Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos

libation The pouring out of wine or other liquid, whether or not conceived as a drink, in honour of a god or ancestor.

limb (of the Sun or Moon) The edge of the apparent disc of the Sun or Moon.

lintel A horizontal stone or timber, placed across the top of two uprights, as in a door frame.

long barrow See barrow

lozenge A rhomb, a geometrical figure in the shape of the ‘diamonds’ on playing cards.

lynchet A terrace cut into the slope of a (usually chalk) down, intended for cultivation.

magnetic flux A measure of the magnetism crossing a surface. More precisely: the surface integral of the product of the permeability of the medium and the magnetic field intensity perpendicular to the surface.

magnetometer An instrument for measuring the strength and direction of a magnetic field, in archaeology usually the Earth’s.

magnitude (of a star) A measure of the brightness of a star or planet. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus (second century BC) grouped stars on a scale from first (brightest) to sixth magnitude (barely detectable). It was eventually realized that the physiology of the eye is such that each step corresponds to a roughly similar brightness ratio. In 1856 N. R. Pogson established a standard scheme in which a difference of 5 in magnitude corresponds to a brightness ratio of 100 to 1. A difference of 1 in magnitude then corresponds to a brightness ratio of 2.512 to 1. The only magnitudes relevant to this book are magnitudes apparent to the eye. (Other definitions relate to the intrinsic luminosities of stars and to the type of radiation received by the detector.) marl A soil comprising a mixture of clay and lime.

megalith A large stone (by implication, one that is thought to have had a monumental use). (From Greek mega, large, and lithos, stone.)

Megalithic Yard (MY) A unit of length (0.829 m or 2.72 ft) that was used, according to Alexander Thom, in the construction of stone rings and other megalithic monuments.

menhir A single standing stone of appreciable height (a Breton word, said to be from men, stone, and hir, long). The word occurs in many Breton place names, but seems to have entered archaeology only in the eighteenth century.

meridian The plane containing the northernmost and southernmost points of the horizon, the north celestail pole, and the zenith overhead; or that part of the great circle on the celestial sphere through the last three points. (From the Latin meridies, midday, when the Sun crosses the meridian.) The word is also used of the terrestrial counterpart of this, namely a line of longitude on the Earth, as in ‘the meridian of Greenwich’. See culmination.

Mesolithic The period between the end of the last Ice Age (say 8000 BC) and the introduction of farming and pottery making (in Britain around 4500 BC).

Metonic cycle The cycle of 19 years or 235 months (these being approximately equal) that brings the Moon back in step with the Sun, so that new and full moons repeat on the same dates. From Meton, a Greek astronomer of the fifth century BC.)

mica A mineral (often aluminium silicate) occurring as small glinting flakes in granite and other rocks.

micaceous Containing mica.

microlith A very small stone tool, in some instances meant as part of a larger tool (for example as a blade fitted in a haft).

midden In general use now a dunghill, but in archaeological use a rubbish dump, often containing bones, shells, and charcoal.

Minoan The name applied by Sir Arthur Evans to the Bronze Age civilization of Crete (3000 to 1000 BC, divided by him into three periods, Early, Middle and Late).

mortise A cavity cut into wood or stone into which fits the end (or some part) of another piece of wood or stone (this being called a tenon) so forming a joint. The Stonehenge lintels had mortises into which fitted tenons at the tops of the uprights. This was obviously copied from earlier practice with timbers.

Mortlake ware A characteristic form of late Neolithic pottery with thick rims and heavy decoration. See Peterborough ware.

mortuary house A house of the dead, in some cases of stone and in others of wood, wattle and daub, as in houses of the living. Used for the deposit of the corpse, and occasionally offerings, at the time of burial. The starting point of many burial mounds.

Mycenaean A mainland Greek civilization that developed in the late Bronze Age, which in its early period (sixteenth century BC or before) was strongly influenced by the Minoan civilization. Named after the place Mycenae, although the term is applied more extensively.

Neolithic The period (literally ‘New Stone {Age}’) in which agriculture was first practised, pottery was made, and fine tools mainly in stone, all of these things being eventually the subject of trade. Typical monuments of the period were the long barrows and causewayed enclosures. The period in southern Britain can be conventionally taken as lasting from about 4500 BC to about 2800 BC.

node A point where two great circles on the celestial sphere intersect (see Appendix 2). Two great circles of much importance are the apparent paths of the Sun and Moon through the stars, and the lunar nodes (where they cross) are of especial interest since eclipses take place when the Sun and Moon are at or near them. The lunar nodes are not fixed but moved slowly round the sky in a sense counter to the Moon’s monthly motion, completing the circuit in about 18.6 years.

obol or obolus A silver (or later bronze) coin of ancient Greece, which was often placed in the mouths of the dead as a fee for the ferryman Charon, who conveyed the shades of the dead across the rivers of the lower world. The tradition was taken over by the Romans.

oolite A form of limestone, in which the calcium carbonate adopts a granulated form around grains of sand. Usually fossil-bearing.

