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Mortlake ware A characteristic form of late Neolithic pottery with thick rims and heavy decoration. See Peterborough ware.
mortuary house A house of the dead, in some cases of stone and in others of wood, wattle and daub, as in houses of the living. Used for the deposit of the corpse, and occasionally offerings, at the time of burial. The starting point of many burial mounds.
Mycenaean A mainland Greek civilization that developed in the late Bronze Age, which in its early period (sixteenth century BC or before) was strongly influenced by the Minoan civilization. Named after the place Mycenae, although the term is applied more extensively.
Neolithic The period (literally ‘New Stone {Age}’) in which agriculture was first practised, pottery was made, and fine tools mainly in stone, all of these things being eventually the subject of trade. Typical monuments of the period were the long barrows and causewayed enclosures. The period in southern Britain can be conventionally taken as lasting from about 4500 BC to about 2800 BC.
node A point where two great circles on the celestial sphere intersect (see Appendix 2). Two great circles of much importance are the apparent paths of the Sun and Moon through the stars, and the lunar nodes (where they cross) are of especial interest since eclipses take place when the Sun and Moon are at or near them. The lunar nodes are not fixed but moved slowly round the sky in a sense counter to the Moon’s monthly motion, completing the circuit in about 18.6 years.
obol or obolus A silver (or later bronze) coin of ancient Greece, which was often placed in the mouths of the dead as a fee for the ferryman Charon, who conveyed the shades of the dead across the rivers of the lower world. The tradition was taken over by the Romans.
oolite A form of limestone, in which the calcium carbonate adopts a granulated form around grains of sand. Usually fossil-bearing.
Ordnance Datum (OD) The level with reference to which ground levels (heights and depths) are quoted in the Ordnance Survey.
orthostat An upright stone.
Palaeolithic The period (literally ‘Old Stone {Age}’) of human existence when stone tools first played an important technological part in human evolution. There are many definitions, but the Palaeolithic period is often conventionally taken to have lasted to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, and to have begun around 700,000 years ago. Britain was occupied intermittently during certain warmer periods of this long stretch of time, which is usually divided into Lower (say to 200,000 years ago), Middle (up to between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago) and Upper Palaeolithic (continuing to about 10,000 years ago).
passage grave General term for a tomb in which a long stone passage leads into a burial chamber, the whole being then covered with a mound of stone or earth.
paving Usually flat stone slabs covering the ground.
post pipe The space in the ground left after the decay of a post, or its filling. Its precise size and constitution depends on local circumstance (outside pressure, the treatment of the original post, surrounding soil, and so on).
Peterborough ware Pottery of a style associated with the second half of the third millennium BC in southern Britain (as far north as Yorkshire). Typical is the heavily ornamented necked bowl, at first with a rounded base, later in a flat-based form. The ornament is often added with a twisted cord impression. S. Piggott recognized three distinctive styles: Ebbsfleet, Mortlake and Fengate.
precession (of the equinoxes) The slow drift of the equinoctial points (see equinox) round the sky (the apparent sphere of stars). The effect is that the measured ecliptic longitudes of the stars increase by about 1.5° per century, but it also means that what stars are visible, and where precisely they rise and set over the horizon, change with time—and change substantially over millennia.
quern A device in which grain is ground, usually comprising two discs of stone, the lower one hollowed and fixed, the upper rotated or moved from side to side by hand.
radiocarbon A radioactive isotope of the element carbon, used as an indicator of the time that has passed since the death of a specimen of organic matter (wood, bone, antler, etc.). See Appendix 1.
reave A land boundary.
resistivity A measure of relative electrical resistance, in archaeology usually that of the soil. (The term is usually defined as the resistance measured across a specimen of certain standard dimensions.) Variations in resistivity may indicate past soil disturbance (ditches, post holes, etc.) or the existence of buried material (stones, the remains of posts, etc.).
revetment A retaining wall, usually of stone, timber or turf, supporting a rampart or mound, or even the side of a ditch.
rhomb or rhombus A parallelogram with four equal sides. A lozenge-shaped plane figure.
rhyton A vessel from which libations are poured. (From the Greek.)
Rinyo–Clacton ware A major pottery style of the late Neolithic, with typically linear patterns and a more homogeneous form than that of Peterborough ware. It tends to have a bucket shape with thick walls and a flat base, and to be poorly fired. Known throughout Britain (found at Rinyo in Orkney and Clacton in Essex, of course), it is rare in Ireland. S. Piggott used the name to replace the more descriptive grooved ware, which carries no implication of a single material culture responsible for it, but which some regard as too narrowly defined.
sabbath Originally the seventh day of the week, a day of religious rest as enjoined on the Jews of Israel; more generally, any comparable periodic day of rest.
sarsen A form of micaceous sandstone (see mica), as used for the larger stones at Stonehenge. The word was perhaps peculiar to the Wiltshire region.
