The Human Cosmos. Jo Marchant
recesses where people may once have secluded themselves were now filled by ceremonial stone basins.
Together, these changes suggest that the purpose of these sites was shifting away from enabling individual spirit journeys towards public ceremonies, presumably conducted by powerful elites and intended to invoke drama and awe for the watching crowds. The culmination of this tradition was Newgrange, decorated with a gleaming quartz façade: the most impressive passage tomb known in terms of its size, complexity, the quality and quantity of its art, and the accuracy of its alignment.
It didn’t stand alone, however. This piece of land, famously nestled in a bend of the River Boyne, hosts not just Newgrange but two other passage tombs of similar size – Knowth and Dowth (the latter aligned to the winter solstice sunset) – plus around ninety other monuments, including smaller passage tombs, standing stones, timber circles, earth enclosures and a processional way. It was a dramatic ceremonial landscape which would have required the coordinated effort and resources of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
On the morning of the winter solstice, a procession of mourners or worshippers perhaps walked across the river and up onto the ridge before placing human remains in the tomb. At sunrise, the beam of light shone into the burial chamber, symbolising the journey into the dark underworld. But that may not have been the final destination. Lewis-Williams suggests that people may have imagined the sunlight, with the released spirits of the dead who had been placed in the chamber, then continuing up through the high corbelled roof and back to the sky, where they would join the sun ‘in the eternal round of cosmological life, death and rebirth’.
There was a problem, though. No matter how impressive a tomb like Newgrange or Dowth might have looked to the gathered crowds, the main event – the lighting of the burial chamber – could only be witnessed by the handful of individuals inside. Maybe that’s one reason the tradition reached a dead end; passage tombs were no longer built after about 2900 BC. The focus shifted instead to a new kind of monument which took those same illuminations and made them visible to hundreds of people at once.
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Few ancient monuments have inspired as many different interpretations as the worn, tumbling ruin of Stonehenge, set in the open grasslands of England’s Salisbury Plain. Over the centuries, this mysterious giant circle has been described as a druid temple, astronomical observatory, healing centre, war memorial and even a landing point for alien spacecraft. But thanks to a series of recent excavations at Stonehenge and beyond, archaeologists are now in a better position than ever before to tell the stones’ real story.
The site is unique for the sheer epic size of its stones and the staggering distances they were carried. Giant sandstone slabs called ‘sarsens’, weighing 22–27 tonnes each, were probably brought from hills near Avebury, more than 30 kilometres to the north. Smaller bluestones standing among them, weighing several tonnes each, were brought hundreds of kilometres from Wales: one of the most impressive achievements of the entire Neolithic. Adding to the mystery is the monument’s famous orientation to the sun.
Modern excavations and radiocarbon dating show that Stonehenge was constructed in several phases. Just after 3000 BC, a circular earthen ditch and bank (loosely described as a ‘henge’4) was dug from the chalk using antler picks, with a ring of bluestones just inside and an entrance facing towards the northeast. Several sarsen stones were erected inside the ring and beyond the entrance, leading towards a large, unworked sarsen now called the Heel Stone. Several centuries later, the monument took roughly the form we recognise today, as the bluestones were rearranged and the giant sarsens added in a circle of 30 uprights, with horizontal lintels that may have formed a continuous stone ring, 4 metres in the air. At the centre, arranged in a horseshoe-shaped arc, five doorway-like arches called ‘trilithons’ rose nearly 8 metres.
The most complicated astronomical theories suggested for Stonehenge – for example that it predicted eclipses – have been debunked. But it is indisputable that the trilithon arc, plus an avenue leading away from Stonehenge towards the northeast (it later turns and eventually reaches the nearby Avon river), point towards midsummer sunrise. Thousands now gather every year to watch the midsummer sun rise over the Heel Stone, but in Neolithic times, the sun would have risen in line with the avenue itself.
The monument also captures midwinter sunset, in the opposite direction. Whereas the summer alignment is visible from inside the circle, the setting midwinter sun could have been viewed by a procession approaching along the avenue from the northeast. In fact, the stone surfaces visible from this direction are more carefully dressed, suggesting this midwinter moment was the most important. A rectangle of stones called ‘station stones’ is also possibly aligned to the most extreme rising and setting points of the full moon, which occur at the solstices every 18.6 years.5
What was it all for? That was the question concerning British archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson when he took part in a television documentary about Stonehenge in February 1998. Parker Pearson had invited a Malagasy colleague named Ramilisonina to join him. The pair had spent several years working together in Madagascar, where traditional communities still erect standing stones known as vatolahy (‘man stones’) in honour of the dead.
The day before filming, Parker Pearson took Ramilisonina to nearby Avebury, where there are three Neolithic stone circles. Curious to know what his friend thought of the prehistoric site, Parker Pearson explained to Ramilisonina that archaeologists didn’t know why the stones had been erected. ‘He asked if I had learned nothing from working in Madagascar,’ Parker Pearson recalled in 2013. ‘It was obvious to him that such stone circles must be monuments to the ancestors, constructed in stone to represent the eternity of life after death.’ Perishable materials such as wood, by contrast, belonged to the temporary world of the living.
At first, Parker Pearson dismissed the idea that Madagascan beliefs could reveal anything new about the purpose of these Neolithic monuments; the idea of Stonehenge as a memorial to the dead had been suggested before. But the next day, during filming at the site itself, he wondered if Ramilisonina’s words might help to explain not just these ancient stones, but the entire surrounding landscape.
A few miles up the River Avon from Stonehenge is another Neolithic site, built from earth and wood. Durrington Walls is the largest known henge in the British Isles, an earthen circle that encloses over 17 hectares and includes several large rings of timber posts. Archaeologists had long thought that Durrington Walls was centuries older than Stonehenge, but redating of the Stonehenge stones had just revealed that the two sites could have been in use at the same time. After speaking to Ramilisonina, Parker Pearson wondered if Stonehenge and Durrington Walls might not be two separate monuments after all. Perhaps they were two halves of the same complex: one for the living and one for the dead.
To test the idea, Parker Pearson and his colleagues excavated across both sites from 2003 to 2009. As predicted, the team found evidence of a previously unsuspected settlement at Durrington Walls. It dates to around 2500 BC, when the giant sarsens were erected at Stonehenge. The site overflowed with debris from domestic life, whereas Stonehenge has yielded almost exclusively cremated human remains (archaeologists estimate hundreds of people may have been buried there in the third millennium BC). What’s more, the team uncovered an avenue leading from one of the timber circles to the Avon, suggesting the site was linked to Stonehenge by river. They also confirmed several solstice alignments at Durrington Walls – including that this circle and its river avenue both face southeast towards either midsummer sunset or midwinter sunrise – and the remains of lavish midwinter feasts.
Parker Pearson concluded that this was where the builders of Stonehenge’s epic second phase lived. They appear to have travelled from miles around at certain times of year, to celebrate their ancestors and perhaps usher the dead from the living world into the eternal afterlife. The midwinter solstice, when the sun had waned to its lowest point and plant life was dormant, might have been seen, he suggested, as the point at which ‘the dark world of the dead was closest to the world of the living’. Perhaps people gathered then at Durrington Walls to commemorate the recently deceased by feasting and erecting timber posts.
A procession might have started in the midwinter-oriented timber circle at dawn, with people walking