Ordnance Datum (OD) The level with reference to which ground levels (heights and depths) are quoted in the Ordnance Survey.

orthostat An upright stone.

Palaeolithic The period (literally ‘Old Stone {Age}’) of human existence when stone tools first played an important technological part in human evolution. There are many definitions, but the Palaeolithic period is often conventionally taken to have lasted to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, and to have begun around 700,000 years ago. Britain was occupied intermittently during certain warmer periods of this long stretch of time, which is usually divided into Lower (say to 200,000 years ago), Middle (up to between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago) and Upper Palaeolithic (continuing to about 10,000 years ago).

passage grave General term for a tomb in which a long stone passage leads into a burial chamber, the whole being then covered with a mound of stone or earth.

paving Usually flat stone slabs covering the ground.

post pipe The space in the ground left after the decay of a post, or its filling. Its precise size and constitution depends on local circumstance (outside pressure, the treatment of the original post, surrounding soil, and so on).

Peterborough ware Pottery of a style associated with the second half of the third millennium BC in southern Britain (as far north as Yorkshire). Typical is the heavily ornamented necked bowl, at first with a rounded base, later in a flat-based form. The ornament is often added with a twisted cord impression. S. Piggott recognized three distinctive styles: Ebbsfleet, Mortlake and Fengate.

precession (of the equinoxes) The slow drift of the equinoctial points (see equinox) round the sky (the apparent sphere of stars). The effect is that the measured ecliptic longitudes of the stars increase by about 1.5° per century, but it also means that what stars are visible, and where precisely they rise and set over the horizon, change with time—and change substantially over millennia.

quern A device in which grain is ground, usually comprising two discs of stone, the lower one hollowed and fixed, the upper rotated or moved from side to side by hand.

radiocarbon A radioactive isotope of the element carbon, used as an indicator of the time that has passed since the death of a specimen of organic matter (wood, bone, antler, etc.). See Appendix 1.

reave A land boundary.

resistivity A measure of relative electrical resistance, in archaeology usually that of the soil. (The term is usually defined as the resistance measured across a specimen of certain standard dimensions.) Variations in resistivity may indicate past soil disturbance (ditches, post holes, etc.) or the existence of buried material (stones, the remains of posts, etc.).

revetment A retaining wall, usually of stone, timber or turf, supporting a rampart or mound, or even the side of a ditch.

rhomb or rhombus A parallelogram with four equal sides. A lozenge-shaped plane figure.

rhyton A vessel from which libations are poured. (From the Greek.)

Rinyo–Clacton ware A major pottery style of the late Neolithic, with typically linear patterns and a more homogeneous form than that of Peterborough ware. It tends to have a bucket shape with thick walls and a flat base, and to be poorly fired. Known throughout Britain (found at Rinyo in Orkney and Clacton in Essex, of course), it is rare in Ireland. S. Piggott used the name to replace the more descriptive grooved ware, which carries no implication of a single material culture responsible for it, but which some regard as too narrowly defined.

sabbath Originally the seventh day of the week, a day of religious rest as enjoined on the Jews of Israel; more generally, any comparable periodic day of rest.

sarsen A form of micaceous sandstone (see mica), as used for the larger stones at Stonehenge. The word was perhaps peculiar to the Wiltshire region.

scaling posts The name given here to the timber posts, traces of which are often found under the high end of a long barrow. They are not symmetrically placed, and it is here argued that they provided a guide to the astronomical architecture of the barrow.

shard or sherd A fragment of broken pottery.

solstice The times of year at which the Sun is at its maximum northerly or southerly declination. The days are then at their longest and shortest respectively. These times are traditionally called midsummer and midwinter, although astronomers, among others, define the beginnings of summer and winter in terms of them. They occur now around 21 June and 21 December, but it makes little sense to ask for equivalent Neolithic dates, when there was no comparable calendar. At the winter solstice, the Sun’s noon altitude is at its lowest, and at the summer solstice it is highest.

standstill (lunar) A maximum or minimum of the lunar declination. (Compare the solar solstices.) This is only in the mathematical sense of there being a zero rate of change, and does not imply that there will be no greater or lesser values attained. See Appendix 2 for a fuller account of the Moon’s complex motions.