scaling posts The name given here to the timber posts, traces of which are often found under the high end of a long barrow. They are not symmetrically placed, and it is here argued that they provided a guide to the astronomical architecture of the barrow.
shard or sherd A fragment of broken pottery.
solstice The times of year at which the Sun is at its maximum northerly or southerly declination. The days are then at their longest and shortest respectively. These times are traditionally called midsummer and midwinter, although astronomers, among others, define the beginnings of summer and winter in terms of them. They occur now around 21 June and 21 December, but it makes little sense to ask for equivalent Neolithic dates, when there was no comparable calendar. At the winter solstice, the Sun’s noon altitude is at its lowest, and at the summer solstice it is highest.
standstill (lunar) A maximum or minimum of the lunar declination. (Compare the solar solstices.) This is only in the mathematical sense of there being a zero rate of change, and does not imply that there will be no greater or lesser values attained. See Appendix 2 for a fuller account of the Moon’s complex motions.
stele A standing stone or slab of modest size (say less than a metre, and often less than 30 cm) with one face only sculpted in low relief. An Anglicized Greek word. (Pronounced like the English word steel.)
tenon See mortise.
terminal The end of a monument (in this book usually a cursus) on the assumption that it was regarded as such by its builders and has been correctly identified.
theodolite A portable surveying instrument, usually now mounted on a tripod and fitted with a telescope, with graduated circular scales with which angles of azimuth and altitude can be accurately measured.
transept A side compartment in a passage tomb, often doubled to form a plan in the form of a cross, or even quadrupled.
trapezium A plane quadrilateral (a closed figure with four straight sides) that is not a parallelogram. Some use the word in a more special sense, adding the condition that just one pair of opposite sides be parallel.
treehenge The name given here to a henge with mainly timber components (uprights, lintels, etc.).
trilithon Three stones, in the form of two uprights and a lintel across the top.
trixylon Two massive timber uprights with a timber lintel across the top (by analogy with trilithon).
tropical year The time taken by the Earth to travel once round the Sun, from equinox to equinox. Alternatively, from the point of view of an observer on the Earth, the time apparently taken by the Sun to pass once round the sphere of stars, from equinox to equinox. This is the common year, of about 365.242 days.
tumulus A term used loosely for any artificial mound, called into use especially when the precise nature of the mound is unknown.
twilight The periods after sunset and before sunrise when the sky is partially illuminated through the scattering of sunlight. Various definitions are offered (civil, nautical, astronomical) according to the degree of darkening thought to be significant.
urnfield A field of pottery urns used for burial by cremation. (Also used of the culture in which this form of burial was practised.)
vallum A wall or rampart of earth, sods, or stones, possibly palisaded.
weald or wold A wooded tract of country. (The Weald is a name used especially of an area formerly wooded between the North and South Downs of Kent, Surrey and Sussex.)
wedge tomb A very long megalithic tomb, with the covering sloping down towards the end furthest from the entrance. A common Neolithic Irish form.
Windmill Hill culture The name given to a culture typified by the Neolithic culture responsible for the causewayed enclosure at Windmill Hill, near Avebury.
wristguard A plate of wood, stone or metal attached to the inner side of the wrist (of the hand with which an archer holds the bow), to protect the wrist from the bowstring.
zenith The point of the sky directly above the observer. The point to which the string of a plumb line may be regarded as directed. (More precise definitions are strictly necessary if the non-spherical form of the Earth is to be taken into account.)
zodiac The band of sky now associated with twelve constellations through which the Sun seems to pass in its annual path. See ecliptic.
PREFACE (#ulink_5804acd6-8427-5ede-91dd-22cea7f7e056)
To the Greeks, the primary sense of cosmos was that of order, harmony, and proportion. When the word was applied to the universe as a whole it was to insist that those properties—appropriate to a well regulated state, a finely decorated vase, a formally beautiful building—belonged to the universe too. Aetius tells us that Pythagoras was the first to use the word in this sense, and Stonehenge had stood for two millennia by his time. Today, as it presumably did then, Stonehenge impresses the onlooker more for its engineering than for its cosmic qualities, but it too was in a very real sense a cosmos, a geometrically ordered monument aligned on the universe of stars, Sun and Moon, and an embodiment of the spiritual forces they represented to most of mankind.
Such a claim is easier to make than to justify. It is not easy to catch at the mind of a people who lived more than four thousand years ago, and who left no written history, but the aim of this book is to do just that. Except indirectly, its concern is not with the realities of daily life, not with social structures, habitation, subsistence, or sheer survival, but rather with types of Neolithic monument that speak for the qualities of mind of the people responsible. We may have no texts, but the relatively large scale on which so many Neolithic monuments were built, combined with the modest way in which they merged into the landscape, have together ensured that time has not quite managed to obliterate them or all of their meaning. The monuments in question might not have compared in appearance with the polished glories of Egypt and Greece, but they have hidden qualities, and when those are found, the fact that they were concealed makes them all the more surprising.
