The Making of Stonehenge

Rodney Castleden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134886371
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Every generation has created its own interpretation of Stonehenge, but rarely do these relate to the physical realities of the monument. Rodney Castleden begins with those elements which made possible the building of this vast stone circle: the site, the materials and the society that undertook the enormous task of transporting and raising the great vertical stones, then capping them, all to a carefully contrived plan. What emerges from this detailed examination is a much fuller sense of Stonehenge, both in relation to all the similar sites close by, and in terms of the uses to which it was put. Castleden suggests that there is no one 'meaning' or 'purpose' for Stonehenge, that from its very beginning it has filled a variety of needs. The Romans saw it as a centre of resistance; the antiquaries who 'rediscovered' it in the seventeenth century saw a long line of continuity leading back into the nation's past. The archaeologists see it as a subject for rational, scientific investigation; The National Trust and English Heritage view it as an unfailing magnet for visitors; UNESCO has declared it a World Heritage Site, the cultural property of the whole of humanity. Lost to view amid competing interests over the millenia are the uses it has served for those who live within its penumbra, for whom Stonehenge has never been 'lost' or 'rediscovered'. It exists in local myth and legend, stretching back beyond history.

1
INTRODUCTION

When, in 1986, I was writing an account of the society that produced Stonehenge, I emphasized that Stonehenge would only make sense when it was viewed within its cultural context. The way to the truth about Stonehenge seemed then to be to forget about Stonehenge in the first instance, to study the archaeology of other sites and then to piece the whole culture together like a jigsaw puzzle, starting with the edges and working in towards the centre. That centre was, of course, Stonehenge.¹ Even though that was not the prime intention, the writing of The Stonehenge People clarified my ideas about Stonehenge: I began to see it as through a dispersing early morning mist. More recently I compiled a gazetteer of the neolithic sites in Britain, mainly as a companion volume to The Stonehenge People to show the sort of archaeological site data that were available to justify and substantiate the more general statements in the earlier book, but something else happened.² I found that by looking closely at all the available evidence about all the British neolithic sites I was in effect assembling the pieces of an even bigger jigsaw puzzle than before. My image of Stonehenge became more sharply focused too, as if I was seeing it in the clear light of day for the first time. It is that sharper, clearer picture resulting from a second, longer and more arduous journey through the archaeological evidence that I want to share with readers.

In his thought-provoking book Rethinking the Neolithic, Julian Thomas expresses the view that searching for change through time in prehistory is in effect a means of disrupting the presumed continuities which are the foundation of the conventional wisdom.³ I hope it will become apparent in this book that Stonehenge tells a different story altogether. When we look very closely at what appears to be a series of separate monuments built successively on or close to the same site, we will find a surprisingly large number of common threads and common themes that run through from stage to stage. In other words, The Making of Stonehenge reinforces, and perhaps plays its part in rediscovering, an idea of continuity at a time when many are ready to opt for discontinuity.

This may be an appropriate moment, before the story begins to unfold, to reflect on our method and approach. How should we go about thinking about the remote past? Thinking about last week is easy: social customs, daily work routines, political contexts and perceptions of needs have not changed in that time so there is a continuum within which we can easily visualize what we, or others, were doing. But with the remote past it is different. There are dangers in regarding the distant past as essentially the same as the present or even the same as later periods of the past. There are problems in that, once we infer a structure such as the chiefdom society idea for bronze age Wessex, a part at least of our minds tends to succumb to all the associated assumptions and subordinate ideas that rightly belong to later examples of chiefdoms and we begin, willy-nilly, to impose mental stereo-types and to develop models of behaviour that may be totally anachronistic. Steering ourselves away from this ‘Past-as-Present’ way of thinking is difficult because modern analogues make the past more recognizable, more reassuring, more approachable. The Past-as-Other carries difficulties of its own: a culture that, when reconstructed, is totally alien is hard to imagine and also hard to test for internal consistency. Yet the Britain of the remote past may well have been like this: it may have been totally alien. As L.P.Hartley says, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’⁴

If we seek to reconstruct the way Stonehenge came to be built we have another problem to contend with, and that is that archaeologists themselves shift their position from time to time. Traditionally, they have tended to view ancient cultures in terms of palaeotechnology: hence the stone age/ bronze age division. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a fruitful change towards the study of palaeoeconomics, and many useful studies have put the building of prehistoric monuments very successfully into a context of strained man-land relationships. This is an idea which reasserts itself during the course of this book, and seems to be an integral part of the Stonehenge saga.

