Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos. John North
is through a comprehensive set of detailed analyses of individual cases—a programme far beyond the scope of this book. A few important examples will be touched on in the remaining parts of this chapter: they conform closely to a few simple principles, and it would be very surprising to find that others failed to do likewise. But first to a related theme, a favourite object of archaeological comment, namely the orientation of the body within the tomb.
There seem to have been many local variations in burial rites. In the Wessex long barrows the bones were generally placed in the tomb in a disarticulated state, sorted by type, presumably following exposure of the body elsewhere. Where a skeleton in a chamber tomb is found in a recognizable direction, however, it is often with the head to the west or to the east–occasionally both are found in the same tomb. Opinions differ as to whether these variations indicate differences of age or sex. In a study of the positions of very many skeletons in tombs in Bohemia and Moravia, W. Schlosser and J. Cierny found some interesting patterns. It seems that the culture responsible for linear pottery (in the centuries around 5000 BC) had a very strong preference for placing the head roughly to the east; that among the ‘corded ware’ peoples (around 2200 BC), west and east were favoured in roughly similar numbers, with a slight preference for west; but that the Bell Beaker peoples favoured placing the head to the north or south (in the ratio now of about two to one), with a small subgroup roughly northeast or southwest, and a few roughly southeast. Three thousand years later, many Germanic groups were still putting the feet of the corpse to the north. In an English Saxon cemetery at Fairford, for example, this habit was found to be almost universal. J. Grimm, writing on German mythology in 1854, drew attention to something that appeared to point back from the Middle Ages to an ancient pagan tradition of worshipping towards the north. Thus in some stories of Reinard the Fox, the wolf did just that, while the fox adopted the Christian convention, facing east.
It has to be said that in the Bell Beaker class of burials the bodies were no longer laid out full length, but in a contracted posture, with the knees drawn up in the manner of an embryo, and that for this reason, a precise direction of the body simply cannot be specified. Nevertheless, some rough statistics from the Wessex round barrows belonging to the Bell Beaker culture fit well with the continental evidence. In a count of 55 instances made by William Long in 1876, on the basis of previous reports, in 35 cases (in other words, more than six out of every ten) the head was said to have been to the north. Six had heads placed to the northeast, and five to the east. All eight points of the compass with the exception of south were mentioned in one report or another, but the three named were the most common. (West and southeast accounted for three each, northwest for two and southwest for one.)
Rough and ready as these data are, it does seem that customs in the orientation of the body of the deceased are almost as characteristic as pottery types, although possibly not as subtle. They were obviously ‘astronomical’ in some degree, but how are they to be interpreted? Some of the problems to be expected have already been mentioned. Death has some plain analogues in the heavens. It seems natural to represent death by the western half of the horizon, the place of the dying Sun for peoples in the northern hemisphere, and this is borne out by many later religious rituals known from direct textual evidence or report. (The eastern half of the horizon tends to represent life or birth.) In those Neolithic practices in which a near north–south line was preferred, the body might have been lain with head turned to face an appropriate easterly or westerly direction. Why east or west? Was it the general phenomenon of rising and setting of heavenly bodies that counted? (It was obviously not a precise arrangement, if the Sun was involved at any other season than the equinoxes.) It will shortly be noted in connection with tomb architecture that an approximate north–south line was associated with the behaviour of the star Deneb, in which case that more obvious explanation counts for nothing. Granting for the sake of argument that this was so, how should one interpret the intentions of those who laid out a body east–west? Might the relatives of the deceased have looked across the body, perhaps, towards Deneb? Or did they look over the length of the body towards Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus, which happened to rise near east and set near west? There is evidence from some much later societies that the feet are placed towards the land of the dead, but this of course is often related to the daily passage of the Sun.
Is the argument helped out by the orientation of the tomb itself, as for example in certain passage graves that restrict a line of sight? At Gavr’inis in Brittany, for instance, and Newgrange in Ireland, where there are chamber tombs dated to within a century or two of 3500 BC, the main corridors were clearly directed towards midwinter sunrise, in the sense that they opened towards it and were illuminated by it. (There might also be lunar directions implicit in both.) And if we settle on a solar ceremony at the laying out of the body, there remains the question of the timing of events. Was the body preserved until the Sun was in the right position, say setting at one of the solstices? Or was the Sun’s direction preserved, marked out as something appropriately sacred, say at the time of one of the solstices, and used for burial even if the Sun was not rising or setting in that direction at the time of the burial? Another possibility is that in some cases there was human sacrifice, a death that was contrived rather than natural, at precisely the appropriate season.
There is some evidence from modern anthropology as to comparable burial customs, but it is not coherent. All told, it is virtually impossible to place a reliable ‘astronomical’ interpretation on even comprehensive statistics as to the directions of burials, if they are merely to the four cardinal points of the compass. Even so, there is a conclusion to be drawn that is far from trivial. Whether or not the ritual interpretation can be discovered, there is no doubt that burial was in these cases an activity governed by rules relating to celestial phenomena, for only by reference to the heavens can the cardinal points be found. To progress further it is necessary to look to the tombs in which the bodies were placed.
Long barrows were built in Britain from perhaps the middle of the fifth millennium BC to the early third, and as time progressed, several changes of style and custom took place. To hint at a change in custom one must first be quite sure that there was a consciousness of the need to act in a particular way. That there were architectural rules of some sort is strongly suggested by the fact that in a large proportion of the examples surveyed, the higher and wider end of trapezoidal structures heads (roughly) east. This might not be thought a very profound principle, but it was true of the long mounds of the Linear Pottery culture in Northern Europe, and it is reminiscent of the characteristic habit of that same culture in Bohemia and Moravia, where the body was so often placed with the head to the east. This encourages a search for more precise rules.
Those who have recorded the directions of unexcavated long barrows have usually been content with rough approximations, referring, say, to only eight or sixteen points of the compass. The original structures have almost always been largely destroyed, modified by rabbits and badgers, or ploughed out of existence—usually by the farmer, but occasionally in the course of military exercises with tanks. (Unfortunately here, the better the barrow the greater the challenge.) The line of the major axis of a barrow is often as much as we can expect, and this seldom to better than a degree or two, unless we are convinced that it was deliberately aimed at some distant point. One should not be satisfied with the axis alone, for the principal lines of sight will be shown to have often differed from that line.
A direction without reference to the location is worthless. The midwinter Sun at Stonehenge rises about 40° south of east; at Newgrange, the angle is nearly 44°. Such directions vary with geographical latitude and the altitude of the horizon, but they also vary with the century. All such data are needed. The first two items of information can usually be taken from the Ordnance Survey. For structural details, an archaeological survey is needed. It is worth bearing in mind that whatever the quality of the original, a third-hand copy might be in error by as much as 20°. One much-copied plan—by one of archaeology’s most expert draftsmen—displaces the West Kennet long barrow by 15°.
An approximate date for construction calls for independent archaeological evidence. The orientation of a monument might provide a date, but only in conjunction with an opinion as to precisely what the prehistoric practices