By the later part of the third millennium bce, Britain had become connected to mainland Europe by the so-called ‘Beaker network’. This appears to have involved the circulation of people, materials, and cultural innovations over trans-continental distances. Most tellingly, it included direct evidence for cross-Channel contact and the movement of individual people into Britain who had lived much or most of their lives in continental Europe. However, the evidence for such contact during the previous few centuries is very much sparser. If, as it seems reasonable to infer, developed passage tombs were ultimately an Atlantic European phenomenon that was adopted in idiosyncratic ways in Ireland, Scotland, and finally Scandinavia during the course of the fourth millennium, routine interactions with the Continent are less easy to identify thereafter. In marked contrast with this, the period after 3000 bce saw the emergence of a range of new interregional connections within Britain and Ireland. These have been less consistently recognized, as they conflict with the traditional narrative in which populations in central and south-west Asia engaged in periodic wholesale migration northward and westward. Such a narrative of external stimulus to change is less secure in this period because we now realize that the social and cultural changes that overtook Britain in the earlier third millennium originated predominantly in the northern and western parts of these islands.
Orkney house societies
Some of the most significant innovations of the third millennium throughout Britain were ultimately generated in the Orkney archipelago and its immediate sphere of contact (Fig. 5.1).
While aspects of the unique developments that took place in the Orkneys can be attributed to connections with Ireland and the Western Isles, these contributed to the emergence of a distinctive social formation that was at once highly competitive and spectacularly creative. By the start of the third millennium, Orkney had become a crucible of social and cultural change, but developments in the islands arguably began to diverge from those on the mainland soon after the Neolithic began, perhaps during the thirty-seventh century bce. While in southern Britain in particular, the accumulation of large herds of cattle took on great importance for societies that retained a fair degree of residential mobility, Orcadian communities enjoyed a more obviously sedentary way of life throughout the Neolithic in which the house became, and remained, the focus of social life. Large deposits of carbonized cereals recently discovered at Ha’Breck, Varm Dale, and Wideford Hill provide an indication of the enduring importance of cultivation in the Orkneys, with less evidence for a decline in the contribution made by domesticated plants from the later fourth millennium. The most dramatic material manifestation of this cultural distinctiveness was the emergence on the islands of a concentration of Neolithic villages unparalleled elsewhere in Britain. The earliest Neolithic settlements in the Orkneys, such as Wideford Hill, Green, Smerquoy, and Ha’Breck, date to the period between 3600 and 3300 bce. Architecturally, they comprised dispersed groups of timber buildings, circular or sub-rectangular in plan, and with a central scoop hearth that was sometimes surrounded by four substantial posts—the latter presumably supporting the roof. These dwellings generally seem to have been quite short-lived, with little evidence for maintenance or rebuilding, so that residence was still somewhat unstable and shifting over the medium term.
Fractionally later, perhaps by 3500 bce, stone- and earth-built elongated mounds known as ‘stalled cairns’ began to be constructed, among other things as repositories for the remains of the dead and fixed points within a landscape of more fluctuating activity (Fig. 5.2).
The core of these distinctive structures comprised a series of stone compartments divided from each other by upright slabs arranged on either side of a central passage, and generally housing ‘benches’ or horizontal stones. The compartments have often been found to have been used as store-houses for the bones of dead people. Although these are generally few in number, the deliberate arrangement of skulls and longbones suggests that, as with the chambered cairns of much of western Britain, these tombs were used for the decomposition and subsequent disarticulation of fleshed cadavers. While it is often the case that tombs for the dead are modelled after the dwellings of the living, in Orkney the opposite appears to have been the case. For by around 3400 bce, the wooden buildings began to be complemented by stone structures that took their architectural inspiration from the stalled cairns, and might indeed be described as ‘stalled houses’. Examples at Smerquoy, Stonehall Meadow, and the Knap of Howar were distinguished by sub-rectangular inner spaces with faced walls, from which pairs of upright slabs projected, dividing up the internal area of the house.
As Colin Richards has argued, this demonstrates both a new commitment to living in specific places over the long term, and a desire to emphasize continuity with the past by introducing reminders of the dead into domestic life. Both these tendencies point to the increasing durability of the house itself and the household community. While some of these buildings appear initially to have been isolated in the landscape, the ensuing development was unequivocally towards the formation of progressively more tightly nucleated villages. A first step in this direction took the form of the ‘pairing’ of houses, either side-by-side or end-on-end, at the Knap of Howar, Green, Howe, and the Knowes of Trotty, creating larger enclosed spaces.
Owing to its remarkable state of preservation and early exploration, the most famous Neolithic housing site in Orkney is Skara Brae, located on Skaill Bay in the north-western corner of the Orkney Mainland (Fig. 5.4).
However, the site at Barnhouse, located just over ten kilometres south, next to the Stones of Stenness on the southern isthmus that separates the lochs of Harray and Stenness, provides at present the best-documented series of early structures. Here, a group of free-standing sub-circular stone houses dating to the thirty-second century bce onwards were clustered around an open central area that was likely to have been used for communal activities. By the time that Barnhouse was occupied, some significant developments had taken place. Passage-tomb architecture, manifested in sites such as Maes Howe and Quanterness, had been introduced, probably from Ireland and the Western Isles. The construction of these monuments involved creating a series of concentric ‘skins’ of masonry and other materials around a central chamber, and this was to influence both the development of domestic architecture in Orkney and the formation of new monumental traditions, notably henges. Further, Grooved Ware pottery had started to be made, emerging alongside the round-based Unstan bowls that had hitherto been in use, and was the only ceramic tradition represented at Barnhouse. As we mentioned in Chapter 4 and will pursue further in this chapter, Grooved Ware employed decorative motifs drawn from the Irish passage- tomb tradition, mixing them with Orcadian potting skills. In both cases, elements borrowed from distant regions contributed to the creation of something quite specific to the insular context. Each of the Barnhouse buildings had a central box hearth with rectangular stone-lined recumbent ‘beds’ (presumably when in use containing heather- or bracken-filled paillasses) to right and left of the entrance, and a stone ‘dresser’ placed so as to face the doorway. The term ‘dresser’ was attached many years ago to these otherwise mysterious shelved fixed items of furniture, on analogy with recent historic Scottish practice. This interpretation of their role has been restated in recent years because it has been proposed that the visual prominence of these facilities would have rendered them suitable as open display-cabinets for treasured items (such as carved stone balls, polished maceheads, and ground stone objects that might constitute heirlooms) that in some way were important to the identity and projected values of the household.
