7 - Into the Second Millenium BC

Stone settings can be of a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from the over one thousand stones arranged in ten rows at Kermario near Carnac in Brittany, though the great ring at Avebury to single standing stones. The commonest plans, apart from rows, circles and monoliths, are ovals, coves, where three stones are placed close together in a horseshoe, and single lines.

The settings can be understood in the same way as the wooden settings described in the previous section as marking the site of a special spot used for ritual or ceremony but it may be that the particular varieties of stone formation have significance. This could mean that various sites were used for different purposes within the same religious sect or that the various sites each represents a particular brand of belief like the different chapels and churches belonging to the various Christian denominations that we see around us today.

The site that has received most attention is Stonehenge which, alone of stone settings, consists of two different types of stones and betrays its technological heritage in the way that the great stones, the sarsens, are fitted together using woodworking techniques of tenon and mortice. This relates the monument to earlier timber circles and raises the intriquing possibility that they too consisted of three components fitted together like the stone trilithons and/or uprights joined together to make a circle with a continuous lintel at Stonehenge.

It is usually assumed that the earliest stones used on the site of Stonehenge came from the Prescelli Hills in south-western Wales and that they were brought by water into the estuary of the Severn, then up the Bristol Avon, across to the headwaters of the Wylye, down that river to its junction with the Hampshire Avon at Salisbury then up the Avon to a point some two miles from Stonehenge. Thence they would have been dragged overland. These are the stones known as the bluestones. I suppose that on average each stone would have weighed around four tons and the transport of eighty- two of these stones some 200 miles was a considerable achievement.

The larger stones, the sarsens, did not come more than twenty-five miles. They were brought from the area of the chalk downs between Marlborough and Newbury in north Wiltshire and are the remains of a stratum of silicified sandstone that in remote geological time lay on top of the chalk. Seventy-five of these enormous stones weighing up to forty tons were located and shaped with hammerstones. Placed on sledges and moved on rails like a railway train perhaps, they were transported some twenty to twenty-five miles to the site of Stonehenge. There they were set up in holes by being slid down inclines and after being left to settle, the tops were cut to an even height and the tenons shaped onto which the mortices in the lintel stones would be fitted.

The stones were dressed and the parallax was corrected so that from the ground the uprights and the lintels look as though they are the same width at the top as at the bottom. Grooves cut into the sides of the lintels that topped the stone rings allowed them to be fitted together into a continuous circle. These sophisticated additions to the monument are what distinguishes it from all other standing stone settings that, like the great stone setting at Avebury, used undressed stones.

The various constructions at Stonehenge have been grouped into three main phases with accompanying dates and a pottery style that has been identified as being characteristic of the construction period.

Phase 1.

Around 3000calBC (a calibrated date). Middle of the Neolithic period. Built as a henge with a circle of postholes (Aubrey Holes) inside the bank which was placed inside the ditch. The posts may have had a lintelled top for they were of a fair size, the postholes being on average 0.76 metres in depth and over a metre in diameter, stout enough to support a continuous lintel. The pottery of the period was the Peterborough type.

Phase 2.

Between 2900calBC and 2550calBC. The posts had gone by this time, the ditch backfilled, and some of the Aubrey Holes and other holes contain cremations. Postholes were dug in the entrance and outside it and a large number of postholes appear inside the henge arranged in no sort of identifiable pattern. Pottery type: Grooved Ware.

Phase 3.(A lengthy phase).

Around 2550calBC. The bluestones were erected in a circle which may or may not have been completed. Two stones were placed close to the bank on opposite sides of the monument, the distance between the stones of the pairs being about thirty metres. These four stones are known as the Station Stones. The Heelstone was set up outside the entrance. Cremation burials continue to be made in the interior. The characteristic pottery continues to be Grooved Ware.

Before 2480calBC the sarsen circle and trilithons horseshoe appear. Ditches encircle the Heelstone and one of the Station Stones on each side of the circle. The characteristic pottery continues to be Grooved Ware.