What was the motivation of those who invested so much care and energy in them? The view to be defended here is that, as well as being religious, that motivation was in a strong sense astronomical, and that in this respect, few cultures of the time can compare with it. Such a claim is neither new nor precise. What is new here is the detail with which probable observing procedures are worked out, and connected with others detectible from at least as early as the fifth millennium BC. Stonehenge is like no other monument in the world, but there are many respects in which it is mistaken to regard it as unique. To understand it we must fit it into its context, both in time and space. In time, it can be shown to have continued in a venerable tradition. In space, its context is the remarkable landscape in which it stands. The number of prehistoric monuments within two kilometres of the site is to be counted not in tens but in hundreds. What is less widely recognized is that the astronomical properties of Stonehenge, as of so many earlier Neolithic monuments, were also heavily dependent on that landscape. But not entirely. Their design depended also on the state of the heavens.
It will not of course be suggested that the monument on Salisbury Plain was an astronomical observatory, at least in the current meaning of that word. The stones were not erected as a means to investigating the heavens in a detached and abstract way. The aim was not to discover the patterns of behaviour of the Sun, Moon or stars but to embody those patterns, already known in broad outline, in a religious architecture. There are signs that such ritualized architecture had been practised in the Wessex neighbourhood and elsewhere for well over a thousand years before the first phases of building at Stonehenge. While that monument in stone surpassed all before it, in architectural subtlety as well as in grandeur, to appreciate even this point one must know something of the earthen and timber structures that went before it and consequently about half of the book is concerned with that earlier material.
The book was prompted by a certain symmetry I noticed in 1979 in some published plans of excavations made on the site of a Bronze Age burial mound at Harenermolen in the northern Netherlands. (The monument in question is discussed and illustrated in Chapter 7 (#u8d084d18-89a8-5a4e-a442-eb8a757f0fb4) below.) When built, that mound had been surrounded by rings of wooden posts that had of course rotted away millennia before the excavation performed by A. E. van Giffen in the 1920s. As at many other comparable sites, he and others have been able to chart the traces of the original posts with considerable accuracy, through the discoloration of the sandy soil. It soon became clear that when such rings of posts were erected they were placed with reference to the rising and setting of the Sun and Moon at critical times and seasons. A similar claim has often been made for many of the stone circles, but the positioning of the timber posts seemed to offer more reliable evidence as to precisely how the Sun and Moon had been observed.
Using the key astronomical ideas that emerged in this way, it was natural enough to try to apply them to the much earlier Aubrey holes at Stonehenge, and to timber monuments at Woodhenge, Mount Pleasant, and elsewhere. Doing so led me in turn to consider the potential astronomical implications of the much earlier English long barrows, tombs roughly similar in form to others in various regions of Neolithic northern Europe. Many of them seemed to indicate that the stars, rather than the Sun and Moon, were for their builders the prime focus of religious attention. Needless to say, the order of the book is more or less the reverse of that of my search, and begins with the long barrows. The path to Stonehenge is well trodden, although usually more direct.
The direction of the argument as presented here might disturb the casual archaeological reader, with eye trained to find the nub of the argument by looking for histograms and comparable statistical tools of evaluation. They could have added little of value, and they are certainly not the only valid way of assessing an argument. Like most archaeological reconstructions of the past, mine follows a perfectly conventional method. It puts forward a series of hypotheses about past human actions, and it tries to determine which of them best survive attempts to refute them in the light of the evidence. The evidence in question concerns not only the excavation but what is humanly possible and humanly probable. Those last two factors are all too often left out of the equation, but they play an important part in the initial search for alternative hypotheses. A rigorous search for alternatives is often far more important than a blinkered analysis of only one. To take a simple example: the existence of large temples as evidence for the organization of society into chiefdoms (the positive argument for the fact that large numbers of people can be controlled efficiently in chiefdoms is irrelevant for the moment) is worthless if one cannot rule out all the engineering possibilities for building such temples with small groups of people. And to take an astronomical example: a typical histogram of notable celestial events to which a monument seems to point is worthless if only one observing position and only one technique are considered, and viable alternatives are ignored. Open-mindedness as to alternatives is a much harder lesson to learn than statistics.
How this general method will work out in practice may be illustrated in regard to the long barrows, the subject of a long chapter in which the pattern might easily be overlooked. At an early stage the hypothesis is made that the very brightest stars were observed rising and setting over the barrows, and this according to a series of very simple but precise rules, at which the barrow architecture seems to hint. Making that assumption, the barrows can be reasonably precisely dated, even without evidence of a scientifically high quality. These dates fit well with radiocarbon dates (which are occasionally used to help select alternatives, but not to refine them after the initial stage). A single instance is not compelling, but statistically the argument is strengthened by the fact that this can be done in several independent ways at a single barrow, and the dates usually then hang together well. (The evidence for this is evaluated in passing, for example, at pp. 45, 52-3, 79-80, but more especially at pp.) What is more, the case is strengthened when it is found that the same procedure gives acceptable results at all the barrows examined; and that the same fundamental principles can be readily extended to other monuments, such as chalk figures and causewayed enclosures. A thousand instances might give the reader more satisfaction than a dozen, depending on the mentality of the reader, but the evidence from even a few is compelling. And there are other respects in which this is so.
