Read Stonehenge a New Understanding Online
Authors: Mike Parker Pearson
Tags: #Social Science, #Archaeology
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Computer-generated plots showing the relative density in the northern part of the main trench of animal bones (left), worked flints (center), and burned flints (right). The outline plans of the houses are visible, as is the curving line of postholes forming a fence that separated two of the houses. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project, drawn by Ben Chan
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Full plan of the Southern Circle, combining the 1967 and 2005–2006 excavation and geophysics results. The cone shapes are the postholes and their ramps. Julian Thomas’s excavation trench is marked to the west. The rest of the circle is now buried beneath the modern road. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project, drawn by Lawrence Shaw
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A plan of the Late Neolithic timber circle of Woodhenge. Today the postholes are marked with small concrete pillars, and the bank and ditch are barely visible. The contents of the grave were destroyed during the Blitz, but the burial is thought to date to the Early Bronze Age. Reconstruction drawing by Peter Dunn © English Heritage
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A reconstruction of the timber posts at Woodhenge. Reconstruction drawing by Peter Dunn
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Model of Phase 1 of the Southern Circle as a square-shaped arrangement of posts surrounded by two concentric timber circles, with the D-shaped house to the northeast. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Model of Phase 1/2 of the Southern Circle. In this phase the builders added a timber portal facing the midwinter sunrise. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Model of Phase 2a of the Southern Circle. In this phase, a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of timber posts was erected inside three concentric circles. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Model of Phase 2b of the Southern Circle. In this last phase, a ring of posts was added at the center of the circle and a final ring was added around the outside. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A computer-generated image of the Southern Circle in its final phase. The image has been created as an overlay on the excavation plan of the postholes and other features. The lintels are hypothetical. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project, created by Lawrence Shaw
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Excavating one of the postholes at Woodhenge. After the posts had decayed, a cove of sarsen standing stones was erected in the southern part of the monument.© Josh Pollard and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A laser scan of the floor of House 851, showing the beam-slot indentations where wooden furniture once stood around the edge of the plaster floor. To the left of the circular hearth a pair of indentations, made by someone’s knees, are also visible. © Kate Welham and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A plan of the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney. The Durrington Walls houses are very similar in plan and internal organization, but were built in wood rather than stone. A photograph of House 7 is shown in Chapter 4. © English Heritage and Batsford
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An elevated view of Julian Thomas’s trench showing the central square house and the postholes of its circular palisade fence within the largest of the Western Enclosures. © Julian Thomas and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A group of antler picks deposited by Neolithic builders before they built the henge bank of Durrington Walls. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A Beaker pot from a site called Naboth’s Vineyard near Cowbridge in Wales.In both shape and decoration, it is like those found at Durrington Walls. © National Museum of Wales
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Copper axheads from Castletown Roche in Ireland. These are similar to the earliest metal axes used in Britain. © Colin Burgess and Phoenix Press
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Reconstructed profile of the great trilithon Stone 56 in its pit, showing that Atkinson’s presumed ramp is too long to have been a construction ramp for erecting the stone. The numbers refer to Atkinson’s and Gowland’s trenches. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A reconstruction of the Early Mesolithic posts (today under the Stonehenge parking lot where they are marked by white circles on the tarmac) with the solstice-aligned chalk ridges in the background. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A plan of the Greater Cursus, showing the Amesbury 42 long barrow and the locations of all excavations between 1917 and 2008. Adapted from Richards “The Stonehenge Environs Project” figure 62. © English Heritage
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The eastern ditch of the Amesbury 42 long barrow, excavated by JulianThomas’s team in 2008. © Aerial-Cam
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A Collared Urn (1880–1670 BC) from the Cuckoo Stone. This pot was carefully
lifted from the ground so that its contents could be excavated in the laboratory. © Colin Richards and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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The Bulford Stone now lies close to where it once stood, in a field east of the River Avon. © Colin Richards and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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A plan of Stonehenge showing the locations of the excavated cremation burials (black circles) in the Aubrey Holes and ditch. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Tim Darvill (left), Geoff Wainwright (center) and Miles Russell (right) excavating at Stonehenge in 2008. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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William Stukeley’s drawing of how he imagined a British druid to have looked.
