kind of far right, this is part of our white heritage kind of on the other side. And you can sort of seemingly
read anything you like into Stonehenge. And I wonder what you think about that? - I'm often unhappy with
the way that that's done because I think Stonehenge
belongs to all of us. So when you have a
particular narrow group, whatever it is, whether
it's in the far right or the loony left or anything in between, you feel this is actually
taking something away from the place 'cause it's so much bigger
than these narrow fields. But you're never going to stop it. It's always been the case and always. But I mean, as an
archeologist, I'm conscious that some people may feel
that archeologists claims don't hinges their own, they have a particular perspective
on what's going on there. I do find, I mean like
the stuff that happened, I'm really pleased that there's
no longer a festival there. I think when in the '80s
when the festival was going, I think that was a huge distraction. Although it was very popular
with a lot of people, not least academics, it was a huge, it made visiting
for the ordinary visitors, tourists, and so it made it
almost impossible to get near the place to appreciate it. And I think me the most important thing is that we should all be able
just to go and experience Stonehenge in our own
imagination and take the whatever we like and come away
with whatever we like without having that disturbed too much. - A wonderfully uplifting
notion on which to end. We need to end at 7:00
and the iron hand of time is upon that hour. So I shall Thank you, Mike. - Thank.
(all clapping)