I am referring here to the way some hypotheses have of leading up to unsuspected situations. In the case of the long barrows, for example, it comes as a surprise to find that, accepting our starting point, it turns out that there were strong preferences for certain simple gradients—for example, one in five and one in ten—in the angles of observation set by the barrows. These gradients conform with the known architecture of the barrows, also often in unexpected ways, and the same simple gradients even turn up on critical ridges of the landscape on which later monuments were placed. There are other unexpected shared elements to be found in monumental design, and a fair-minded reader will admit that they are at least as objective as many other archaeological constructs—for instance, the common social structures held to be discernible on the basis of monumental building techniques in widely separated cultures. (Perhaps they are even more so, since those of the first sort were quite unexpected while those of the second often owe as much to Max Weber and Émile Durkheim as to mounds of earth.) Just as unexpected is another finding of ours, namely that the long barrows fall into regions in which they are aligned on the landscape in groups of three or more. This cannot be explained by chance, and it is therefore of enormous value to our general thesis that the very stars that seem to have been the focus of attention at the long barrows were evidently used to align the barrows on the landscape over great distances (pp). Of course it may be that there is a better archaeological explanation than mine for those extraordinary alignments of barrows—ley lines of cultural stress, perhaps—but I doubt it.
There have been numerous attempts to interpret the Stonehenge monument in astronomical terms, and what has been said of tacit presuppositions in archaeology was never truer than there. One of the greatest of omissions has been to ignore potential observing techniques almost totally, and to imagine that an observer stood in some position that was only roughly defined, ‘near such and such a stone’. Rules of a much more exact kind are offered here. Of course they may be wrong, but since assuming them leads to a much more precise fit with astronomical data than those offered previously, the rules of evidence require us to accept them until something better is suggested. Some of the earlier astronomical interpretations of Stonehenge, dating from the seventeenth century, are sketched in Chapter 7 (#u8d084d18-89a8-5a4e-a442-eb8a757f0fb4). Archaeologists as a whole remain quite properly sceptical about most of them—in fact they are usually prepared to accept only the approximate alignment of the Heel Stone on sunrise at the summer solstice. They have had good reason to resist the astronomical hypothesis, in view of the fact that hardly a single really precise line of sight has hitherto been found, but they have not been sceptical enough, for even that old favourite, the line to the Sun at summer solstice, is a very sorry specimen that has been quite misunderstood. Stonehenge was indeed built to an astronomical design, or rather succession of designs, but all of them were much more ingenious than has previously been recognized. (The real test of honest druids hereafter will be their readiness to face the elements on Salisbury Plain in midwinter. Since Stonehenge is now seriously outdated, the most honest of all will learn the necessary techniques from the pages that follow, and build another temple far away from it.)
The true astronomical arrangement of the stones would have been appreciated sooner had there not been an almost universal preoccupation with plans of the monument, that is, with charts in only two dimensions. To understand the acumen of its builders one must study its three-dimensional form—a hard lesson that we are taught by the long barrows and timber circles. Another obstacle to progress has been an obsession with the idea that sightings from prehistoric stone circles were usually made towards points on distant horizons. The horizon is all-important, of course, but the people of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages will prove to have been in the habit of creating artificial horizons, just as surely as astronomers and surveyors today use something of the sort in their levels and theodolites, albeit for quite different reasons. Such reference planes were created long before the time of Stonehenge—in the first place, no doubt, to remove the irregularities of a tree-covered horizon. They were incorporated into the Stonehenge monument in several different ways, and the alignments of the stones there will be properly understood only if they are systematically taken into account.
Addressed as it is to a general rather than a professional audience, this book includes only the barest details of the underlying calculations, but those who wish to repeat them should be able to do so—with the help, if needed, of the appendices. There is not a single result in it that might not be made more precise after closer study and field work, but there is a law of diminishing returns in these matters and I believe that the main drift of the argument will survive such improvement. The analysis of prehistoric astronomical alignments demands accurate data, and the Stonehenge archaeological record is not in the best of shape. I have drawn heavily on the field work of archaeologists who are likely to feel uneasy at the use to which their work is being put. They inhabit an earth-bound world that makes them uncomfortable with lines of geometrical straightness, and it is not surprising that they have often omitted to record precisely the information needed here. The real cause for surprise is that they have so often recorded what was needed, and my debt to their recording is almost total. Many will be horrified at my defence of Alexander Thom’s Megalithic Yard (0.829 m), and even more so by its occasional use in plans. By this I do not mean to prejudge the question of whether it was in use, but merely to simplify the task of judging whether it might have been so. Of one historical truth one may be quite certain, when adding a scale to one’s plan: the metre was not in use in the Neolithic period.