This four-square organization of interior space around a boxed central hearth is understood as the ‘classic’ internal arrangement for houses in Later Neolithic Orkney, and arguably elaborated on the internal structure of the earlier houses. Some of the houses at Barnhouse were repeatedly rebuilt on the same site, while the hearthstones were often reused in new buildings, underlining the importance of the fireplace as the physical and conceptual focus of the household. However, the site is also distinguished by the emergence there of the phenomenon of ‘big houses’, which are not only larger but also structurally distinct from the other buildings.
The first of these was House 2, an elongated structure containing two separate hearths, and with a dual-cruciform interior in which a series of alcoves were defined by four corner buttresses. This arrangement is reminiscent of some of the passage tombs of Orkney, and it may not be coincidental that there was a cavity beneath the floor containing what appeared to be the remains of a burial. Increasingly, the living and the dead were being brought together in the same spaces. It was evident from bone and other debris that the eastern part of this interior space, nearer the entrance, had been used for food preparation and dining, while the more secluded western part featured detritus indicative of stone tool manufacture. The later big house at Barnhouse, Structure 8, was a massive square building surrounded by a clay platform that in turn was bounded by a stone wall, manifesting the tendency toward multiple concentric boundaries. This building contained a series of hearths, and again combined elements of house and tomb architecture. Within this huge structure, food was being cooked and eaten on a larger scale than elsewhere on the site, and this suggests that it was a venue for communal meals or feasts. However, Structure 8 was as much a monument as a house, and was constructed over the remains of other buildings at a time when the settlement was in decline.
At Skara Brae, small free-standing buildings like those at Barnhouse were eventually replaced by a structure in which the houses were not only more substantial but were also joined together, embedded within a mass of midden material seemingly representing the rotted-down debris of past occupation. But at the same time, the individual dwellings were rigorously segregated from each other by walling and sillstones in the passages. There is a suggestion that this change in the character of occupation followed a period in which activity slackened somewhat in some areas of Orkney, coinciding with the change from Grooved Ware that was decorated with incised lines to new styles with applied decoration. The tendency of settlements to become large conglomerate mounds was complemented at sites such as Muckquoy and Rinyo by containment within walls or ditches, completing the trend toward nucleation and consolidation. Yet although the trend was for settlements to become more tightly knit over time, there are also indications that the separate households retained their independence, and competed against each other, jealously retaining fine artefacts and hosting feasts as a form of rivalry.
The most remarkable among the Neolithic settlements in the Orkneys, however, is the recently discovered site that lies on the Ness of Brodgar, the northern isthmus that separates the lochs of Harray and Stenness in south Mainland. In this prominent location it is therefore also bracketed between the two celebrated ditched henge monuments containing massive upstanding stone circles: the Stones of Stenness to the south and the Ring of Brodgar to the north. It is, moreover, less than a kilometre away from Barnhouse. The beginnings of activity at the Ness of Brodgar are presently mysterious, as there are plainly earlier structures beneath the Late Neolithic buildings that have been investigated to date, which explain the subsidence that has affected these. Earlier stone houses that have been glimpsed so far are internally divided by upright slabs, rather than the pairs of opposed stone piers that characterize the buildings that, revealed by excavation, stand to roof height in places today. Activity at the site probably began before 3000 bce, perhaps much earlier. Similarly, the timing of the end of occupation is not certain, although it may be as late as 2300 bce. It is evident, however, that the intensity of activity varied considerably, and may it be that the site was actually abandoned for a period around 2700 bce, in a development comparable to Skara Brae. The Ness was certainly a massive complex, extending over 250 metres by 100 metres, and contained within a colossal stone wall.
Among the most astonishing things about this unique site is that in its later phases it was composed entirely of at least seven of the ‘big houses’ that are found singly or in pairs at other settlements. These take the form of embellished versions of the characteristic Late Neolithic house, elongated or extended in design. Moreover, these structures were architecturally very diverse, with idiosyncratic combinations of internal partitions and buttresses. Like the big houses at other sites, these buildings contained concentrations of special objects, which might conceivably have been identified with the histories of particular kin groups. Equally, the Grooved Ware pottery found there was more varied than any ceramic assemblage retrieved from any other Orcadian site. One implication of this may be that, rather than having been occupied by a single community, the Ness of Brodgar was set apart as a special place of assembly in a special location, used as a gathering point or ceremonial focus for disparate groups drawn from a wider area. In such a location, the stone enclosure wall would have served not so much as a defensive structure as a means of symbolically removing the activities that took place there from the realm of the everyday.
Yet paradoxically, although the houses are bigger than elsewhere, and occupation may not have been continuous throughout the year, there is plenty of evidence for everyday activities having taken place at the Ness of Brodgar. Pottery was made here, and flint and ground stone were worked nearby, with the evidence for different crafts being concentrated in different buildings. As at Skara Brae, a huge quantity of midden material has been found in and around the site, providing an indirect indication of the intensity of occupation. Indeed, a mound of midden material seventy metres across and four metres high was positioned immediately to the south of the walled area, offering tangible evidence of the longevity of the settlement. This may have built up over an abandoned chambered tomb. The buildings at the Ness of Brodgar are unusual also in that as well as scratched decoration on the walls, traces of coloured pigment have been recorded covering parts of the walls, and numbers of stone roofing ‘slates’ have also been recovered from among the debris. While all these houses are massive, and the excavator, Nick Card, has conjectured that they might best be described as ‘temples’, one stands out as particularly huge. This is Structure 10, which appears to represent an even larger equivalent of Structure 8 at Barnhouse. Like that building, Structure 10 combined aspects of the architecture of houses and tombs, most notably the rather small cruciform inner chamber, which invites comparison with the passage tomb of Maes Howe, located 1.4 kilometres to the east. Yet while this enclosed space contained a freestanding ‘dresser’, its walls were not finely dressed like those of the Maes Howe chamber. It was instead the exterior of Structure 10 that was much more imposing, contained within an outer wall which enclosed a paved passage. When excavated, this passage revealed a huge deposit of cattle bones, in which the hind limbs of the animals predominated. It appears that a massive feast, the debris from which was strewn about the outer part of the structure, marked the termination of activity in the building, and perhaps at the site.