Between 2200calBC and 2100calBC the bluestones reappear as an oval built inside the sarsen horseshoe. A bank and ditch avenue is built from the entrance to the monument running northeastwards. The Heelstone is at the beginning of this avenue. The characteristic pottery continues to be Grooved Ware but the first Beaker pottery appears alongside a body in a burial in the ditch.

Around 1900calBC the bluestone oval is rearranged into a horseshoe opening like the sarsen horseshoe towards the entrance to the monument. A circle of bluestones was placed between the sarsen horseshoe and the sarsen circle. Pottery is now in the Beaker style.

Between 1700 and 1600calBC two concentric circles of holes were dug outside the stone settings and between them and the encircling bank of the monument. These are called the Y and Z holes and are accompanied by pottery of the Wessex I type. (Early Bronze Age)

This very elaborate sequence of phases is not repeated elsewhere on any other stone setting sites, at least, as far as we are aware and is another characteristic of Stonehenge that puts it into a different category from all other stone circles.

Latest thinking associates it with Brittany. The geometry and astronomy of the Four Station Stones have many parallels in Brittany but few in Britain and the grading of the horseshoe towards the midwinter sunset and the anthropomorphs, axes, dagger and crook carvings on both the horseshoe and the circle have sources in Brittany.

Despite the common knowledge that the midsummer sun rises over the heelstone, the orientation of the monument and the avenue that leads to it is in the opposite direction so that the midwinter sunset can be seen between the uprights of the largest trilithon. The same phenomenon occurs in Orkney where the setting midwinter throws its last beams along the entrance passage of the the passage grave.

The stone phases stretch from before c2500BC through to 1600BC, a period of around nine hundred years which provides some sort of chronological parameters to the period during which the most obvious ritual preoccupation was with stone settings.

Like Stonehenge, Avebury was a henge which had stones associated with it though whether they were added to it at a later date is not altogether clear. It is one of a pattern of 'stone-henges' that are found from north to south in Britain from Balfarg in the north to the Stripple Stones in Cornwall and include the Devil's Quoits in Oxon, the Bull Ring and Arbor Low in Derbyshire and Cairnpapple. Unfortunately a great many of the stones on these monuments have disappeared.

In the north of Scotland stone rows in Caithness and stone circles around the Clava Cairns are some of the better-known examples of stone settings but in Aberdeenshire recumbent stone circles (RSC) are the most spectacular constructions. They consist of of a circle of stones graded in height, the two tallest in the south-western quadrant flanking a prostrate block, the recumbent. Inside the circle may be a ring-cairn in whose central space cremated human bone was deposited. Examples of these monuments are at Loanhead of Daviot and Berrybrae in Aberdeenshire.

North-east of the Tay in Perthshire at Croft Moraig is an example of a site where a timber setting was replaced by a stone one as at Stonehenge or the Sanctuary in Wiltshire. At Croft Moraig a horseshoe of fourteen posts inside a shallow ditch was replaced by a stone horseshoe surrounded by a stony bank. The third phase there consisted of a 12.2m diameter of large, ungraded stones set up within the bank around the horseshoe with two outliers towards the ESE. We can recall that the Sanctuary had outliers in its final phase that were the beginning of the West Kennet Avenue and one wonders whether the same sort of situation could have been planned at Croft Moraig.

On the Orkney mainland there are the standing stones of Stenness which are the remains of a 31.1m diameter circle inside a bank. The Ring of Brodgar is a 103.6m diameter circle inside a rock-cut ditch.

In the Western Isles and in the North burial deposits are common in stone circles. The most impressive monument perhaps is Callanish on the Isle of Lewis. The ring is composed of thin pillars with four avenues leading to it. Inside the ring there are the remains of a Camster chambered cairn.

Cumbria has one of the finest collections of stone circles in Britain and would be a fine place to begin a study of stone circles. One of the finest is Castlerigg which must have been one of the major engineering achievements of the period. The heaviest stone in the circle must weigh at least 15 tons, the average weight of the stones is about 2.5 tons but they did not have to be carried very far. The entrance of the circle is flanked by two larger stones 4m apart and outside it there are traces of a bank.