The interpretations offered here do not lend themselves to exactness, and it is all too easy to quote results to a nonsensical degree of accuracy that might suggest otherwise. There are writers who publish declinations and directions that by implication are accurate to a thousandth of a degree, but who have not even taken astronomical altitude into account, although it would have displaced their findings by angles of the order of a degree, twice the diameter of the Sun. There have been archaeologists who have considered that they have done their duty by the points of the compass if they have marked them on their plans to within five or six degrees. Those who repeat the threadbare story of Mrs Maud Cunnington, who is said to have made some of her measurements with an umbrella, should compare her azimuths with their own. A good umbrella is far better fitted to the accurate measurement of length than is a pocket compass to the accurate measurement of direction.
The many different sorts of monument to be considered were first and foremost religious centres, or at least focal points of religion, built by people in whose spiritual lives the stars, Sun, and Moon played an important role, perhaps even a central role. There are limits to what an insight into past observational practice can reveal about prehistoric religion, its symbolism and ritual, but one should not be unduly apologetic about its genuinely scientific nature. The activities reconstructed here were rule-directed, scientific in a very real sense, and their implications for human history, intellectual and practical, are anything but trivial. Here, for instance, we can dimly perceive the beginnings of mathematical astronomy, the oldest of the exact sciences, not to mention the roots of a geometry of proportion—which was destined to have an important place in ancient Greek philosophy and science. As a window into the beliefs of the past, this all surely deserves at least as much attention as a showcase of flint scrapers.
* * *
My debts are numerous. I was very fortunate to have Bill Swainson cast an editor’s eagle eye over my script. To the late A. G. Drachmann I owe the idea of self-denial in the matter of footnotes. I have weakened only occasionally—but then at some length—when adding asides that might have stood in the way of the main argument. Appendices and Bibliography are included at the end. (Those unaware of the distinction between dates BC and bc, for example, might consult Appendix 1. A few readers might want the basic astronomy in Appendix 2.) I should never have turned in the direction of Stonehenge in the first place without the encouragement of Francis Maddison thirty years ago, and his broad view of archaeology has certainly coloured my own. Richard North passed a critical eye over my Scandinavian asides. Above all I owe a debt to an entire profession that is not really mine, and especially to Tjalling Waterbolk for his expert comment, on the continental material in particular. The book’s dedication, however, can only be to my wife Marion for her unstinting support. And to her patience, not even Chaucer’s Clerk could have done justice.
J. D. N.
July 1996
A few typographical corrections to the first printing have been made here, together with some minor adjustments to the star maps of Figs. 4 (#ulink_36bd5951-5913-5457-8619-4af6c9d13f52) and 210. That the corrections called for were not more numerous I owe largely to the care of my editor Toby Mundy. My indebtedness to him has accumulated steadily since he first took the book in hand.
J. D. N.
November 1996
CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_b9117825-6274-5249-aa16-f9b948deb7d2)
1 (#ulink_72a90ce3-9314-55d5-bb33-f6f86fb81322)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_72a90ce3-9314-55d5-bb33-f6f86fb81322)
… the Discovery whereof I doe here attempt (for want of written Record) to work-out and restore after a kind of Algebraical method, by comparing those that I have seen one with another; and reducing them to a kind of Aequation: so (being but an ill Orator my selfe) to make the Stones give Evidence for themselves.
John Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica, ed. J. Fowles and R. Legg (1980), p. 32
The People (#ulink_ee9c409b-f2bb-5572-bad4-871bf8354e73)
MOST of the achievements recorded in this book were those of people who lived between three and six thousand years ago—a relatively short period by comparison with the quarter of a million years that Britain has been inhabited. During that long earlier period, following the arrival of the first hunters in these northern latitudes, there had been gradual but massive fluctuations in climate, and long glacial periods during which it would have been necessary to retreat southwards. Much of what is known about the general pattern of existence of early peoples derives from evidence as to their diet, for example from middens, and hunters are in this regard by their very lifestyle elusive. The few hunter-gatherers who were cave dwellers—and especially those from temperate regions in the same period—tell us that there were other dimensions to their lives than subsistence alone, for they have left us carved and modelled figurines in stone and clay, including those notorious ‘Venuses’ who look as though they were meant as wives for Michelin man. Even from a time as early as the Leptolithic period (say 35,000 to 10,000 BC) there have been found in France not only many specialized tools and weapons, but spectacular cave art. Among surviving artefacts are bones scratched in ways suggesting that some sort of counting was taking place, and on the basis of the grouping of incisions into sets of around thirty, claims have been made that some of the counting was of the days of the Moon.
It is from the Leptolithic period that the first clear indication of ritualized burial in Britain has been found, that of the ‘Red Lady’ (or was it a young man?) found in a cave at Paviland on the Gower Peninsula in Wales. The body had been covered in red ochre—presumably to give it a semblance of life in death—and had been dressed in ornaments of ivory and shell. Radiocarbon dating puts this at well over twenty thousand years ago, when there was still a land bridge to the continent of Europe.