At the Ness of Brodgar, therefore, the ‘basic model’ of the cellular house was elaborated to provide enclosed spaces that were used for a variety of domestic and non-domestic activities (Fig. 5.7). Indeed, as Colin Richards has pointed out, there appears to have been a degree of equivalence between a series of different architectural forms in Later Neolithic Orkney: houses, tombs, henge enclosures and ‘temples’, halls, or shrines. This blurring of categories is most obvious in the case of the circle-henge of the Stones of Stenness, whose ditch and ring of stone uprights contained a massive, centrally placed box hearth. It may simply be that this was a location at which communal meals could be taken by large groups of people. But another possibility is that this had been a ‘big house’, whose remains were now contained within a series of concentric boundaries. As we will see below (under ‘Henging, mounding, and the dead’) this provides an important clue to understanding the development of henge monuments.
According to Richards, the efflorescence of Neolithic Orkney from the end of the fourth millennium bce can be understood in terms of the paradoxical development of a society characterized by volatile and competitive household groups, who nonetheless constantly needed to signal social cohesion and collective identity. ‘Houses’ asserted their origins and continuity through domestic architecture, the transmission of heirlooms, and relations with the dead. But at a higher level, communities became more nucleated and built massive corporate monuments in the course of the earlier third millennium bce. The clearest example of this was the Ring of Brodgar henge, whose upright stones had been dragged from a variety of different locations, representing the unity of disparate social groups (Fig. 5.8).
Packed together in the competitive pressure cooker of the Neolithic Orkneys, these rival ‘house societies’ created a series of architectural and artefactual innovations whose subsequent dispersal would be of decisive importance to Later Neolithic Britain.
The Grooved Ware phenomenon
The pottery that was made and used at all of these Orcadian ‘village’ sites from Barnhouse onwards was Grooved Ware, a pot-making and -using tradition that stands out as being quite unlike any other in Neolithic Britain. And more: Grooved Ware has no obvious parallels in continental Europe either. In particular, while the carinated bowl, plain-and-decorated bowl, and Peterborough series were all composed of round-based vessels, Grooved Ware pots were predominantly flat-based tubs and buckets. It is very likely that Grooved Ware developed in Orkney in the first instance, and indeed at the sites of Pool on Sanday and Crossiecrown on the Orkney Mainland there are sequences in which Grooved Ware directly replaced the plain round-based Early Neolithic pottery and decorated Unstan bowls. It has been suggested that this stylistic shift is related to changes in the use of pottery vessels that were perhaps increasingly displayed on just those flat stone surfaces so prominent within the houses.
In the Orkneys, the earliest Grooved Ware is characterized by incised decoration comparable to that employed on the broad collars of Unstan Ware pots, while on later vessels more elaborate plastic decoration was present. A recent re-evaluation of the dating of the chambered tomb of Quanterness has indicated that Grooved Ware was in use at that site by 3200 bce. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Grooved Ware, however, is that although it developed out of the ceramic traditions of northern Scotland, the decorative motifs employed on the pots were clearly derived from the passage-tomb ‘art’ of Ireland. It is germane here, therefore, to note that it has been argued that the passage tombs of Ireland increased in scale and complexity from 3600 bce onwards, reaching a climax between 3300 and 3000 bce. At around this time, the abstract decoration on the stones of passage, chamber, and kerb changed from what has been characterized as a haphazard scratched or picked ‘depictive’ style to a more carefully arranged and more plastic sculptural form. The particular designs that were seemingly adopted for use on Grooved Ware (meanders, chevrons, triangles, zigzags, lozenges, and lattices) belong to the period of overlap between these two styles. We observed in Chapter 3 that the spatial distribution of these motifs within the tombs was clearly grouped and therefore probably purposive. It follows, therefore, that there may well have been a particular significance residing in this formerly stone-focused symbol-system that was being transferred to the pottery. Moreover, as we pointed out in Chaper 4, elements of this suite of symbols were also carved onto a range of other portable artefacts, including carved stone balls, stone and antler maceheads, and plaques of stone and chalk. This implies that whatever connotations the designs carried, they were being introduced into a wider range of contexts. Some of the stones within the tombs in Orkney were also decorated with a combination of incised linear motifs and pecked curvilinear forms. But the walls of the houses had only the linear designs, and these were the ones that were also found on Grooved Ware. One way of interpreting this distinction is to suggest that the pottery bore images that were appropriate for the houses of the living, not those of the dead. Moreover, with their flat bases and vertical cordons, it has been proposed that some Grooved Ware pots evoked the architecture of circular houses and timber circles. This implied connection between Grooved Ware and the house or household is echoed in the results of petrological analysis of the crushed rock used as temper, conducted by Andrew Jones. This showed that each dwelling at Barnhouse had its own distinctive ‘recipe’ for placing rock inclusions in the fabric of its Grooved Ware vessels, suggesting in turn that each household maintained its own time-honoured traditions of practice and ways of asserting its identity as a distinct descent group. Yet the inclusions were hidden beneath the surface treatment of the vessels, and decoration of the pots was highly standardized throughout the settlement, expressing the developing tension between the household and the greater community.
After having been used principally in Orkney for two centuries or so, Grooved Ware began to be adopted in much of Britain and Ireland in the two centuries after 3000 bce. There are indications that the Orkney Islands were increasingly involved in long-distance contacts from this time onwards: flint from the Scottish mainland, pitchstone from the Isle of Arran, and volcanic tuff from Cumbria all occur on early third-millennium sites. This expansion broadly coincided with the development of new forms of monumental architecture, including the circles of upright timber posts at Temple Wood in Kilmartin Glen, Argyll, and at Machrie Moor on the Isle of Arran. In Ireland, similar circles of pits and posts are sometimes found near to the passage tombs that were now beginning to go out of use, as at Newgrange, Knowth, and Ballynahatty. As Grooved Ware was introduced to different regions, distinctive variations of form and decoration began to appear. Notably, on the British mainland small tubs with raised horizontal bands that converge in knots form a Woodlands style, while much larger, slightly concave, bucket-shaped vessels with vertical applied or incised cordons are characteristic of the Durrington Walls style. The production of much larger pots in the south of England than had originally been used in Orkney was complemented by a change in the way that these vessels were being used. Analysis of the residues from Grooved Ware in Orkney indicates that they were often employed to contain milk or cattle meat. Yet in the south of England, there was a much more emphatic focus on pig fats. Although pigs cannot be milked, and provide no other products aside from leather, they are very well suited to the sporadic provision of large quantities of meat. Pigs have large litters of young, which mature relatively quickly, so that herds can be repeatedly culled and bred up to strength again. The capacity rapidly to generate large quantities of fat-rich food for collective consumption was an important element of a new social pattern that was beginning to develop at the start of the third millennium bce.
