Making Connections: Stonehenge in its Prehistoric World

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Neil Wilkin, British Museum - October 2018 Recent Lecture
This is the title of a joint exhibition by English Heritage and the British Museum at the Stonehenge Visitors Centre which runs from 12th October 2018 to 21st April 2019. The aim is to present objects which connect Stonehenge with the objects and people which have existed before and during its time, the new exhibition space enabling such objects to be brought close to the Monument from the British Museum collection. For various reasons the British Museum did not acquire many finds from the Stonehenge area itself – they are in local museums: Salisbury and Devizes. What the British Museum has tells the story of Britain and Europe. So, this exhibition will deal with the question: how does Stonehenge fit into the British and European story? Why are these objects important?

The 18th century antiquarians William Stukeley and Hans Sloane figure in this story. Stukeley spent seven summers during the 1720s in the Stonehenge landscape surveying, drawing, recording. He was the first to make a connection between the monument and the solstices, and discussed his ideas with the Astronomer Royal Edmund Halley, and with Newton. Stukeley was instrumental in widening understanding of the monument, the first to say Stonehenge was not built by the Romans but predated them, and the first to observe and record the Avenue and Cursus. But because of the times he lived in, he was steeped in the Classical world: the Cursus was a Roman chariot racetrack; Classical sources spoke of Druids, so Stonehenge had to be something to do with the powerful Druids. Sir Hans Sloane was a medical man, also studied botany, and was a collector of many objects: his collection was the foundation of that at the British Museum. What was happening in Britain and Europe as represented by objects in the exhibition?

Before Stonehenge: c. 4000 BC: A jadeitite axe from the beginning of the Neolithic. The source of the stone for many polished axes found in Britain and on the Continent (they were traded right across Europe) was tracked down to the mountains of Northern Italy. An example at the British Museum and one at Devizes Museum are from the same outcrop. The rock was difficult to reach, so was precious, sacred, the axes made from it bewitching, spectacular. Trade came with a change of lifestyle: domesticating the land, altering the earth, not just living with nature. c. 3800 BC: The Coneybury Anomaly, a significant prehistoric feature near Stonehenge, and pre-dating it, is a pit, discovered in 1980 on Coneybury Hill across the small valley of Stonehenge Bottom from the Stonehenge monument. It contained a sealed deposit of objects suggesting a large feast had taken place nearby, with sherds from 41 vessels and bones of cattle, deer and fish, implying a large gathering of people, and as it contained both hunted and domesticated animals (the ‘anomaly’), suggests an age when people were just beginning to become Neolithic.

Winterbourne Stoke Long Barrow, also Early Neolithic, was found to contain an individual burial, which has been reconstructed at the Visitors Centre.
c. 3500 BC: A source was found in Britain for a stone for polished axes, from Langdale high in the Lake District, so it was still an effort to obtain it. The distribution of these axes right across the country is an important part of their story. From c. 3000 BC: The Stonehenge monument itself, built in phases. And from the later Neolithic: two plaques of chalk were found in a pit by Phil Harding in the 1980s, on them a rough decoration (similar to the grooved ware pottery found in huge numbers at Durrington Walls) and of a type found right across Britain and Ireland from this time, such as on the chalk Folkton Drums (toys?) found in a child’s grave in East Yorkshire; a similar design occurs on Kerbstone 67 at New Grange in Ireland, and these motifs are found on the enigmatic stone balls, e.g. the Towie Ball, from North East Scotland.

Beaker People: c. 2400 BC: The Amesbury Archer’s burial was discovered by Wessex Archaeology close to Stonehenge, with a phenomenal range of objects buried with him. There are clues that the burial was re-visited and things added and taken away. The gold of his ‘basket’ hair ornaments is from Cornwall, tanged points from Iberia, wrist-guards perhaps from France. All clues he was from the Continent, borne out when his teeth were tested isotopically, revealing where he’d been drinking water as a child. Were all the Beaker people from Europe? This test has been used right across Britain: findings will appear soon in a book published by the Prehistoric Society. People had not entered Britain in large numbers, but DNA tests say the population of Britain was changed almost completely in a couple of hundred years, the Neolithics apparently replaced by the Beaker people in a concentrated wave from the Continent. What happened? There is little evidence for violence, at least in the archaeological record. Was an already small population wiped out by other factors such as disease? The evidence is still sketchy. The objects in the exhibition have something to say about the process of change. From the Beaker Period in East Yorkshire, two objects: a copper dagger representing the new technique of metal work, which must have seemed magical, powerful. Was one of the Archer’s wrist-guards for falconry as well as archery? There are lots of wrist-guards in Beaker burials around the country and some have scratch marks. So even though the population had changed, some processes still seem to have continued.

Beaker burials were perhaps contemporary with Neolithic recumbent stone circles. Two populations living side by side? Some evidence the earlier population was not wiped out is suggested by lunulae: gold collars which perhaps represent the Sun, still important in symbolism, found in both Ireland and Britain. On one, decoration similar to that on Beaker pottery. A hybrid culture? 2000-1900 BC: Metal becomes much more important in Britain. c. 2000 BC: On the stones of Stonehenge, carvings are executed – all (hundreds) are of metal objects – axes and daggers. There are examples in the exhibition of the objects depicted on the stones.

After Stonehenge: It still exists - people respected it? And they built a huge number of burial mounds around the Monument. A lot of metal, including recycled metal, was coming into Britain from Europe, and perhaps this was due to an important technological development: From c. 2000 BC, sewn plank boats such as the Dover Boat - sailing craft, they could carry cargo. Was this a catalyst for intensification of trade between Britain and Europe? And more evidence that the Sun was still important: rediscovered in the British Museum stores a Bronze Age bronze disc, very like the Trundholm Sun Chariot from Denmark (a wheeled horse pulls the Sun disc across the sky), with almost identical decoration. The British Museum one was from a bog in Ireland and is on display in the exhibition: a connection between Scandinavia and Ireland? More analysis is to be carried out on it. c. 1000-800 BC: An object from Kelleythorpe, East Yorkshire, is perhaps a “flesh hook”, to fish bits of meat out of a cauldron: one was found on the Continent actually in a cauldron. But it is more than just a functional object. The zig zag decoration perhaps represents water, and it is surmounted by carvings of raven-like birds and swans. And there are rings – for feathers? Perhaps of those birds? Black and white birds denote contrast, like the sky and land. As early as the 8th century AD, Irish myths feature these kinds of oppositions: do they go back to prehistory?

It is a hundred years since Stonehenge was given to the public. Laurence Binyon, poet and author of perhaps the most well-known war poem, ‘For the Fallen’, was a Curator at the British Museum and wrote a poem about Stonehenge. It is a hundred years since Stonehenge was given to the public, and a hundred years since the end of World War One. People come and go, but stones mean stability.

Yvonne Masson