stele A standing stone or slab of modest size (say less than a metre, and often less than 30 cm) with one face only sculpted in low relief. An Anglicized Greek word. (Pronounced like the English word steel.)

tenon See mortise.

terminal The end of a monument (in this book usually a cursus) on the assumption that it was regarded as such by its builders and has been correctly identified.

theodolite A portable surveying instrument, usually now mounted on a tripod and fitted with a telescope, with graduated circular scales with which angles of azimuth and altitude can be accurately measured.

transept A side compartment in a passage tomb, often doubled to form a plan in the form of a cross, or even quadrupled.

trapezium A plane quadrilateral (a closed figure with four straight sides) that is not a parallelogram. Some use the word in a more special sense, adding the condition that just one pair of opposite sides be parallel.

treehenge The name given here to a henge with mainly timber components (uprights, lintels, etc.).

trilithon Three stones, in the form of two uprights and a lintel across the top.

trixylon Two massive timber uprights with a timber lintel across the top (by analogy with trilithon).

tropical year The time taken by the Earth to travel once round the Sun, from equinox to equinox. Alternatively, from the point of view of an observer on the Earth, the time apparently taken by the Sun to pass once round the sphere of stars, from equinox to equinox. This is the common year, of about 365.242 days.

tumulus A term used loosely for any artificial mound, called into use especially when the precise nature of the mound is unknown.

twilight The periods after sunset and before sunrise when the sky is partially illuminated through the scattering of sunlight. Various definitions are offered (civil, nautical, astronomical) according to the degree of darkening thought to be significant.

urnfield A field of pottery urns used for burial by cremation. (Also used of the culture in which this form of burial was practised.)

vallum A wall or rampart of earth, sods, or stones, possibly palisaded.

weald or wold A wooded tract of country. (The Weald is a name used especially of an area formerly wooded between the North and South Downs of Kent, Surrey and Sussex.)

wedge tomb A very long megalithic tomb, with the covering sloping down towards the end furthest from the entrance. A common Neolithic Irish form.

Windmill Hill culture The name given to a culture typified by the Neolithic culture responsible for the causewayed enclosure at Windmill Hill, near Avebury.

wristguard A plate of wood, stone or metal attached to the inner side of the wrist (of the hand with which an archer holds the bow), to protect the wrist from the bowstring.

zenith The point of the sky directly above the observer. The point to which the string of a plumb line may be regarded as directed. (More precise definitions are strictly necessary if the non-spherical form of the Earth is to be taken into account.)

zodiac The band of sky now associated with twelve constellations through which the Sun seems to pass in its annual path. See ecliptic.

PREFACE

To the Greeks, the primary sense of cosmos was that of order, harmony, and proportion. When the word was applied to the universe as a whole it was to insist that those properties—appropriate to a well regulated state, a finely decorated vase, a formally beautiful building—belonged to the universe too. Aetius tells us that Pythagoras was the first to use the word in this sense, and Stonehenge had stood for two millennia by his time. Today, as it presumably did then, Stonehenge impresses the onlooker more for its engineering than for its cosmic qualities, but it too was in a very real sense a cosmos, a geometrically ordered monument aligned on the universe of stars, Sun and Moon, and an embodiment of the spiritual forces they represented to most of mankind.

Such a claim is easier to make than to justify. It is not easy to catch at the mind of a people who lived more than four thousand years ago, and who left no written history, but the aim of this book is to do just that. Except indirectly, its concern is not with the realities of daily life, not with social structures, habitation, subsistence, or sheer survival, but rather with types of Neolithic monument that speak for the qualities of mind of the people responsible. We may have no texts, but the relatively large scale on which so many Neolithic monuments were built, combined with the modest way in which they merged into the landscape, have together ensured that time has not quite managed to obliterate them or all of their meaning. The monuments in question might not have compared in appearance with the polished glories of Egypt and Greece, but they have hidden qualities, and when those are found, the fact that they were concealed makes them all the more surprising.

What was the motivation of those who invested so much care and energy in them? The view to be defended here is that, as well as being religious, that motivation was in a strong sense astronomical, and that in this respect, few cultures of the time can compare with it. Such a claim is neither new nor precise. What is new here is the detail with which probable observing procedures are worked out, and connected with others detectible from at least as early as the fifth millennium BC. Stonehenge is like no other monument in the world, but there are many respects in which it is mistaken to regard it as unique. To understand it we must fit it into its context, both in time and space. In time, it can be shown to have continued in a venerable tradition. In space, its context is the remarkable landscape in which it stands. The number of prehistoric monuments within two kilometres of the site is to be counted not in tens but in hundreds. What is less widely recognized is that the astronomical properties of Stonehenge, as of so many earlier Neolithic monuments, were also heavily dependent on that landscape. But not entirely. Their design depended also on the state of the heavens.