Ireland has a good collection of standing stones. In the south-west there are some recumbent stone circles. An example at Dromberg in Co. Cork has the characteristic of a level surface of gravel in the interior under which two burial pits were uncovered which contained cremations.

The West of Ireland the most spectacular site is at Grange in Co Limerick where there are three stone circles like the arrangement at Stanton Drew in Somerset. The largest of the circles is the Lios where the stones are set side by side with their backs against an encircling bank. The stones were brought a distance of about a mile to the site, a very considerable task since the largest stone weighs some 60 tons. A single narrow passage leads across the ditch and through the bank into the interior where excavations produced English neolithic pottery of the Grooved Ware and Ebbsfleet types which are common in the Wessex henges and have also been discovered at Stenness in Orkney. A site similar to the Lios is at Castleruddery in Co. Wicklow.

In eastern Ireland there are rings like the 35 stones placed around the great passage grave at Newgrange. Further north in Ulster there are circles and rows of stones. The most elaborate complex is the group of standing stones at Beaghmore in Co. Tyrone which consists of circles, cairns and rows of standing stones.

Strangely, Wales has only 5% of British stone circles within its borders. One of the most interesting is the embanked stone circle at Druid's Circle in Gwynnedd. In the centre was a stone cist holding the cremation burial of a child inside a food vessel. Close by this primary burial was another enclosed inside a food vessel and not far away a third cremation.

'Open circles' are defined as stone circles which enclose areas free from mounds or pits other than burials. There are some 900 of them lying mainly along the west coast of Britain or in north Wiltshire or Oxfordshire alongside the prehistoric tracks of the Ridgeway and the eastern Cotswold-Wessex pathway. Ten of them are the largest megalithic constructions in the country and comprise the three at Avebury, Winterbourne Bassett, the Devil's Quoits in Oxon, Stanton Drew and, along the coast, the Ring of Brodgar, Broubster in Caithness, the Twelve Apostles in Dumfriesshire and Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumberland. These all have diameters of over 60 metres.

Avebury in Wiltshire has its outer ring inside the internal ditch with a diameter of 165m. Inside there are two smaller circles and part of what may have been a third circle which was partially destroyed when the henge was built. Or perhaps this circle was never completed. If it existed then there would have been a line of three stone circles on the site like the arrangement at Stanton Drew.

Inside the central circle which originally contained 30 stones but of which only four survive, was a large cove, the largest known, of which two stones still stand. There was a cove also at Stanton Drew and another at Arbor Low. The south circle is slightly larger and contained 32 stones. At the centre was a huge upright which was originally 6.4m tall. This has now disappeared. Also inside this circle was an arrangement of smaller stones, known as the Z stones. To the south of the south circle are several other stones which may have formed part of another destroyed feature, possibly a fourth circle. These internal features are associated with a number of cremation burials

Leading away from the southern Entrance the double line of stones of the West Kennet Avenue traces a sinuous path of over a mile to Overton Hill on which stands the Sanctuary. Another avenue of which only two stones remain led towards the west from Avebury. This is known as the Beckhampton Avenue.

The Sanctuary started life as a circular wooden structure erected during later Neolithic period which was later replaced by a double stone circle and joined to the henge at Avebury by the West Kennet Avenue. At the foot of one of the stones of its inner circle was found the grave of a young man accompanied by a beaker pot

Although a good deal of excavation was carried out on the Avebury ditch and the West Kennet Avenue in the earlier part of the twentieth century, not very much information was obtained about their builders or their uses. The main pottery found associated with them is Mortlake Ware and there is also a fair amount of Beaker pottery accompanying cremations.

On the basis of material used to pack around the basis of the standing stones, which is of two kinds - clay and small boulders from the banks of the nearby River Kennet and hard chalk from the bottom of the great ditch - two periods of construction have been suggested although not universally accepted by all authorities who have studied the monument:

Avebury 1 consisted of the Central and Southern Circles and perhaps the unfinished northern one together with the main part of the West Kennet Avenue which stopped short of the circles and did not point directly at them.