In the 1980s a new approach emerged, one whose potential is only just beginning to be realized, and that is the study or rather the inference of palaeoideology. This is difficult, because it involves us in entering the often exotic thought-world of a remote and long-dead people. One useful idea which this approach has produced, to give an example, is that neolithic people were neolithic, rather than belonging to any other culture or valuesystem, because they recognized the potential of their raw materials and artefacts (or made objects) to symbolize and express the important division of the universe into Wild and Tame, Made and Unmade.⁵ Well, so it may be, and I believe the evidence does show this, but does it necessarily tell us the all-important thing: what did it mean to be a neolithic person? I think tracing the saga of the making of Stonehenge through the uncharted centuries of British prehistory may tell us at least part of the answer, and also tell us in what ways living in the bronze age (about 2100–750 BC) that followed the neolithic was different. Tracing the story of Stonehenge’s rise and fall after all covers a very long period. If we take the history of the oldest cathedral in Christendom and double it we are still a thousand years short of the time Stonehenge took to evolve.

It was Colonel Hawley who, in the most literal sense, uncovered most of what we know about Stonehenge, and yet he understood very little of what he saw. His final verdict in 1928 as he came to the end of his excavations, the most extensive ever undertaken at Stonehenge, was pessimistic. ‘So very little is known for certain about the place that what I say is mainly conjecture, and it is to be hoped that future excavators will be able to throw more light upon it than I have done.’⁶

Now, we have more to go on. There have, for example, been the important excavations of Stone, Piggott, Atkinson and Pitts: there are also radiocarbon dates for several phases of the monument’s development. There have also been excavations at many of the monuments in the landscape round Stonehenge, which show an important continuity of tradition. There is a tendency, for example, for the neolithic and early bronze age monuments to ‘point’ towards the north-east: it is not just successive stages of Stonehenge which do this (Stonehenges I, II, IIIa and IIIc), but also the earlier earth circle up at Robin Hood’s Ball on the shallow hill top to the north and the linear earthworks of the Great Cursus and Lesser Cursus close at hand. The monuments sprang from a very long-lasting fund of beliefs and customs held by the people of the area and presumably passed on by oral tradition. For this reason, I place Stonehenge repeatedly within its geographical frame, and the chronological series of maps in the text shows an area of 100 sq. km, a square 10 km by 10 km, with Stonehenge at its centre (see Figures 11, 16, 17, 20, 29, 41, 58, 92, 97). The people who conceived, built and used Stonehenge will have been very familiar with this area, where they built their houses, lived out their lives, gathered their firewood, hunted, grew their cereals and herded their cattle and pigs. As we shall see, putting Stonehenge into its geographical setting will help us to understand the whole ceremonial landscape, of which Stonehenge is but a part.

The Making of Stonehenge does not attempt to cover all aspects of the monument. Christopher Chippindale’s excellent Stonehenge Complete deals with the social history of Stonehenge in modern times in vivid detail, whereas this book deals exclusively with the prehistoric Stonehenge.⁷ Now seems like the right moment to attempt to collate all the scientific evidence, take account of modern archaeologists’ interpretations, and attempt a synthesis that contains Stonehenge’s meaning: it is very specifically Stonehenge’s meaning to its makers that matters. This task is made easier for me by the existence of Atkinson’s classic, though now rather dated, work written in the 1950s and the more recent books by Aubrey Burl and Julian Richards.⁸

It is difficult to fight one’s way past the familiarity of the image of Stonehenge from a thousand advertisements, posters, postcards, cartoons and book jackets. It has been dragged into many a book and film for its potency. In the film Night of the Demon it appears enwrapped in a predawn mist and is associated unequivocally with calling up devils. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the heroine becomes a modern and unconscious lunar sacrifice as she lies asleep on a stone shaped like an altar— a powerful and moving image.⁹ There are, of course, many more. Some of the sense of wonder generated must have been intended by the original architects and the problem is to pare away the romantic, druidical and modern elements in our reaction to the monument. We have instead to try to experience the monument through the frame of reference of the prehistoric people who built and used it. I believe that as the chapters of The Making of Stonehenge unfold, the reader will discover that it is possible to recapture that prehistoric experience and understand what it was the makers of Stonehenge were striving to achieve.

Meanwhile, we can share with the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley those curiously ambivalent feelings that Stonehenge contains and communicates, the sense of both crudity and sophisticated ingenuity, of ruin and architecture, of enormous weight gracefully borne. ‘A serious view of this magnificent wonder is apt to put a thinking and judicious person into a kind of ecstasy. When he views the struggle between art and nature, the grandeur of that art that hides itself and seems unartful, for though the contrivance that put this massive frame together must have been exquisite, yet the founders endeavoured to hide it by the seeming rudeness of the work. It pleases like a magic spell, and the greatness of every part surprises.’¹⁰

2
‘BEYOND ALL HISTORICAL RECALL’

It is remarkable that whoever has treated of this monument has bestowed on it whatever class of antiquity he was particularly fond of.

Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, 1786

THE NOBLE RUIN

Stonehenge is the ruin of a single great prehistoric stone building. The huge weathered blocks are simply shaped and arranged in deceptively simple geometric shapes and, so far as we can tell, have always been undecorated.¹ As it now stands, the monument is a physical wreck, a tight huddle of midgrey stones dwarfed by an expanse of open, rolling plain. Visitors are often disappointed by their first sight of this wonder of the prehistoric past. ‘It looks so small’ is what many of them say, but there is little to give any sense of scale, the stones may not be approached, and there is nothing from the remote past to explain it.