Both shells and ochre have been found with similar Middle Palaeolithic burials in France and southeastern Europe, and indeed red ochre was to be used in the same way throughout Europe for many millennia thereafter.
The last of the long periods of glaciation lasted for about sixty thousand years, and drew to a close about eleven thousand years ago, even though there are signs of intelligent activity with stone implements from an earlier date. As the climate changed, and temperatures rose to levels more or less those of the present, northern Europe was drastically affected. Much is known of the environment of the time from the evidence of pollen and molluscs. The most striking changes were to the forests. First birch and pine made a recovery, and then hazel, elm, oak and lime moved into the older forests, with ash and alder following later. The population began to expand again after hunting and collecting methods were adapted to the new flora and fauna. Habits did not develop in the same way in all northern centres, but speaking generally, man tried to live near to large stretches of water at least in winter and early spring. Britain was linked to the continent by land until about 8000 BC. It is to this (Mesolithic) period that the first known human activity in the immediate neighbourhood of Stonehenge belongs. A series of pits was dug then a few hundred metres to the north of the stones, and they appear to have held massive upright posts of pine, for reasons that are entirely a matter for speculation.
As the forests developed, deer, elk, ox and boar moved northwards into them, and were hunted for food, but also for clothing, weapons, and implements that could be made from antler and horn. Long afterwards, ditches at places like Stonehenge were still being dug with antler picks. There are signs that the hunting way of life in Britain was giving way to farming by 4400 BC or thereabouts. It was long supposed that this change was a consequence of immigration by an alien people, but the matter is likely to have been more complicated. Hunter-gatherers had actually been opting for a relatively settled existence long before this new phase, a fact that would have made them more receptive to farming techniques than if they had been nomadic. It has even been claimed that they had previously indulged in a form of agriculture, namely the cultivation of the hazel for its nuts, but this is unproven. They had by this time certainly developed simple but efficient stone tools—unpolished axes and adzes, for example—and had proved themselves capable of sculpting animal figures and of decorating antler and bone tools, but the farming economy, which typically involved the cultivation of grain and the raising of such animals as sheep, cattle, swine, and goats, had much earlier beginnings, and those far away from Britain. Radiocarbon dating methods have pushed back the origins of settled agricultural communities in southwest Asia to well before 8000 BC, and similar communities may be as old in southeast Asia. Farming soon spread into the Mediterranean: it was practised in Thessaly, Crete and Cyprus even before the development of pottery there. It also made its way westwards along the Mediterranean coast, and again the domestication of sheep and goat evidently preceded pottery-making. By the sixth millennium BC, farming villages where pottery was made were present over the entire Aegean area, from whence farming made its way into the Balkan peninsula and the Hungarian plain, mostly following river valleys. The most important phase in the spread of farming to northern latitudes, however, took place early in the fifth millennium, when it moved northwards from the Hungarian plain, westwards along the Mediterranean coast, and in all directions along the Atlantic and Baltic coasts, where the population had become relatively stable. Finally it was carried inland to other parts of Europe by small groups, in particular lake-dwellers.
The main movement northwards is associated with a characteristic type of pottery, decorated with linear patterns, and usually known by its German name, Bandkeramik. The explosion of the Bandkeramik culture from the general area of the Hungarian plain is also characterized by its remarkable settlements, each with ten or twenty long wooden buildings, dwellings five or six metres wide and roughly eight times as long, with a roof supported by three rows of posts. A typical house was divided into three sections: the living quarters were in the middle, there was a granary at one end, and at the other there was a section of uncertain purpose that might have been a house temple for cult purposes. There is no clear evidence for animal stalls. In each village, one of the buildings was usually notably larger than the rest. As this culture spread westwards and northwards it finally made contact at length with settled communities along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of western Europe, including Britain and Ireland. These coastal communities already had a certain cultural homogeneity, and the new farming habits did not exclude the old but supplemented them. Baltic peoples, for example, now learned how to grow grain and raise cattle, but they did so on a limited scale and continued to fish, to collect shellfish, and to hunt along the coast and inland as they had done before. Their contacts with the distant Danubian tradition are nevertheless evident from their pottery, from copper imports, and the style of their long houses.
By what route farming eventually reached southern Britain is not entirely clear. On one view it arrived through a migration of peoples from perhaps two or three directions, in particular from western France and from the northern and southern Netherlands. It has been suggested that some immigrant groups might have settled in Britain and coexisted for centuries alongside the older hunting population, the two merging only by slow degrees. Another hypothesis, at least as plausible as the first, is based on the fact that early dates for food production have been found from along the Irish Sea, in the neighbourhood of important centres of polished stone axe production that later sent their wares at least as far afield as Wessex. It is possible, therefore, that agriculture was brought to Britain by an Irish Sea population that had learned of it and acquired stock and skill through coastal contacts. Whatever the answer, by 4000 BC farming was established to some degree in places across the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland. Although the population was then still very small, it was growing steadily. There were of course important differences between forms of agriculture developed in different centres, differences that depended on history and environment, but there are such strong affinities between Britain and the continent of Europe from this time onwards that whether or not we are to believe in the migration of peoples in appreciable numbers it is impossible to doubt a continuing interchange of ideas.