Avebury 2 was a reconstruction in which the northern circle (if it existed) was demolished and the other two surrounded by the the bank and ditch with the Great (outer) Circle on its inner edge. At the same time the Z stones were erected and the former end of the West Kennet Avenue joined to the southern entrance by additional stones forming a sharp bend.

In the west of England on Dartmoor there are a number of rings but the most striking features are the stone rows like those at Merrivale. The stones are very small compared with stones elsewhere but they are found together with the stone rings and occasional single standing stones.

Further east is the complex of stone settings at Stanton Drew just to the south of Bath. There are three circles, the middle one some 113m in diameter with the remains of an avenue leading off it in the direction of the River Chew that lies to the east. To the north-east is an oval and another lying to the south-west of the middle circle. To the west is a cove and to the north-east two outliers on the other side of the River Chew.

The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire complete our survey of the standing stone of the British Isles. They lie beside an ancient ridge road. The main feature is a circle of about seventy stones known as the King's Men. None are very big stones but a few metres to the east is the King Stone which is 2.4m high. The Whispering Knights stand about 0.8km east of the Rollright Stones. These are four stones varying in height between 1.5m and 2.4 m which are the remains of a chamber of a megalithic barrow. There is no sign of the mound.

Round about 2500BC we see a new type of monument in the landscape. This is the round barrow and it signals a departure from the old neolithic custom of depositing the remains of the ancestors in repositories like earthen and megalithic barrows. The round barrow is essentially a single grave albeit a rather grand one which would could only have been afforded by the better-off.

The fact that people who could have afforded it wanted solitary burial in a very obvious tomb suggest that the individual was beginning to become more important than the community and signals a sociological change. It also suggests that wealth was being accumulated in individual hands rather than by the community and that society was becoming more stratified.

A map of the distribution of early round barrows in Britain and Ireland should show the areas of greatest prosperity around the beginning of the second millenium BC. Unfortunately a map of this sort does not yet exist.

One of the areas that would be prominent on the map would be the Wessex region. Yorkshire was also important but would figure amongst the less well-endowed areas.

All sorts of burial types were crowned with a barrow. Burials in grave-pits, in cists, simply placed on the ground surface, cremations in urns, in holes in the ground and in tree-trunk coffins could all be dignified with a barrow which was simply a mound of material dug out of an encircling ditch or, when described as a cairn, a pile of stones.

The size of these mounds which you will find described on Ordnance Survey maps as tumuli (singular - tumulus) varies a good deal from one that covers the entire area within a ditch to small piles of material. In the ditched monuments, any space left between the mound and the ditch is described as the berm. During the earliest round-barrow period, the bowl barrow is universal but as time goes by other types appear as well. A bowl is a mound surrounded by a ditch without a berm so that is section its looks like an upside-down bowl.

When ploughed out, as many, or perhaps most, have been, they can be identified from the air by the ditches which show up as darker marks in ripening crops and are described as ring-ditches. In chalk landscapes, ploughing can sometimes bring the chalk remains of the ploughed- out mound to the surface where it shows up as a white smudge for a short time.

We have suggested that the burials dignified with a mound were the leaders of society. This could be by virtue of their wealth, by their status either in the field of religion or in society or by accident of birth as a member of an elite family.

Certainly we can point to graves that seem to be those of the wealthy. The first gold and copper objects appear in some of the earliest bowl-barrow graves at this time and these novelties cannot have been cheap.

It may be that unusual grave-goods identify those who were concerned with ritual like the later South Newton grave in Wiltshire which contained a necklace of sixteen wolves' and two dogs' teeth. Also later is the Bush barrow inhumation on Normanton Down overlooking Stonehenge which contained a collection of gold and copper/bronze objects and looks like the burial of a chieftain.

The fact that barrow burials often occur in groups (barrow cemeteries) suggest that they are burials of members of the same clan. One thing is certain and that is that women ranked in importance alongside men for some of the finest and largest barrows were raised over the graves of women who presumably played an equal part in the society of the time.