It will not of course be suggested that the monument on Salisbury Plain was an astronomical observatory, at least in the current meaning of that word. The stones were not erected as a means to investigating the heavens in a detached and abstract way. The aim was not to discover the patterns of behaviour of the Sun, Moon or stars but to embody those patterns, already known in broad outline, in a religious architecture. There are signs that such ritualized architecture had been practised in the Wessex neighbourhood and elsewhere for well over a thousand years before the first phases of building at Stonehenge. While that monument in stone surpassed all before it, in architectural subtlety as well as in grandeur, to appreciate even this point one must know something of the earthen and timber structures that went before it and consequently about half of the book is concerned with that earlier material.

The book was prompted by a certain symmetry I noticed in 1979 in some published plans of excavations made on the site of a Bronze Age burial mound at Harenermolen in the northern Netherlands. (The monument in question is discussed and illustrated in Chapter 7 below.) When built, that mound had been surrounded by rings of wooden posts that had of course rotted away millennia before the excavation performed by A. E. van Giffen in the 1920s. As at many other comparable sites, he and others have been able to chart the traces of the original posts with considerable accuracy, through the discoloration of the sandy soil. It soon became clear that when such rings of posts were erected they were placed with reference to the rising and setting of the Sun and Moon at critical times and seasons. A similar claim has often been made for many of the stone circles, but the positioning of the timber posts seemed to offer more reliable evidence as to precisely how the Sun and Moon had been observed.

Using the key astronomical ideas that emerged in this way, it was natural enough to try to apply them to the much earlier Aubrey holes at Stonehenge, and to timber monuments at Woodhenge, Mount Pleasant, and elsewhere. Doing so led me in turn to consider the potential astronomical implications of the much earlier English long barrows, tombs roughly similar in form to others in various regions of Neolithic northern Europe. Many of them seemed to indicate that the stars, rather than the Sun and Moon, were for their builders the prime focus of religious attention. Needless to say, the order of the book is more or less the reverse of that of my search, and begins with the long barrows. The path to Stonehenge is well trodden, although usually more direct.

The direction of the argument as presented here might disturb the casual archaeological reader, with eye trained to find the nub of the argument by looking for histograms and comparable statistical tools of evaluation. They could have added little of value, and they are certainly not the only valid way of assessing an argument. Like most archaeological reconstructions of the past, mine follows a perfectly conventional method. It puts forward a series of hypotheses about past human actions, and it tries to determine which of them best survive attempts to refute them in the light of the evidence. The evidence in question concerns not only the excavation but what is humanly possible and humanly probable. Those last two factors are all too often left out of the equation, but they play an important part in the initial search for alternative hypotheses. A rigorous search for alternatives is often far more important than a blinkered analysis of only one. To take a simple example: the existence of large temples as evidence for the organization of society into chiefdoms (the positive argument for the fact that large numbers of people can be controlled efficiently in chiefdoms is irrelevant for the moment) is worthless if one cannot rule out all the engineering possibilities for building such temples with small groups of people. And to take an astronomical example: a typical histogram of notable celestial events to which a monument seems to point is worthless if only one observing position and only one technique are considered, and viable alternatives are ignored. Open-mindedness as to alternatives is a much harder lesson to learn than statistics.

How this general method will work out in practice may be illustrated in regard to the long barrows, the subject of a long chapter in which the pattern might easily be overlooked. At an early stage the hypothesis is made that the very brightest stars were observed rising and setting over the barrows, and this according to a series of very simple but precise rules, at which the barrow architecture seems to hint. Making that assumption, the barrows can be reasonably precisely dated, even without evidence of a scientifically high quality. These dates fit well with radiocarbon dates (which are occasionally used to help select alternatives, but not to refine them after the initial stage). A single instance is not compelling, but statistically the argument is strengthened by the fact that this can be done in several independent ways at a single barrow, and the dates usually then hang together well. (The evidence for this is evaluated in passing, for example, at pp. 45, 52-3, 79-80, but more especially at pp.) What is more, the case is strengthened when it is found that the same procedure gives acceptable results at all the barrows examined; and that the same fundamental principles can be readily extended to other monuments, such as chalk figures and causewayed enclosures. A thousand instances might give the reader more satisfaction than a dozen, depending on the mentality of the reader, but the evidence from even a few is compelling. And there are other respects in which this is so.