I saw it and it was like the Curate’s Egg, good in parts.
The big idea is something Mike Parker Pearson has been pushing for a long while. Stonehenge is a place for the dead, and important in funerary rites. I’ve been wary of this. An astronomer thought it was a giant observatory. A Gynaecologist recently published it was a birth canal. It’s no great shock to discover that a specialist in burials thinks it was associated with burials. What marks out Mike Parker Pearson’s work are two key differences.
One is that he’s been patiently gathering data to support his idea. While not always strongly successful, he’s not really had a major problem with the data forcing him into special pleading. The second is that his ideas explain a lot more than Stonehenge and actually say something useful about British society in the 3rd Millennium BC.
A connection between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge
There’s been all sorts of problems I’ve had with the Stonehenge as funerary monument idea. The biggest is ‘Where are the people?’ It’s not a problem specifically for Parker Pearson’s interpretation, no-one has really answered this. Stonehenge Decoded answered that question. They were at Durrington Walls, a few miles away. This was what he made the news with last year when he found a village around the earthworks there. More excitingly the tools found in the village only had winter season use. The stuff you’d expect to find in a year-round settlement was missing. Good, but old (2007) news to an extent.
The programme also added information about the connection between this site and Stonehenge. One of the features which is odd at Stonehenge is something called the Avenue. It’s a path which winds round from the river up to Stonehenge. If you were to walk along it the folds in the landscape would hide Stonehenge from view until you were almost on top of it. If you were to do this around sunset at midwinter you, and everyone you wanted to impress, would see the Sun setting in Stonehenge as you arrived. As public displays of power go, it’s a lot stronger that one person seeing the Sun rising over the Heel Stone if he stands slightly off-centre in the circle in midsummer. Additionally dating evidence all seems to be consistent with the two sites being in use around the same time.
That explains Stonehenge, but what does that mean for Neolithic Britain?
Sadly the programme didn’t mention the Bluestones, and that’s a real shame because Parker Pearson also has the most convincing explanation of the Bluestones.
Burials and Hierarchy
The Bluestones aren’t really blue, and they’re nowhere near as impressive looking as the big Sarsens. However, they’re the ones people know about because they’re the ones that came from Wales. There’s two possibly explanations for how they got there. Natural or man-made means.
Heavy rocks don’t migrate, but they can be moved naturally. Aubrey Burl, who’s a big megalithic expert has been looking at stone circles around the British Isles and found that everywhere else they’re made of local rocks. He thinks the bluestones were lying around Salisbury Plain. How did they get there? Glacial action.
During the Ice Ages the British Isles were periodically covered by ice caps. One of these could scour off the bluestones and deposit them on Salisbury Plain. One criticism of this is that it’s funny how the glacier dropped exactly the right number of stones to make Stonehenge. That’s not a sensible objection. Buy yourself a packet of Wine Gums and arrange them in a circle. Isn’t it odd how there’s exactly the right number of Wine Gums in the packet to make a circle? Other circumstantial evidence for glacial action is the types of rock in the circle. They have different properties. For instance some are friable* and some are not. Surely if you were travelling hundreds of miles to get a rock and dragging it back, you’d want to get rocks of the same type. There’s also said to be bluestone used in some barrows, though that’s debateable.
It’s an elegant idea except for one problem. During the last Ice Age the ice caps didn’t reach as far south as Salisbury Plain, so they couldn’t have been dropped there. I don’t know if an earlier ice cap could have dropped them, but nor does anyone else I’ve read.
So they must have been brought by humans right? Yes, except archaeologists have ignored the implications of this in a lot of their work. For many archaeologists the Neolithic was non-hierarchical. Without a central power, how do you get the massive concentration of labour to bring something from two hundred miles away – repeatedly and reliably? It also requires a lot of special pleading to claim there was that level of control for a narrow corridor between Wiltshire and South Wales – there had to be a network of hierarchies across the mainland at the very least.
Parker Pearson may have the answer from the dates of burials at Stonehenge. There are very few people buried there, with burials becoming more common approaching 2500 BC. This he interprets as a ruling dynasty. He doesn’t speculate too far as to the nature of that dynasty, but surely the world needs a second edition of Science and Society by Euan MacKie to set a cat amongst the pigeons? How long before someone ties together big monumental architecture for religious action and religious hierarchy in the shape of priests?
Pulling it together
Back at Durrington Walls the other shock was that the ‘village’ was big. Huge. Massive. Numbering in the thousands of houses, each of which may have held an extended family. Again that many people in one place for a period of the year and no hierarchy? That would be difficult to envision.
The programme concentrated on the monument of Stonehenge. That’s understandable, it’s big, sexy and mysterious. What Mike Parker Pearson is doing is even more interesting than tackling that monument. He’s patiently demolishing many Neolithic clichés which have been accepted for decades. It’s not just Stonehenge that he’s decoding it’s Late Neolithic Britain as a whole.
Unfortunately as exciting as all this is National Geographic stuck with the clichés for the dramatisations which ran the gamut from uninspired to awful. But that’s a different entry.
*This means crumbly and not, as I thought for a few days on a field trip, cookable.