The symbolic encapsulation of the house
In Orkney, then, there was a degree of overlap between houses and other structures intended primarily for funerary or ceremonial activity, and over time the houses themselves became more substantial and elaborate, along the way incorporating the remains of the dead in some cases. At some point during this sequence, houses of a design closely similar to those in Orkney began to appear elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, and it is reasonable to suppose that the adoption of this building style was part of the same process that led to the insular dispersal of Grooved Ware pottery. Like the earlier houses in Orkney, these presumed domestic buildings were mostly light structures of wattle and daub construction attached to a wooden frame, but some like those at Durrington Walls appear to have had dressers and beds made of wood. Sometimes, as with the two buildings discovered on a hillside at Trelystan in Powys, they contained stone box hearths. In other cases, as at Wyke Down in Dorset, the stake-hole ring of the outer wall surrounded four sturdier roof posts. Both of these arrangements constitute a square within a circle, a pattern that is so recurrent that arguably it came to embody the very concept of the house and household in Later Neolithic Britain. At other sites, the square-in-circle format manifested itself on a larger scale: at Greenbogs in Aberdeenshire, for instance, the structures concerned may have been large roofed buildings. However, examples at Machrie Moor on Arran, Knowth in Ireland, Durrington Walls northern circle, and Durrington 68 (both in Wiltshire), were more likely to have been open and unroofed. Here, four large free-standing posts were enclosed within a fence or a ring of lesser uprights. These open constructions might be referred to as ‘shrines’, with the central posts taking on an enhanced role as the symbolic focus of the whole. Joshua Pollard has argued convincingly that in some cases what began as ordinary settlements became progressively sanctified, emerging as ceremonial monuments. A case in point is the henge monument at Coneybury Hill near Stonehenge, in which a large, fenced, four-post structure stood amidst the traces of an episode of domestic occupation, and was later enclosed within a substantial penannular bank and ditch. In other cases, buildings that may have been domestic in character were incorporated into much later monuments. The two small houses at Trelystan, mentioned already, were sealed beneath an Early Bronze Age round barrow, while a sub-rectangular stake structure associated with pits that contained Grooved Ware sherds at Raigmore near Inverness was identified underneath a Clava-style passage tomb of probable Early Bronze Age date. As in Orkney, then, the house provided a spatial archetype that could be elaborated or appropriated in a variety of different ways (Fig. 5.10).
A singularly massive variation on the theme of wooden post architecture was represented by the so-called ‘palisaded enclosures’ that were built from around 2800 bce onwards, if not earlier. These were often sub-circular or oval in plan, were composed of rings of contiguous or evenly spaced upright timbers, and generally extended to 200–400 metres in diameter, although the colossal example at Hindwell measured about 800 by 525 metres. Several palisaded enclosures are found in Scotland, and a group of sites cluster together at Hindwell and Walton in the Walton Basin of Powys. Since these timber-built monuments are not visible in the modern landscape, they have generally been identified only in the past few decades (often through the means of aerial photography), and this has begun to redress the balance of Neolithic studies toward these so-called peripheral areas, as discussed in Chapter 1. The Scottish enclosures seem all to date to a horizon between 2800 and 2500 bce, potentially placing them quite early in the sequence. Moreover, it positions them in broad contemporaneity with comparable palisaded enclosures in Denmark and Sweden. In both areas, the emergence of a new suite of large enclosed sites coincided with the creation of new networks of interregional contact, which circulated objects and practices over wide areas (the Battle Axe complex and the Grooved Ware complex, respectively). This might arguably have created new conditions in which places where large numbers of people could gather were required. If the Scottish enclosures were constructed shortly after Grooved Ware began to be dispersed across the British mainland from north to south, it is not surprising that radiocarbon dates for enclosures further south, at Hindwell, Marne Barracks, Catterick, Mount Pleasant, Dorset, and Greyhound Yard, Dorchester, all fall in the later third millennium bce or later.
However, some recent developments place the north-to-south narrative for palisaded enclosures in question. First, a new analysis by Alex Bayliss and colleagues has placed the accepted dating of the two large palisaded enclosures at West Kennet near Avebury in north Wiltshire in dispute. Their argument is that at the time of excavation it was not recognized that the enclosures were associated with a rather later Grooved Ware settlement (which might represent the ‘worker’s camp’ for the construction of nearby Silbury Hill), and that the samples strictly associated with the palisade structures indicate a construction date of around 3300 bce. Secondly, Alasdair Whittle pointed out some while ago that the two dates for the construction of the palisade at Mount Pleasant may have come from material that tumbled into the voids left behind by the timber uprights when they rotted out, and thus are much later than the actual time of construction. It is therefore conceivable that the palisade slot and the internal post circle (Site IV) together constituted a timber phase of the monument, which preceded the digging of the henge ditch, and whose date has yet to be satisfactorily determined. It follows that the notion of an enclosed space defined by contiguous or spaced wooden posts may have been one that developed in various parts of Britain in the centuries around 3000 bce, in response to similar forces or needs. We have seen already that early cursus monuments used earth-fast timbers to delineate an area, while palisade slots were employed at causewayed enclosures at Orsett (Essex), Haddenham (Cambridgeshire), and Crickley Hill (Gloucestershire). In a sense, ‘walls’ of wood already formed part of the architectural vocabulary of Neolithic Britain.