In the earlier period when long barrows were in use, they were often used as territorial markers of the ancestral territory. When round barrows appear, they are normally arranged in groups around ceremonial sites like Stonehenge or Avebury. It seems that the septal territory was no longer important or perhaps no longer existed. Certainly barrows are no longer used as territorial markers as far as we know. Essentially, they have become private things, used to indicate personal or family status.

A good deal of attention has been paid to the pottery of the period from the last centuries of the third millenium for the next eight hundred years or so. This was because earlier archaeologists used the study of the pottery as the method to establish a chronology. Unfortunately it has become clear in recent years that the pottery styles of this period do not form a neat chronological succession, all the main types of pottery can be found in contemporary contexts.

We can probably be confident that Beaker ware was the earliest of the new styles. Flat- bottomed with a variety of forms but usually with the sinuous profile that makes it the best-known of all prehistoric pots, it introduces a range of new motifs to British pottery and, like the Mortlake ware, is sometimes decorated all over the exterior surface.

As the Beakers are usually found in graves or associated with ritual monuments like stone settings or with the use of henges as at Mount Pleasant in Dorset, they may belong to a class, along with the Mortlake and other wares of the period, of ceremonial pottery. Our lack of settlement sites, which is not remedied until the second half of the second millenium BC, makes it difficult to make a firm distinction between ceremonial and domestic pottery.

Urns are familiar pots in cremation burials, and are referred to as collared (a deep exterior rim; wide distribution in the British Isles) or cordoned (with cordon decoration; highland distribution) or enlarged food vessels (a confusing term since there are food vessels which are classified as an entirely distinct form of pottery; highland distribution; they are sometimes referred to as encrusted urns.) or biconical (lowland distribution; sometimes found in settlements) or Cornish (which show a regional distribution in the south-west; sometimes found on settlements) or bucket-shaped urns which are a rather amorphous group.

Then there are food vessels, so named because they are thought to have been placed in graves as containers for food for the after-life or the journey to it. A good many different ceramic forms are lumped together in this category but a broad sub-classification is made by describing the squatter vessels as bowls and the taller as vases. Vases are commonest in England, bowls in Ireland and Scotland has a mixture of the two.

Wessex pottery is only known from graves and includes varieties of pygmy pots, some with lids (Aldbourne cups) mainly in southern England.

The final class is Deveril-Rimbury ware, often associated with cremations, and ranging in date from round about 1700BC to about 800BC.

The burials with which these pottery types are associated also include a range of other goods. Some graves have a large assemblage and these are referred to as rich graves and often have barrows heaped above them. The richest are found in southern England dating from a short period between 1600 and 1400BC, contemporary with the richest period of Breton burials which provide a number of parallels for the British material. This group of early-Bronze Age rich graves in England is sometimes called the Wessex Culture.

Grave goods during the period include shale buttons, flint knives, bone pins, stone-bracers (for protecting archers' wrists from the bow-string), flint arrowheads, axe-hammers of hard rocks, small shale or jet rings, pendants of shale or jet, beads of shale, jet or similar materials, amber pendants, bone tweezers, bone belt hooks, whetstones, boars' tusks, antler tines, animal teeth necklaces, necklaces of beads, faience and amber beads, gold-wire binding on various decorative articles, thin gold sheet objects, gold belt hook, discs of sheet gold, gold beads, small gold decorative cones, copper and bronze knives and small daggers, bronze awls, copper and bronze flat axeheads, copper, bronze and gold rivets, copper and bronze pins.

Poorer graves would have few or none of the cheapest items on the above list. Most would include a pot, sometimes only a cremation vessel which could be placed in a hole in the ground or as a secondary burial in the mound of an already-existing barrow.

Perhaps one of the most striking features of the above list is the presence of items that could have come from abroad. Or items that could only have been produced in this country as a result of influences from abroad. This would include faience, amber (although perhaps picked up along the Yorkshire coast) and copper and gold articles while the similarities of the goods with Breton objects suggests some sort of contact with that area.