The narrower focus of these pages is southern Britain, roughly south of a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel, and the Neolithic ‘Windmill Hill’ culture and its successors down to the Bronze Age. (That culture takes its name from a hilltop site near Winterbourne Monkton and Avebury in Wiltshire, where it was first given archaeological recognition as a characteristic form.) (See Fig. 3 (#ulink_8c5900a0-719f-5f03-91fd-fe3b2261e4b9).) The people concerned seem to have had a liking for chalk downlands, which were then covered in a dense forest, largely of oak and elm. The claiming of land from forest has been traced though the analysis of pollens that show, for instance, a decline in the numbers of elms and the corresponding advance of small light-seeking flora. It is possible that land clearance was at first only for animal fodder. The soil at least was light, and easy to cultivate with simple tools, such as those fashioned from antlers—it has even been suggested that deer were at times actually farmed for their antlers. The chalk also had the merit of yielding seams of flintstone, much used for cutting-tools. The farming communities of the region certainly left their mark on the land.
They left other marks on the landscape, in the form of ditches, enclosures of various sorts, defensive earthworks, tombs of various sorts, stone circles, carvings on stone, and so forth—but stones, earthworks, flints, antler picks, pots, even bronze and golden ornaments, are only the husks of human existence. Had these people left behind them even a rudimentary literature, we should no doubt think of them in a very different way. The intelligence and intensity of feeling that is evident from so many of their tangible remains, together with what is known of other non-literate cultures, makes it virtually certain that they had a rich and imaginative oral tradition, even though there is clearly no hope of our ever recovering it.
One of the theses of this book is that various astronomically guided rituals were in use by the time of the very earliest farming communities in Britain. This does not mean that such rituals necessarily followed the same routes as agricultural practices, or that either remained constant over long periods of time. There was a slow evolution in both, with many local variations in tradition. Problems of diffusion of influence are among the most difficult to solve, and once again, a movement of ideas does not necessarily mean a significant movement of populations. While it would be unwise to hazard many general conclusions on astronomical grounds alone, the evidence from this quarter is that the exchange of ideas between adjacent peoples was much greater than is usually recognized.
Alignments and Orientations (#ulink_17bcdb70-c183-5b1f-b73c-14950069be46)
The overall aim of this book is to discover certain patterns of intellectual and religious behaviour through a study of archaeological remains that seem to have been deliberately directed in some way towards phenomena in the heavens. Much use will be made of a handful of words and ideas that are certainly not a part of everyday discourse but that are, even so, essentially simple. One of these, the notion of an astronomical alignment, is easily explained by reference first to the stars and then to the Sun and Moon (see also Glossary).
Each day, from a given place, if I can see an identifiable star rising, it will always seem to rise over the same point on the distant horizon. (This will be on its eastern half. It will culminate due south of the pole for anyone living in the northern hemisphere. And in view of the context, this qualification need not be repeated.) If it can be seen setting, the star will similarly always seem to set over a fixed point on the western horizon. If the star is sufficiently important to me, I might choose to remind myself of those points of rising and setting, perhaps by such irregularities as hill-tops or isolated trees; or I might choose to mark the directions in which they lie by setting up pairs of posts or other markers relatively near at hand. I should not have to revise the alignments of such markers materially during my lifetime, unless I wanted extreme accuracy of a sort that need not be considered here. (The word ‘alignment’ will usually be used here to refer to two or more terrestrial objects lined up on a celestial object, and not exclusively to sets of three or more terrestrial objects in line, which is an unnecessarily narrow archaeological usage.)
I might choose to direct my buildings—say the main axis of my church—in the same way. Reversing the order of discussion, however, is a hazardous undertaking: the fact that the orientation of someone else’s church happens to produce an alignment with an astronomically interesting event does not necessarily imply that the orientation was deliberate. Deciding between deliberate and accidental alignments is one of the central problems of this book.
Just as with the stars, I may notice the Sun rising at a recognizable place on the horizon, but in this case, as the days go by, that place will seem to change. In midsummer, the Sun in the eastern half of the sky will rise over its most northerly point of the horizon. It will attain its most northerly point of setting on the horizon’s western half at the same season. I could mark these directions as I did those of the rising and setting star; and as the year progressed and the days shortened, I should notice that those distant points of the Sun’s rising and setting move southwards, and that in midwinter they reach to their furthest points south. Again I could mark those southern extremes in one way or another. The markers (both near at hand, or one near and one distant) would then be aligned on four critical phenomena, namely midsummer and midwinter risings and settings of the Sun.