Some palisaded enclosures, such as West Kennet and Ballynahatty near Belfast, were associated with smaller structures, whether post circles or smaller palisaded monuments. This would seem to confirm their connection to the broader array of Late Neolithic architecture, including square-in-circle structures. Some of the large palisaded monuments, including Hindwell, Marne Barracks, and Enclosure 1 at West Kennet, were composed of two concentric post rings. That at Blackshouse Burn in Lanarkshire later had a stone bank added, filling in the space between the two post circles. At Dunragit in Galloway, there were three rings of uprights, the outermost of which was quite irregular in plan (Fig. 5.11).
These rings were probably not all contemporary: at any given time, the structure would have consisted of a very large ring of free-standing posts, surrounded by a more continuous fence. In this respect, Dunragit was similar to many of the smaller Late Neolithic timber monuments, in having an internal structure contained within a perimeter, which served as a focus for attention and deposition. Like many of the timber enclosures in Scotland and Wales, Dunragit had a narrow avenue-like entrance (sometimes described as a ‘gunsight’ passage), which was aligned on the large prehistoric mound 400 metres away at Droughduil. Indeed, massive mounds or barrows are often found in close proximity to palisaded enclosures, and their roles may have been in some way complementary. From the start of the third millennium onwards, monuments of various kinds increasingly formed integrated ‘complexes’ that encompassed entire landscapes, composed of structures of different kinds which nevertheless appear to have been mutually related. Indeed, it is notable that palisaded enclosures were often constructed in landscapes that had already accumulated other monuments: the Womaston causewayed enclosure and Hindwell and Walton Green cursus in the case of the Walton Basin enclosures; further cursus monuments at Dunragit and Marne Barracks. Cremation burials were present at Foreteviot and Dunragit, while Grooved Ware has been found at Dunragit, Greyhound Yard, and the West Kennet enclosures. These associations again suggest that palisaded enclosures formed part of the suite of cultural innovations that were adopted across Britain around 3000 bce.
One novel way of integrating this evidence interpretively is to argue that the house or household had re-emerged as a powerful organizing principle at the start of the third millennium, and that structures occupied by a group of people (or dedicated to their collective ancestors) were playing a renewed role in binding them together as communities. The period between 3000 and 2300 bce saw the appearance of a series of regional monument complexes, which included structures built on a scale that had not previously been attempted. Most notably, these include the edifices at Avebury, Silbury Hill, Durrington Walls, and Stonehenge, and it seems likely that these feats of construction were made possible by the development of new means of social integration, in which collectivities of people reasserted an understanding of themselves as ‘households’. This may have been particularly important on the British mainland, where subsistence activities were heavily focused on livestock, and groups of people may not have been co-resident throughout the year. The development of the Ness of Brodgar complex in the very different circumstances of Orkney provides an interesting parallel trajectory: a concentration of Great Houses within a single enclosure rather than a monument fashioned after the house. In this way, alternative physical manifestations of the house ranged between small dwellings and massive timber circles or palisaded enclosures, and in some cases these were juxtaposed. At Wyke Down, for example, small circular houses occurred alongside two modestly sized henge monuments with segmented ditches, while inside the western part of the massive henge enclosure at Durrington Walls in Wiltshire two or more houses were each enclosed within a palisade surrounded by a bank and ditch (Fig. 5.12). These western enclosures could profitably be compared to the house-inside-a-henge at Stenness, and identified as a further example of the principle of concentric enclosing rings, ultimately attributable to the passage-tomb tradition. Whether these structures should be identified as the dwellings of important people, or as cult houses or ancestor houses, as some prehistorians have proposed, remains an open question.
A further aspect of the embellishment of the house concerns the role of pits, which we discussed in Chapter 4. At the eastern entrance of the Durrington Walls henge in Wiltshire, excavations by the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2004–7 revealed numerous stake-built houses with central hearths in rectangular floors. The material for the chalk plaster on the wattle walls of these buildings had been scooped from a series of borrow-pits surrounding them, while the decommissioning of many of the houses after their use was marked by the digging of a substantial pit through the floor, into which occupation debris including animal bones and pottery was placed. So in this instance the life history of the house, from building to destruction, was played out between episodes of pit digging. We have seen in Chapter 4 that the practices of structured deposition in pits became markedly more complex with the introduction of Grooved Ware, alongside, in many cases, the careful placing of fine artefacts and near-complete pottery vessels in an ashy matrix redolent of the hearth and the house. So it appears that activities that commemorated and materially memorialized episodes of domestic dwelling were made more complex and spectacular at a time when the house itself was taking on a greater social importance. And as we have seen, some of the more monumental structures that were derived from the architecture of the house were treated like houses for depositional purposes. Thus at the massive southern timber circle at Durrington Walls, the decay and collapse of the upright timbers were followed by the digging of a series of pits into the tops of the post-holes, into which pottery sherds, animal bones, and other materials were deliberately placed. This might be described as an ‘architecture of memory’, commemorating a building whose physical embodiment had now wasted away.
Timber circles and palisaded enclosures were, in these circumstances, effectively massive houses. Meanwhile, although Grooved Ware vessels in southern Britain were often very large, they had been connected in the first instance with the preparation and sharing of food in the domestic context. We have seen that their flat bases implied use within a house, and their shape possibly evoked the house. Pit-deposition introduced a physical reminder of the life cycle of the house into the landscape, while another aspect of domestic life that was amplified and dramatized was the consumption of collective meals. At Durrington Walls, pigs had apparently been shot with arrows before being barbecued over open fires, generating colossal quantities of bone debris. Pig bones and porcine fat residues on pottery are common on Grooved Ware sites in southern Britain. In Orkney, more modest feasting appears to have taken place at the household level. In the south, the scale increased appreciably, as the sharing of huge quantities of food arguably became a means of achieving social cohesion, as well as potentially constituting a form of competition between regional communities or exceptionally powerful people. Taken together, the evidence suggests that from 3000 bce onwards a social order was created that relied at least to some degree upon display, drama, and spectacle. Collective identity was ‘acted out’ through processions, pilgrimages, feasts, funerals, and the construction of increasingly massive monuments, to which people who may have been dispersed over very large areas would have claimed affiliation. Through public performances of shared belonging, new, more extensively networked, and in some cases much larger, social entities were created and sustained in an otherwise highly unstable world. Paradoxically, however, being dependent for their social dynamic upon periodic gatherings and episodes of consumption rather than the rhythms of everyday life, these more closely networked political entities may nonetheless have rendered themselves both more volatile and also shorter-lived.
