TIME TEAM SPECIAL
Channel Four 1st June 2009
The mystery of the world’s most famous megalithic monument continues; in 2008 Professors Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright carried out excavations at the stone circle on Salisbury Plain claiming to have cracked the mystery of Stonehenge's original purpose as an ancient healing centre. The archaeologists carried out the first dig inside the sarsen circle for almost fifty years, claiming that "There's no doubt that what we've found in this little trench is going to fundamentally change perspectives on Stonehenge..."
BBC's Timewatch [1] featured the Darvill and Wainwright’s dig at Stonehenge but the claims that the stone circle was an ancient site for healing sound rather reminiscent of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th Century myth of The Giant’s Dance brought over to Salisbury Plain from Killaraus in Ireland, but claims that the purpose of Stonehenge was a prehistoric “Lourdes” remain unconvincing. [2]
Another year on and yet another theory on the purpose of Stonehenge is revealed after Channel Four screened the Time Team Special ‘The Secrets of Stonehenge’ on 1st June 2009 leading up to the solstice at the Stones.
The programme hosted as ever by Tony Robinson explored the work of a team of archaeologists led by Mike Parker Pearson, Professor of Archaeology from Sheffield University, studying the Stonehenge area over six years, known as the Stonehenge Riverside Project [3] culminating in excavations in the inner circle of stones in 2008. This programme followed on from a previous Time Team Special in 2005 which centred on another nearby henge known as Durrington Walls, investigating the connection between the two sites linked by the River Avon.
Time Team embraced the theme of the programme with the usual enthusiasm, roasting a pig Neolithic-style, and experimenting with digging in the hard chalk with antler picks and built a full-size wooden replica of the Southern Circle at Durrington.
As early as 1810 Sir Richard Colt Hoare had observed that centuries of agriculture had left Durrington Walls “form much mutilated” but when Geoffrey Wainwright excavated the route of the A345 in 1966 he discovered the southern timber circle in addition to a smaller circle just north of it. Since 2003 the Stonehenge Riverside Project led by Mike Parker Pearson has carried out excavations at Durrington Walls, identifying the Neolithic village with its avenue to the river Avon. Radiocarbon dates of approximately 2600BC are roughly contemporary with the earliest stone phase at Stonehenge, raising speculation that it is possible that the inhabitants of Durrington were the builders Stonehenge. Parker Pearson believes that Durrington Walls was a complementary structure to Stonehenge as evidenced by the similar solstice alignments, suggesting that the timber circle at Durrington Walls represented life and a land of the living, whilst Stonehenge and the plain around it, encircled by burial mounds, represented the land of the dead, connected by the ceremonial route of the River Avon and their respective avenues.
The Riverside Project provided an opportunity to reassess Durrington Walls and its relationship with Woodhenge. Larger than that other well known super henge Avebury, the massive 17-hectare enclosure of Durrington Walls sits on the steep slope of a small valley, no doubt sited there for a reason we could safely assume as nothing about these super henges was random; the west and east entrances, stressing the downhill access from the high flat ground of Larkhill, aligned on the solstice axis to the riverside. Continuing with the Riverside Project into 2008 Parker Pearson, set out with the pre-determined theory that Stonehenge was a monument to dead and Durrington Walls to the living, connected by the Avenues to the river and set about to prove the connection between the two sites.
Parker Pearson claimed that the excavations reveal Stonehenge was just part of a vast ritualistic landscape with nearby Durrington Walls the largest Neolithic settlement in Northern Europe, claiming that they have discovered the place where the people who built Stonehenge were based, conjecturing that this landscape between the two henges was connected by the River Avon and turned into a ceremonial route for the remains of the dead as they pass into the afterworld. They claimed to have proved this theory when in the last summer of the excavation in 2008, they started to dig in the stone circle itself, claiming to reveal not only when and how Stonehenge was built but, and most significantly why.
The Stonehenge Riverside Project claims:
Stonehenge was completed around 4,500 years ago, revealing new evidence suggesting that it took only 35 years to complete.
Geophysics surveys were carried out inside Durrington Walls, as well as at Larkhill and Bulford, visiting most of the area’s 750 round barrows. On the River Avon´s floodplain, the geomorphological team found numerous palaeochannels including some likely to date to the third millennium BC.
The team claim that excavations reveal that the construction of Stonehenge was contemporary with Durrington Walls. The construction of the Durrington henge was preceded by the building of a 20m wide avenue, leading from the River Avon and aligned on the midsummer solstice sunset. The Durrington Avenue ran from the riverside to the Southern Circle for a distance of just over 170m. This avenue led into the Southern Circle, a 40m-diameter monument of six concentric rings of timber posts. This midsummer sunset-aligned avenue consists of a central roadway flanked by a gully and external bank. At more than 20m wide, it is Europe´s earliest road surface. The outer two rows of the Southern Circle were not present on its northwest side, indicating that this part of the timber circle was never completed.
