From Stonehenge to Mycenae

The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation

John Barrett, Michael J. Boyd

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474291903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book reconsiders how we can understand archaeology on a grand scale by abandoning the claims that material remains stand for the people and institutions that produced them, or that genetic change somehow caused cultural change. Our challenge is to understand the worlds that made great projects like the building of Stonehenge or Mycenae possible. The radiocarbon revolution made the old view that the architecture of Mycenae influenced the building of Stonehenge untenable. But the recent use of 'big data' and of genetic histories have led archaeology back to a worldview where 'big problems' are assumed to require 'big solutions'. Making an animated plea for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions, the authors consider how life was made possible by living in the local and materially distinct worlds of the period. By considering how people once built connections between each other through their production and use of things, their movement between and occupancy of places, and their treatment of the dead, we learn about the kinds of identities that people constructed for themselves. Stonehenge did not require an architect from Mycenae for it to be built, but the builders of Stonehenge and Mycenae would have shared a mutual recognition of the kinds of humans that they were, and the kinds of practices these monuments were once host to.

1

Archaeological Approaches to Stonehenge

On a June day in 1668 Samuel Pepys visited Stonehenge. His diary entry records his reaction to the stones: it was a reaction that is likely to have been shared by many visitors before and since:

Come thither, and find them as prodigious as any tales I ever heard of them, and worth going this journey to see. God knows what their use was!

Pepys 1668

Whatever Stonehenge’s use was, and speculations have ranged from a temple to a computer, the monument continues to challenge our understanding of the world in which it was built, used and then abandoned. Our concern in this book is to consider the issues that archaeologists face in their attempts to make sense of worlds such as this.

There was of course a time when the purpose of the monument was widely understood; when it was built with such considerable effort, when it was modified and used, and it is this world that has been the focus of archaeological concern and speculation. But then that use stopped, and its original purpose was forgotten, and whilst the Stonehenge of today is used as a visitor attraction, we might wonder at the circumstances that allowed the original purpose of the monument to slip from view.

Fig. 1.1 View of Stonehenge from the south-west. Photograph by Elaine Wakefield. Copyright Wessex Archaeology.

Pepys was certainly not the first to record an impression of the site: the site was sketched and recorded at various times during the middle ages, and two years before Pepys’ visit the antiquary John Aubrey had drawn a plan of the stones and observed some of the additional archaeological features that are part of the monument’s history. Our story will begin however with the archaeological excavations and the re-setting of some of the stones that took place between 1950 and 1964. The history of the archaeological investigations of Stonehenge has not been a particularly happy one. Various ‘diggings’ have taken place within the circle, not all of which have produced the detailed records that might have been expected. The work that was instigated in 1950 was itself designed to evaluate an earlier programme of excavations that had taken place between 1919 and 1926. Neither of these twentieth-century programmes of investigation produced anything but the most minimal written record until all that work was finally brought together in 1995 (Cleal et al. 1995). Nonetheless the 1950–1964 excavations did result in a scheme for the architectural development of Stonehenge that remained in use until recently (Atkinson 1960). This proposed architectural sequence was reassuringly simple: three stages of building were suggested, starting with an earthwork enclosure within which lay a cremation cemetery, some evidence for a central timber structure and with stones at the enclosure’s north-eastern entrance. In this scheme, the second stage of development focused upon the trans-shipment of stones, whose distinctive geology indicated an origin in the south Welsh mountains of Prescelly, and their preliminary erection at Stonehenge, along with the construction of an avenue between the north-east entrance to the earlier earthwork and the River Avon. This Avenue ran for some 2,100 metres, initially along the line of the north-eastern axis of the monument and then east and south-east. It was in the third phase of the proposed scheme that the great stone structure was erected and modified. The stones came from relatively local sources on the chalk lands, but they had been extensively shaped before being erected in what has long been regarded as an outer circle of standing stones that were linked by a continuous line of lintels, and within which five sets of trilithons had already been erected. The latter comprised closely set paired standing stones, where each pair supported a lintel. The original south Welsh stones were re-erected within this more massive and complex structure.

In the three hundred years since Pepys’ visit archaeology had thus provided something of a building sequence for the history of Stonehenge, although archaeology was less forthcoming in providing an understanding of its use. Richard Atkinson, who was one of those directing the 1950–1964 programme and author of the proposed building sequence, when confronting such questions as: ‘why it was built, why this particular sequence of building and, indeed, what did it all mean?’ simply countered that:

To all these questions ‘Why?’ there is one short, simple and perfectly correct answer: ‘We do not know and we shall probably never know’.

Atkinson 1960, 168

That said, Atkinson then permitted himself to conjecture that the monument developed as a temple that originated with the digging of an earthwork enclosure which may have been intended to separate the sacred activities within the enclosure from those beyond. Atkinson suggested that the initial priority of the celebrants was to communicate with a nether world and that the development of the stone architecture implied that ritual concerns were lifted towards the sky and the movement of celestial bodies. We have no need to follow Atkinson’s suggestions in any detail for, as we shall see, much has changed as to how we might understand the monument and the periods of its use, but for all his doubts Atkinson was forced to allow that these questions concerning the meaning of Stonehenge, difficult as they might be to answer, were the kinds of ideas that archaeology should explore and that mark ‘the growth of ideas about what archaeology is for’ (Atkinson 1960, 178 original emphasis omitted).