Henging, mounding, and the dead
The expenditure of colossal amounts of labour in the construction of earth and stone monuments may nevertheless not be a reliable indicator simply of the scale and complexity of communities in the way that has sometimes been suggested. It may, rather, reflect an intention to bring into being qualitatively different social bonds and structures. Construction can in such circumstances constitute a form of display or theatre, which also brings new architectural spaces into being that, once established, can host subsequent performances of other kinds. These points are especially pertinent in discussing henges, a new kind of monument that developed during the earlier third millennium bce (Fig. 5.13).
The term ‘henge’ is something of a misnomer, originally used by T. D. Kendrick to describe a disparate variety of prehistoric sanctuaries or religious sites, while referring specifically to the trilithon stone arrangements (or ‘hinges’) at Stonehenge. Over time the word has come to distinguish a group of Later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age circular or oval enclosures, generally defined by a ditch with a bank positioned on its outer side. These range in size from small hengiforms (which can enclose an area less than ten metres in diameter) to the massive embanked enclosures of Wessex (Avebury, Marden, Mount Pleasant, and Durrington Walls), which are up to half a kilometre in extent.
Henges can contain a range of internal features, including both timber and stone circles, four-post structures, and ‘coves’ (or rectilinear settings of upright stones). These enclosures, reversing as they do the normal defensive pattern of a bank within a ditch, have long been understood as separating out by a ditch a central reserved space, with further significant‘exclusion’ from outside view being provided by the high enclosing bank, which might nonetheless have sometimes served as a place of vantage for an audience. However, two recent insights have transformed this received and perhaps obvious understanding of these structures. First, in discussing the much later ‘royal sites’ of Iron Age Ireland, which may have some general structural affinity with henges, Richard Warner has suggested that a monument with an internal ditch and external bank is likely to represent a means of enclosing and containing powerful alien forces: the ‘Otherworld’. This point is best considered in relation to other developments towards the end of the fourth millennium. We have noted already that the architecture of passage tombs differed from that of earlier funerary monuments in being composed of a series of ‘rings’ of different materials, surrounding a central chamber. In Ireland the outermost of these rings was generally a kerb of large, sometimes decorated, stones. But in the Hebrides, passage tombs such as Dun Bharpa (Barra) were contained within a ‘peristalith’, which amounted to a circle of upright stones. Indeed, at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, the most elaborate and well known of the stone circles (locally known as Tursachan) actually contained a small passage tomb. Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings have suggested that the isolation of the peristalith as an architectural unit gave rise to the emergence of stone circles as a distinct kind of monument around 3000 bce (Fig. 5.14). More generally, we argue that this emphasis on ‘wrapping’ and containment can be placed alongside the enhancement of decoration on pottery in the Peterborough Ware tradition to indicate a growing cultural anxiety over the control of potent and volatile influences, both material and immaterial. This same imperative to create boundaries around problematic entities lay behind the creation of henge monuments.
Secondly, Alex Gibson has observed that in many cases the structures enclosed by henges appear to be earlier in date than the bank and ditch. For example, at Arminghall (Norfolk), North Mains (Perthshire), and Balfarg (Fife), timber circles predated the ditches that surrounded them, while at Dyffryn Lane (Powys) and perhaps also Arbor Low (Derbyshire), stone circles were contained within later henge enclosures. In other words, ‘henging’ was a means of placing a boundary around some existing entity, thereby controlling or restricting its efficacy and influence, or affording it a greater sanctity by severing it from the profane world. Even where a henge contains no detectable structure, it is possible to argue that it was built to encircle and control or neutralize the site of an important or inauspicious event. ‘Henge’ is therefore as much a verb as a noun. As Kenneth Brophy and Gordon Noble have maintained, henging represented one aspect of a suite of practices that sought to manage places and materials that were understood as imbued with unstable vital forces, or tainted by malevolent residual ancestral or spiritual presences. The prophylactic or restorative practices concerned possibly also included deposition in pits, the gathering of materials in middens, and the throwing up of mounds over structures and occupation sites, hence in practice sealing them over. An example of the latter is the pile of stony material containing Grooved Ware sherds and burnt animal bone raised over a sub-rectangular timber structure contained within the early henge at Balfarg Riding School in Fife. Here, the excavator originally suggested that the wooden construction might have served as a platform for the exposure of the dead, although it may equally have represented a shrine whose form evoked an ancestral dwelling place.
The beginnings of henge monuments are poorly understood. Certainly, towards the end of the fourth millennium bce, circular earthworks of various kinds were being used to enclose significant areas, often associated with the dead. In Chapter 3 we discussed the two sites of Monkton Up Wimborne and Flagstones House in Dorset, both of which had discontinuous perimeters and contained burials, predominantly of children (Fig. 5.15).
It seems that human remains were one of the difficult influences that increasingly needed to be controlled, and indeed we can identify the beginnings of this trajectory in the blocking of the entrances of long cairns, and the digging of enclosing ditches around earthen long mounds in the mid fourth millennium. The use of circular or oval ditches as a means of containment can also be recognized in the development of small pit- and post-circles and penannular ring-ditches, like those that clustered around the cursus at Dorchester on Thames in Oxfordshire, dating to the period 3500–2900 bce. Numerous deposits of cremated human bone had been introduced to these structures, and in some cases it may be that they had been created as repositories for this material, which might itself have been understood as singularly powerful or polluting. A comparable site was investigated at Sarn-y-bryn-caled in Powys, again in close proximity to a cursus monument. Here a C-shaped ring-ditch with a pair of upright posts flanking its entrance causeway contained a group of four cremation burials. The earliest of these was dug directly into the base of the ditch terminal, while the other three were cut from higher in the ditch fill, following a redigging of the ditch associated with sherds of Peterborough Ware and radiocarbon dates falling into the interval 3000–2700 bce.