The programme suggested that the Durrington site housed up to 4,000 people, making it the largest Neolithic settlement in north-west Europe . The discovery of houses within and outside Durrington Walls suggests that a large area of the valley in which the henge lies was probably covered in dwellings. The considerable quantities of pig and cattle bones, pottery, flint arrowheads and lithic debris indicate that occupation and consumption were intense.
Parker Pearson proposed that at the winter solstice, people would gather at Durrington Walls with the cremated remains of loved ones who'd died during the year and drink, dance and feast on pork before emptying the ashes into the Avon and making the pilgrimage to Stonehenge.
The claims continue that the Stonehenge greater cursus, consisting of parallel ditches and internal banks running for over 2.5 km, was a linear division between the land of the living, Durrington Walls and the land of the dead at Stonehenge. The discovery of post holes that were seen as possibly supports for excarnation platforms, on the ridge near the east end of the Cursus, would have been visible for some distance.
The Atkinson trench (cut in 1950s) across the Stonehenge Avenue was re-opened to examine the so called man-made "cart tracks" running along the middle of the procession way. Phil Harding, Time Team, said these were natural and not due to the hand of man, Parker Pearson then changed his mind and thought these to be periglacial striations, going on to suggest that Stonehenge was built on this exact spot on Salisbury Plain due to these natural features in the Avenue aligning with the mid summer sunrise.
The Riverside Project produced new dates in support of this concept that Stonehenge was a cemetery from more-or-less its inception until the period of the sarsen erection 2655-2485 BC, which refutes the theory of archaeologists who have considered that Stonehenge was used as a burial ground only for a short part of its use. Cremation burials have been dated to span a period of about 500 years from Stonehenge´s beginnings to after the sarsen circle and trilithons were erected. The remaining 49 cremation burials excavated from Stonehenge were re-buried in 1935 by archaeologists in Aubrey hole no 7.
Re-opening this Aubrey Hole to analyse the prehistoric cremations put there in 1935, half of these came from the Aubrey Holes and half from the ditch. Of those from the ditch, most were buried in its upper fills and are likely to date to the same period, demonstrating that it was still very much a ‘domain of the dead’ when the sarsen circle and trilithons were erected. Preliminary results from the Aubrey hole remains indicate all were male (were sex can be determined) with a minimum number of 2 children out of an estimated 60 burials.
The long span of dates indicates that this was a cemetery which grew over many centuries; the estimated total of up to 240 dead – men, women and children – buried at Stonehenge were interred over a period of some 500 years, making Stonehenge the largest cemetery of its time, when compared to fourteen known other 3rd millennium BC British cemeteries.
Parker Pearson suggests that if people were buried here at an average rate of around one person every two years then they must have been from a very small, select group of the population, interred over centuries, possibly because of their special status as members of an elite dynasty of rulers, although the programme suggested they were mainly male around 25 years of age at the time of death, relatively healthy apart from arthritis in the back.
As stated above, Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill findings contest Parker Pearson’s theories suggesting that Stonehenge was a monument to healing and that connections between the two monuments were unlikely.
Mike Parker Pearson is a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield in England. His books include The Archaeology of Death and Burial, a renowned expert in the archaeology of death and specialising in the later prehistory of Britain and Northern Europe and the archaeology of Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean. He has used his experience in this field to produce his theory for Durrington Walls and Stonehenge but we cannot rely on his findings in Madagascar to be a true reflection of 3rd century BC Wiltshire.
The Time Team programme provided very little in revealing the Secrets of Stonehenge, this is one man’s theory and very little evidence was produced as proof. Durrington Walls and Stonehenge do not need to be connected, the cursus is not aligned as a linear division between the two sites, the programme certainly did not produce any evidence to prove this connection and was nothing more than romantic conjecture by Parker Pearson. Although the notion has some appeal; starting a ceremony at one site on the midwinter sunrise, journeying along the ceremonial route, along the River Avon and then down the Avenue to Stonehenge for the sunset; life and death based on the rising and setting of the mid-winter sun; why would the ashes of the deceased be deposited into the river Avon at the onset of the journey - wouldn’t it make more sense to carry the ashes along the ceremonial route to be deposited at Stonehenge if it was a monument to the dead?
Why do archaeologists insists on starting with a theory and then every find is made to fit into that theory. Why can’t we just start with an open mind and then try and piece the evidence together to see what we come up?
Notes:
1. Archaeologists in Stonehenge Bluestone Shock by Robin Heath.
2. Stonehenge – The Healing Stones
3. Stonehenge Riverside Project
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