Of the most conspicuous element in the design, the Great Circle of sarsens, only a half has survived (see Figure 70). Seventeen of the original thirty uprights are still standing (stones 1–7, 10, 11, 16, 21–3, 27–30), three lie fallen but intact (stones 12, 14 and 25) and five (stones 13, 17, 18, 20 and 24) have completely disappeared. The numbers of the stones are shown on Figures 1 and 8. The thirty massive standing stones, 4 m, 2 m wide, 1 m thick, were originally linked together by thirty running lintels forming a continuous stone ring 4.3 m up in the air. Unfortunately, only six of these (stones 101, 102, 105, 107, 122 and 130) are still in position.

The circle of smaller bluestones within the Great Sarsen Circle is even more ruinous; the stones are more manageable in size, so more of them have been carted away.² Only six out of an estimated original total of forty bluestones still stand upright, while another five lean out of their sockets. Of the five huge trilithons which rose up above the sarsen ring, only two are complete and have always been so (stones 51–4). The lintel and one upright of the fifth trilithon (stones 59–60) collapsed some time in antiquity: this seems to be beyond restoration as each of the fallen stones is broken in three and badly abraded by tourist erosion (stones 59a, b and c and 160a, b and c) (Plate 1). The fourth trilithon (stones 57–8) fell down on 3 May 1797 with such a crash that labourers working in the fields half a mile away felt the earth shake;³ it was re-erected in 1958. The third and largest trilithon, sometimes called the Great Trilithon (stones 55–6), is ruined, with the lintel fallen and one upright fallen and broken in two (stones 156, 55a and 55b): the surviving upright, stone 56, is the tallest, finest, most graceful of the stones at Stonehenge (Plates 26 and 41).

Figure 1 The central stone setting at Stonehenge in its present state. Dashed lines are lintels still in place. Shaded areas are empty stone-sockets.

Half of the original structure is either fallen or missing. Surrounding this wreckage is the very subdued circuit of bank and ditch that marks an earlier stage in Stonehenge’s story. The bank has become degraded and the ditch filled in, to the extent that many visitors scarcely notice them, seeing only the stones at the centre (Figure 8). What is left is a badly damaged monument, mauled and preyed upon by man and weather—just the sort of noble ruin to appeal to lovers of the romantic and picturesque in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is nevertheless important that we should see Stonehenge as a wrecked monument: we should not assume that our stone and bronze age ancestors deliberately created such a rough and chaotic jumble. The rich texture of the stones, patinated by weathering and scumbled with half a dozen different colours of lichen, must also be seen as a postbuilding feature; when newly dressed and ground, the stones would have been more uniform shades of blue-grey, green-grey and pearly pink, with the palest surfaces glinting in the sunshine like sugar. The patina of ageing has become, nevertheless, part of our image of Stonehenge.

It is in this sorry state that Stonehenge has become a powerful symbol of Britain’s, and specifically England’s, national heritage, a kind of time-mark for the dim, incoherent and baffling beginning of a long struggle towards national identity.⁴ It has also become, for people all over the developed world, a symbol of a prehistoric past almost irretrievably lost. This book is about the making of Stonehenge, and about the methods, motives, values and ambitions of the people who were its original builders. If we are to arrive at an understanding of that remote past, a potentially alien world now fifty centuries dead, we will need to make allowance for the various ways in which we have been conditioned to ‘see’ Stonehenge. We tend, for example, because of the monument’s status as a national identity symbol, to see it as very special, even unique, and this can blind us to the existence of hundreds of other stone rings and earth circles in the British Isles, monuments that can teach us a great deal about Stonehenge’s original purpose.

Stonehenge is fundamentally a piece of architecture and therefore it contains within its design references outwards geographically and backwards in time to other monuments. The architectural cross-references (see Chapter 8 for a discussion of these) imply that the meaning of Stonehenge is also cross-referenced to that of other monuments in the neolithic and bronze age world. It will not do to attempt to explain Stonehenge on its own: no monument can be understood as an entirely closed-off system with all its meaning locked within itself; for this reason the book looks at Stonehenge within its landscape, as a word within a context, a word in the centre of its page. I have arbitrarily chosen an area of 100 sq. km with Stonehenge at its centre: surprisingly lar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: ‘Beyond All Historical Recall’
• 3: The First Stonehenge
• 4: Stonehenge Abandoned?
• 5: Stones from Afar: The Bluestone Enigma
• 6: Culmination: The Sarsen Monument
• 7: Stonehenge Completed: The Return of the Bluestones
• 8: The Meaning of Stonehenge
• 9: Stonehenge in Decline
• Appendix A: The Chronology of Stonehenge
• Appendix B: The Cost of Building the Stonehenge Complex
• Appendix C: Radiocarbon Dates
• Appendix D: Large Volcanic Eruptions and Stonehenge: A Possible Connection?
• Notes
• Bibliography