FIG. 1. The directions of the rising and setting Sun at Stonehenge, around 2000 BC, at the times of summer and winter solstice. The directions for the equinoxes are also marked, but are barely distinguishable from the (broken) east–west line. In all cases it is supposed that the upper limb of the Sun (first or last glint of the Sun) is seen on the distant natural horizon.
Approximately halfway between the directions of sunrise at precise midsummer and midwinter (that is, at the solstices), is the true direction of east; and true west is similarly more or less mid-way between the extreme directions of setting. The actual sizes of the angles depend on various factors, and in particular on the geographical place (or more precisely the geographical latitude) and on the irregularities of the actual horizon. In Fig. 1 (#ulink_8eeaba16-f748-5961-8cf8-efb5abfc8c97) the angles are drawn for Stonehenge at a nominal date of 2000 BC. The angles are not precisely divided into equal parts by the east–west line, for reasons explained more fully in Appendix 2.
As early as Neanderthal man—say thirty or forty millennia ago—there were burials aligned accurately east–west, which suggests that some or other celestial body was in the thoughts of those responsible for organizing the rituals of death. A grave excavated at L’Anse Amour, in Labrador, incorporated what were evidently ritual fires arranged to the north and south of the body, which was laid in an east–west direction. The east–west and north–south lines seem to have been key directions in the placement of later burials in many parts of the globe, but—religion apart—how is this tendency to be interpreted? East and west are the directions of the rising and setting Sun at the equinoxes, but they are not easily established, and the positions of the fires might rather be thought to suggest that in the Labrador case the critical directions were north and south, the line having perhaps been decided by the Sun’s midday position. A body with head to the north might have been regarded as lying towards the pole, the region where stars do not move. Granted more sophistication, east and west might have been regarded as midway between the Sun’s extremes of rising and of setting. Alternatively, the four cardinal points of the compass might have been settled not by reference to the Sun but to the daily rotation of the stars: a star culminates (reaches its highest point) on the meridian, just as does the Sun, and the meridian also bisects the directions of a star’s rising and setting. Culminations are not easy to settle precisely, since the altitude of the Sun or star is changing least rapidly then; but this does not mean that culmination was not uppermost in the thoughts of those who chose these directions for burials. Then again, at various periods of history certain bright stars have risen and set due east and west, so that alignment might have been on them. Skeleton directions that have so often been interpreted in solar terms can all too easily be reinterpreted in numerous ways, without our presupposing any particularly sophisticated techniques of observation. Which of these alternatives should one favour?
FIG. 2. The absolute extreme directions of the rising and setting Moon at Stonehenge, around 2000 BC, assuming that the Moon is fully visible, and just touching the natural horizon.
The evidence, based not on skeleton positions (which are often dubious) but on the forms of tombs and other structures, is that all of these ways of considering the cardinal points of the horizon, east and west, north and south, are likely to have been familiar in late Neolithic Europe. It is all too easy to become hypnotized by the idea of observation of the Sun and to forget the stars, but there is strong evidence from the period before the first phase of Stonehenge that observation of the stars was then important, perhaps even more important. In some early cultures from which written records survive—in Egypt, for instance—the direction of north was significant, and was found from observations of the stars circling the pole, or of a particular star near the pole at that time. (This was not the star that now serves us as the Pole Star, which in the remote past was well removed from its present position.)
The directions of the Moon’s places of rising on the eastern horizon and setting on the western also change with time, but the pattern of change is much more complicated than in the case of the Sun. The details are put aside for the time being (they are treated more fully in Chapter V and in some detail in Appendix 2), but again there are four absolute extremes of direction, just as with the Sun. The angle separating the northern and southern extremes of the Moon’s rising and setting is greater than in the case of the Sun. The angles in question, which depend as before on several factors, actually fluctuate in the course of time in a way that at first seems erratic. Alexander Thom and others have suggested, however, that the pattern of change lent itself to an analysis of quite extraordinary penetration by the people of the Bronze Age, or even earlier. For the time being, Fig. 2 (#ulink_659caad6-50f6-51db-8942-4b2a35680de4) will suffice to give an idea of the absolute extremes of lunar direction at the latitude of Stonehenge.
The earliest written astronomical records—notably the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek—reveal a preoccupation with risings and settings and periods of visibility generally. They show a concern with what was to be observed at the horizon, and with intervals of time between special events in the heavens, and their recurrences. This is not to say that there was necessarily a concern with directions towards points of rising and setting, for there are other ways of using horizon observations. Consider, however, a passage from a Mesopotamian astronomical text compiled early in the first millennium BC and known as MUL.APIN:
The Sun which rose towards the north with the head of the Lion turns and keeps moving down towards the south at a rate of 40 NINDA per day. The days become shorter, the nights longer. … The Sun which rose towards the south with the head of the Great One then turns and keeps coming up towards the north at a rate of 40 NINDA per day. The days become longer, the nights become shorter …