The appearance of henge monuments therefore seems to have involved a process of convergence, with diverse enclosed sites gradually trending toward greater homogeneity of form. The passage-tomb-derived practice of enclosing a space within multiple concentric boundaries probably had a role in this development, reaching its most evolved form in the double-ditched henges of Yorkshire, such as the Thornborough Circles. Some apparently early henges lack the classic external bank, including Stonehenge I and Balfarg Riding School, which both probably date to around 3000 bce. Henge A at Llandygai in north Wales had a broad, shallow ditch and an internal bank, and contained at least one cremation burial in a pit. The burnt bones produced a date of 3200–3100 bce, and the henge ditch 3330–3020 bce. Immediately outside the single entrance of the enclosure, a pit circle comparable with those at Dorchester on Thames contained the cremated remains of a further six people, and gave similar dates to the ditch. The Stones of Stenness, discussed earlier, was also relatively early, probably built in 2940–2900 bce, although structurally it more closely approximates to the ‘classic’ henge than these other ‘formative’ sites. Interestingly, the construction of Stenness surrounding the remains of a possible big house was contemporary with the digging of a ditch surrounding the nearby passage tomb of Maes Howe (Fig. 5.16).
At the later end of the henge-building tradition, the construction of archetypal henge monuments with external banks appears to have continued into the Early Bronze Age in Scotland, as demonstrated by recent investigations at Pullyhour in Caithness, Broomend of Crichie in Aberdeenshire, and the Pict’s Knowe near Dumfries. At Broomend, the henge enclosure was constructed surrounding a deep shaft grave containing two Beaker-era burials. Richard Bradley explains that the bank and ditch served to screen the mortuary structure from the outside world, but an avenue of posts prescribed a pattern of movement through the henge and past the grave. Bradley argues that while some Late Neolithic henges had been used for feasting and gathering by the living, these very late henges primarily represented the settings for elaborate funerals. This may also have been the case at the Pict’s Knowe, which had been built enclosing a small sand island in an area of saltmarsh. This island had previously been used for occupation in the earliest Neolithic, and a small oval mound had been built there, flanked by large timber uprights. This was later obscured by a layer of levelling material contiguous with the henge bank, but its position appears to have determined the location and orientation of the enclosure’s entrance (Fig. 5.17). The central area of the henge had been disrupted by rabbit burrowing, but produced fragments of Collared Urn pottery and human bone, suggesting that the bank and ditch had enclosed an Early Bronze Age burial.
The oval mound beneath the Pict’s Knowe can be placed alongside the timber building at Balfarg Riding School and the Stenness house as examples of earlier structures that had been incorporated into henges. This recurrent relationship of henge-construction to the process of enfolding and segregation of traces of past activity suggests that henges embodied and incorporated the collective, or summative, histories of Later Neolithic communities. At the same time, both Jan Harding and Colin Richards have conjectured that henges maintained an intimate relationship with their surrounding landscapes, with their entrances aligned in parallel with rivers, and their banks and ditches mimicking the immediate topography in microcosm. This is characteristic of a change in the nature of monumentality in Later Neolithic Britain. Rather than existing as isolated entities, the monument complexes that we have already mentioned increasingly encompassed entire earthly and more abstract ‘landscapes’: land and water, earth and sky, past and present. Most of the palisaded enclosure complexes of Scotland, for instance, were located to command networks of natural routeways: rivers, valleys, and coastal strips.
The very large henge monument at Avebury in north Wiltshire originally had a ditch that was more than ten metres deep, cutting through the chalk to the greensand beneath, so that at times it would have contained standing water (Fig. 5.18).
This great henge was eventually physically connected up to the stone circle that stood on Overton Hill 2.3 kilometres to the south-east. By this time this stone circle, which, thanks to the observations and speculations of the early antiquaries, has long been known as ‘The Sanctuary’, had replaced a circular timber structure. The connection between the massive henge and the much smaller stone circle was achieved by constructing the West Kennet Avenue, a broad sinuous ‘path’ bordered by two long parallel lines of upright sarsen stones. Roughly 600 metres from the southern entrance of the henge, the avenue stones pass through what has been described as an ‘occupation site’, containing Peterborough Ware, Grooved Ware, and Beaker pottery. One possibility is that this represented one of the large Neolithic middens found in the Avebury region, a repository of cultural material including sherds of several traditions of pottery which had accumulated over a considerable period, and which the path of the avenue had been designed to incorporate.
A second sinuous parallel line of stones, the Beckhampton Avenue, ran instead south-westwards from the Avebury henge, right across a slightly earlier ditched enclosure, to terminate 1.5 kilometres away at the Longstones, a box-like setting of upright stones. If these Avenues were designed to facilitate procession along their length, participants would have been able to view Silbury Hill, the West Kennet long barrow, the West Kennet palisaded enclosures and the Beckhampton long barrow at various points along these specially demarcated routes.1 Whether this viewing was an integral part of their purpose or not, the effect of the creation of the Avenues, continuing the tradition of building parallel-sided, long, linear monuments into the third millennium, was to integrate structures and deposits that had built up through a more or less haphazard historical process into a single overarching pattern. Arguably, this could be seen as a more elaborate way of encapsulating the shared history of a community within a single structure, here in the form of a spatial narrative, in which different structures were revealed sequentially. The logic of containment or wrapping was also expressed at Avebury: the two inner stone circles, both encircled by the outer circle as well as the henge bank and ditch, each surrounded a unique stone structure at its centre (Fig. 5.19).
The Southern Inner Circle was built surrounding the Obelisk, the tallest single stone in the Avebury complex, and the enigmatic Z feature, a linear setting of smaller stones. Recent geophysical survey conducted by Mark Gillings, Joshua Pollard, and colleagues suggests that these settings actually constituted a square-in-circle arrangement rendered in stone, comparable to the timber structures discussed in this chapter, with the Obelisk at its centre. By contrast, the Northern Inner Circle surrounded the Cove, a box-like setting of three (or perhaps four) massive sarsen stones, redolent of the chamber of a megalithic tomb. Recent investigations have hinted that these stones may represent one of the earliest elements of the Avebury monument, possibly dating to the late fourth millennium bce. If so, they may sit alongside a possible timber circle and a small ditched enclosure (potentially an oval barrow) as features that were deliberately incorporated into the Late Neolithic complex.