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A section of Aubrey Hole 32, drawn by Stuart Piggott, showing the filled-in void where a bluestone once stood (5) and the chalk packing material for the stone (4,6, 7) from which bones of a cremation burial were recovered (4). To the left (at 3), the side of the pit has been crushed and the packing layer displaced where the stone was removed. From Cleal
et al
. “Stonehenge in its Landscape” figure 55. © English Heritage
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Removing a bluestone from an Aubrey Hole, showing how the shape of a pit is altered when a stone is removed. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Jacqui McKinley (top) and Julian Richards (right) excavating the undifferentiated mass of prehistoric cremated bones deposited in Aubrey Hole 7 in 1935. © Mike Pitts and the Stonehenge Riverside Project. Photograph by Mike Pitts
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The lead plaque left on top of the cremated bones in Aubrey Hole 7 by RobertNewall and William Young. © Aerial-Cam
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The first cremated bones to be visible after our team lifted the lead plaque. ©Aerial-Cam
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The polished stone macehead found with one of the cremation burials at Stonehenge by William Hawley. It would have been attached to a wooden handle through the shaft-hole. Courtesy of Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum
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The unique, drum-shaped, small pottery object found with one of the cremation burials at Stonehenge and interpreted as an incense burner. From Cleal
et al
. “Stonehenge in its Landscape” plates 8.1 & 8.2 © English Heritage
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The Amesbury Archer and the artifacts buried with him as grave goods, excavated by Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology. © Wessex Archaeology
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Diggers stand in the holes where standing stones once stood at Bluestonehenge on the bank of the River Avon at West Amesbury. © Aerial-Cam
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A laser scan of the Bluestonehenge stoneholes. Laser-scanning is used to record objects and features in three dimensions. © Kate Welham and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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The chalk plaques found in a pit east of Stonehenge, during road-widening in1968. The small plaque is 56 millimters across. © The Prehistoric Society
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One of the chalk plaque fragments from Durrington Walls. This was the most elaborately decorated artifact found in the Neolithic village. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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In the field west of Stonehenge, we dug a number of trenches to explore the enigmatic palisade ditch. Stonehenge is visible to the right beyond the cars. © Aerial-Cam
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A carved chalk pig, dating to the Late Bronze Age, was found in the upper layers filling the palisade ditch. The pig has four “button” feet, a snout, and floppy ears. © Aerial-Cam
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The Stonehenge Avenue turns sharply eastward at a point known as the elbow.We re-opened Atkinson’s trenches here to check whether the avenue was built all at once or in two stages. Stonehenge is on the horizon (center). © Aerial-Cam
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Computer specialists Lawrence Shaw and Mark Dover (standing right) visit Colin Richards’s trench immediately north of Stonehenge. Here the sarsen stones were dressed (shaped and finished) before they completed the last step of their journey. © Aerial-Cam
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Colin Richards and his team plotted every stone chipping found in the trench.The distribution shows the straight edge where a sarsen once lay while it was being dressed. © Colin Richards and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Supervisor Chris Casswell stands with a scale behind tiny Stone 11 at Stonehenge. It is clearly too short to have supported a lintel and has not been dressed in a similar fashion to the other stones of the sarsen circle. © Aerial-Cam
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Students digging test pits near Fargo Plantation, south of the Cursus. Colin’s team here found small chips of bluestone as well as remains of the 1977 Stonehenge festival. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Stone 68, a Stonehenge bluestone of spotted dolerite, has been carefully shaped and has a groove down one side. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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In the Preseli Hills there are several outcrops of dolerite and rhyolite from which the Stonehenge bluestones derive. This landscape also contains Neolithic tombs and other prehistoric monuments. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Proposed routes by which the bluestones were taken from Preseli to Stonehenge.I favor the more northerly route because it avoids difficult sea crossings. © MikeParker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project After Richards (2007)
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The maximum extent of the British–Irish Ice Sheet c. 27,000 years ago. The glaciers from this and previous glaciations never reached Salisbury Plain. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project. After Clark
et al
. (2010)
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The recent discovery of Stukeley’s drawing of 1723 raised the possibility of an undiscovered route by which the sarsens were brought from Avebury and Clatford to Stonehenge. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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William Stukeley drew the abandoned but shaped sarsens at Clatford in 1723. The stones have gone and the road has moved but we have identified the precise spot from the positions of the round barrow and the windmill.
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Stukeley’s drawing of the Devil’s Den at Clatford in 1723. The stone structure of this type of tomb, probably a portal dolmen, was never covered by a mound.
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Landscape archaeologist Dave Field (left) discusses the excavations at Marden in 2010 with site director Jim Leary (center) and colleague. They are standing on a layer of soil on top of the chalk floor of a Neolithic house. The edge of the circular hearth is visible in front of them. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Stonehenge (in its Stage 1; top), Llandegai Henge A (middle), and Flagstones (bottom) had many features in common, including burials and large stones. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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Middle–Late Neolithic cremation enclosures and related sites of the same date as Stonehenge occur throughout Britain. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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The Ring of Brodgar is one of Orkney’s many Neolithic monuments. In its first stage, Stonehenge would have looked very much like this, with its bank and ditch and ring of bluestones in the Aubrey Holes. © RCAHMS. Licensor
http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/
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In 2010, I went to Orkney to work as a volunteer digger for archaeologist Nick Card, who had been excavating a Neolithic village at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, west of the Ring of Brodgar. The buildings are very large, more like halls than domestic houses, and have well-preserved stone walls. © Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project
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On this plan of the pits and stakeholes excavated by Alex Gibson at Upper Ninepence in Wales, one can trace the outlines of two D-shaped buildings. The larger (Structure 3) appears to have had no hearth; the smaller (Structure 2) does. Image courtesy of Alex Gibson
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Visible from Stonehenge to its south are the Early Bronze Age round barrows on Normanton Down, including the rich burial under Bush Barrow. A viewshed is those areas of landscape visible from any particular point, in this case Stonehenge. After Needham
et al
. (2010)