If archaeology can provide for a securer knowledge of the sequence of Stonehenge’s building than it can for the use of the monument then, as an alternative, archaeology might provide an account of the historical context in which the monument was built, used and then abandoned. After all, the building sequence itself means little historically without an understanding of the kind of world in which that sequence occurred. One of the challenges that Stonehenge poses is therefore not so much the question of ‘what was its use?’, but ‘what kind of world could, and indeed would want to, build such a thing?’. Therefore, all the puzzling questions concerning the use of Stonehenge, or what the monument might once have meant, might simply come down to whether the world in which the building and use of Stonehenge occurred is understandable by us. By understanding that earlier world we might also come to understand ‘what archaeology is for’.

Archaeology has become adept at describing what can be known of the material conditions of the past, based upon the analysis of archaeological finds and by providing an account of the mechanical processes that created and transformed those finds; but understanding the past as the historical context in which such things had occurred and, as the ‘New Archaeology’ sought, to explain why such things had come about, has proven to be much more difficult. The problem is that by treating archaeological finds as a record of human activity, archaeologists have faced the unenviable task of establishing the principles that might have determined, and therefore explained, the activities that are recorded. It is hardly surprising that the resulting claims have been contentious. The New Archaeology rejected the assertion that the ways that people had behaved simply derived from their social and cultural context by arguing that such an approach failed to offer a useable basis for explaining social and economic change. The New Archaeology developed, by way of an alternative, the idea that what people had done in terms of their various social and economic consequences, rather than how they had done those things culturally, revealed the historical context of behaviour in ways that might explain the processes of change.

Establishing a context for Stonehenge

In 1956, when Richard Atkinson first published his short book on Stonehenge, the problem of dating each stage of its construction, and thus of establishing those other things in Britain and Europe that were contemporary with the monument’s development, was considerable. The first results from the radiocarbon method of dating were only just becoming available, and a single date had been obtained for organic material that was recovered in the excavation of 1950. This material came from the fill of a pit that belonged to the first stage of Atkinson’s sequence (Atkinson 1960, 89), and whilst Atkinson treated this date with due reservation, the chronology for the entire sequence was estimated from it. Atkinson offered dates for the proposed sequence which he suggested ran from the earthwork enclosure first dug around 1900–1700 BCE to the erection of the stone monument that we see today, sometime around 1500 BCE. The significance of these dates is not only that we now know them to be far too late, such that the first stone monument was erected around a thousand years earlier than Atkinson had calculated, but that they therefore placed Stonehenge in the wrong historical context.

The emphasis that archaeology places upon human history, where the evidence is treated as if it recorded earlier human activities, means that if we claim to be able to explain the historical context of Stonehenge we might not only be expected to describe the ways that human activities were organized at that time, but also offer an account as to how that kind of organization had come into being. The assumption would be therefore, that by tracing the development and organization of human activity archaeology must account for not only the different technical understandings that were available and the levels of social organization within which those understandings were applied but also what had motivated those resources and that understanding to have been directed in a particular way. This would mean that the building of Stonehenge becomes understandable as not only lying within the technical and organizational capabilities of the prehistoric peoples of southern Britain but as also satisfying a certain kind of motivation. Even allowing for the late dating proposed by Atkinson for the erection of the stones, the unique nature of Stonehenge, the scale of the work undertaken, and the architectural refinements represented by the ways that the stones had been worked, all marked something of a challenge to Atkinson’s expectation of what was possible for the prehistoric communities of the period.

Atkinson therefore set about seeking to understand the stone architecture of Stonehenge as if it had been built in the Early Bronze Age around 1500 BCE by assessing the technology used and the necessary level of social organization in which that technology was employed. In terms of technology, Atkinson employed experimental work, model building and an understanding of the mechanical properties of stone, to argue that the ability to transport, work and erect the standing stones and lintels of Stonehenge lay within the capability of the prehistoric communities of that period. He also noted that the mortice and tenon jointing employed to secure the lintel stones onto the uprights was a carpentry technique that had been employed here in stone-working, and that such woodworking skills were likely to have existed given that timber structures had been excavated within earlier monuments in Britain (e.g. Cunnington 1929; Piggott 1939).

If the technical achievements implied by the monument were understandable, then the social context was treated by Atkinson as if it concerned the two questions of the ethnicity of the builders and of their social organization. Ethnicity had long been a central concern for archaeological analysis and one that was addressed by the cultural style of the artefacts and monuments that were created at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Archaeological Approaches to Stonehenge
• 2 The Emergence of an Aegean Civilization
• 3 Living with Things: The Politics of Identity
• 4 Things that Mattered: Identity in the Production, Exchange and Use of Materials
• 5 Places that Mattered: Movement and Belonging
• 6 Bodies that Mattered: The Role of the Dead
• 7 Living amongst Things: Practice, Place and Identity in Expanding Worlds
• References
• Index
• Copyright