This openness to goods and influences from across the sea indicates movement of people like traders or perhaps itinerant craftsmen who bargained their particular skills for food and lodging. If this is so, it suggests that the British farmers were worth a night's or several nights' lodging and the concomitant grub. Does this indicate a growing personal prosperity? Perhaps it does if we associate it with the fashion for raising barrows and the disappearance of the habit of spending large surpluses on conspicuous construction.

An example of burial with a beaker (a Beaker burial) perhaps dating to about 2200BC was uncovered at Barnack in Cambridgeshire where a large grave-pit, 1.8m deep, contained the skeleton of an adult male, wrapped in a shroud and perhaps lying in a coffin. At his feet was a beaker with a metal dagger and bone pendant lay by his side. Underneath the body was a ritually-broken wristguard made out of greenstone with perforations at each end that was covered with gold sheet. This was the first phase of burial and was followed by an enlargement of the mound and a new ditch with a double stake circle and fifteen new burials. Two adults were buried in coffins, another was a male and female double burial in the same grave and one child was accompanied by a Food Vessel. It seems that the grave of an important individual became the focus of the burials of his descendants.

The bulk of the prosperity appears to be in the south judging by the appearance of the metal goods in the southern bowl-barrow Beaker graves and those of the Wessex period. Presumably metal was the prestigious material of the time and therefore could only be afforded by the best off.

Gold was acquired by panning which was possible in many European rivers including those in the British Isles but there are very few left today that are worth working after so many centuries of exploitation.

By 2000BC copper was beginning to be mined in a variety of places in Europe. In the British Isles there were mines at Mount Gabriel, Co. Cork, in southern Ireland, and probably in other parts of Ireland too. In Britain copper and tin were both available on Dartmoor.

Copper is an attractive metal but soft and not very suitable for making edge-tools or weapons so that the earliest copper objects were more in the nature of trinkets. Along with gold it is found in the richer graves in Britain from the latter part of the third millenium BC.

We see in Britain how the original flat copper axeheads and daggers were later being produced in bronze and innovations like a rivetted handle instead of a tang were being introduced from abroad. The early bronzes were poor quality. The proper 10% tin/90% copper ratio for the alloy was not being observed and it was not really until the middle of the Bronze Age that a true bronze was being regularly achieved by British smiths. The best bronzes of this early period were being made in Ireland where the objects were often decorated. Some of these daggers and axeheads were traded across the Irish Sea.

It is easy to overrate the importance of the first metals. Compared with the traditional materials, wood and, above all, stone, the amount in this country was infinitesimal and continued to be so for a long time. Part of the problem is the use of the term Bronze Age which suggests that overnight folk dropped their stone technology and everybody enthusiastically took up metal. This was manifestly impossible in view of the paucity of sites from which the ores could be obtained and the lack of smiths.

Although bronze is a fine metal for edged tools and weapons, unsurpassed until the invention of carbon-steel during the nineteenth century AD, it was expensive and for most applications, good- quality flint was just as good and usually a good deal sharper. So flint and stone continued in use throughout the Bronze Age and throughout a good deal of the succeeding Iron Age as well.

Where we find metals, we find wealth at this time. Usually this is in graves or in hoards which are deposits in the ground. Very little metal is found in settlement sites. We have seen that deposits in the ground were being made for ritual (votive) purposes as far back as the early Neolithic period. But in the Bronze Age we distinguish two other types:

The founder's hoard (smith's hoard) was deposited by the smith to save having to lug large amounts of scrap metal about on his round, for he was peripatetic, like a tinker.

The merchant's hoard was deposited by the merchant as a cache to which he could return to renew his stock.

The reason for the deposit is the same in both cases for the the individual had no transport and had to carry what he wanted on his back. The entrepreneurs probably had regular rounds to reach the scattered farmers who were their customers.

But there were almost certainly craftsmen attached to the households of the wealthy who acted as their patrons. It may be that it was these 'household' smiths who were responsible for most of the technological innovations of the period.

6 - Further Conspicious Construction
Contents
8 - Consolidation