At the Duggleby Howe mound in East Yorkshire, described in Chapter 3, the inhumation burials gave way to cremations as the sequence progressed and the barrow continued to grow in size through the addition of layers of chalk and clay. This change appears to have taken place during the first two centuries of the third millennium bce. Meanwhile, amongst the passage tombs of Ireland, cremation was the normal funerary rite throughout the second half of the fourth millennium. In this connection a very significant site is Kiltierney Deerpark in County Fermanagh, a cremation cemetery at which both the Carrowkeel Ware often found in passage tombs and Grooved Ware were found. So here in Ireland, groups of cremation burials had begun to be deposited in contexts other than chambered tombs. As with Grooved Ware itself, with palisaded enclosures and with square-in-circle buildings, the progressive accumulation of cremated remains in places that may have been set aside to contain them was seemingly part of a new way of structuring human communities in the earlier third millennium. This apparently related complex of novel practices seemingly emerged from contemporary interactions across the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic. As described in Chapter 4, between 3000 and 2500 bce cremated human remains dominate the mortuary record of the British mainland, and inhumations are very scarce indeed. Aside from Duggleby Howe, groups of Later Neolithic cremations are known from small circular enclosures and ring- ditches at Barford in Warwickshire, West Stow in Suffolk, and Imperial College sports ground at Harlington near Heathrow. But the best-known group of Later Neolithic cremation burials was the one located at Stonehenge (Fig. 5.20).
Stonehenge
Many of the themes that distinguished the first half of the third millennium bce are well exemplified by the development of Stonehenge and its immediate environment.
As Mike Allen has recently argued, some of the chalk uplands of Wessex, and particularly Salisbury Plain, may not have been covered by dense, unbroken forest after the end of the last Ice Age. Instead, a patchwork of open woodland, scrub, and grassland may have prevailed, which might have encouraged the local aggregation of wild ungulates, including deer and aurochs. These circumstances may explain the longevity of the Mesolithic site at Blick Mead near the River Avon to the east of Stonehenge, which we described in Chapter 2. In this comparatively open landscape, the periodic gathering of large numbers of Mesolithic people for the purpose of collective hunting may have been complemented by ceremonial or spiritual pursuits that ultimately established the conditions for the construction of Stonehenge. Excavations on the much later ditched Avenue that connects Stonehenge with the River Avon have demonstrated that at the western extremity of its course this feature both encloses, and follows the orientation of, a series of periglacial fissures which are fortuitously aligned toward the midsummer sunrise and midsummer sunset. Before the Stonehenge Avenue banks and ditches were constructed, these fissures would have shown up as variations in the vegetation. So the location at the end of this formation, where the sun rose and set along corrugations in the earth’s surface at significant times of year, and which would later be chosen as the site of Stonehenge, may already have been perceived as a special, and even magical, place during the Mesolithic. This much is implied by the alignment of pine posts set in massive sockets that was constructed very close by during the eighth millennium bce.
The earliest activity at Stonehenge itself took place around 3000 bce. This included the digging of a segmented circular enclosure ditch with an internal bank. Immediately inside this perimeter a ring of fifty-six flat-bottomed circular pits was dug (known as the Aubrey holes, after John Aubrey who first observed them as shallow depressions on the surface). While many accounts maintain that these pit features had held timber uprights (or that they had contained nothing at all), the re-excavation of Aubrey Hole 7 in 2008 revealed traces of the characteristic crushing of the chalk on the sides and base of the pit, which demonstrates unequivocally that it had once served as the socket for a stone monolith. It has long been argued that the smaller bluestones of Stonehenge (a mixture of rhyolites, dolerites, and tuffs from the Preseli hills in west Wales and sandstones from other sources) may have arrived at the site long before the larger sarsen stones that make up the sarsen circle and the five great trilithons at the centre of the monument. The sockets of some of these sarsens appear to have intersected with two concentric rings of features (known as the ‘Q’ and ‘R’ holes), which had apparently held the bluestones at some point. This was thought to prove that a double bluestone circle had predated the arrangements of sarsens. However, recent excavations in the central area of Stonehenge by Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright have revealed that many of the sarsen sockets had been partially re-dug and expanded in later times, so that the relationship with the Q and R holes may actually be spurious. It now seems probable that the bluestones were initially located in the Aubrey holes, and that the bluestone circle was later, and integral to a configuration that also included the sarsens.
Stonehenge may therefore have initially taken the form of a bluestone monolith circle eighty-six metres in diameter, surrounded by a bank and ditch. From the beginning, this monument was used for funerary purposes, and many of the Aubrey holes contained cremation burials, presumably inserted alongside the bluestones. Further deposits of cremated bone were introduced to the bank and ditch, often later in date and smaller in quantity than those in the Aubrey holes. Altogether, it is estimated that the cremation cemetery at Stonehenge may have contained the burnt remains of between 150 and 240 people, buried between 3000 and 2400 bce, although perhaps not at a constant rate. Women and men were equally likely to be represented, but children were less numerous. At a rate of one burial every three or four years, it is clear that not all members of a community would have been interred here, and some criteria must have existed to decide which of the deceased would have been afforded this privilege. The possibilities are numerous. One is that these early dead at Stonehenge were members of an elite group of some kind. It is also conceivable that they were ritual specialists or members of a specific kin group. A further alternative is that they represent the cremated remains of people brought from many different and possibly far-flung communities to be buried together here, over time. If this were the case, Stonehenge might be compared with the Ring of Brodgar as a physical embodiment of the alliance between disparate social groups. At least one of the cremation burials, from Aubrey Hole 32, has produced a radiocarbon date which is rather earlier than the digging of the Stonehenge ditch. This may mean that the bluestone circle initially (briefly) stood in isolation, only later to be encircled by the ditch, confirming the view that henges were a means of enclosing places that had already acquired importance, or were in need of containment. Alternatively, it may mean that the remains of this person had been ‘curated’ for a period of time, and then only subsequently interred in the hole concerned.
If Stonehenge had originally comprised fifty-six bluestones, there were apparently rather more in later iterations of the monument, eventually forming the bluestone oval and outer bluestone circle. Some of these were probably added from ‘Bluestonehenge’, a recently discovered circle that was made up of around twenty-one uprights. This stone circle had been raised at West Amesbury, where the Stonehenge Avenue meets the River Avon (Fig. 5.21).
‘Bluestonehenge’ had eventually also been enclosed within a henge ditch, after the stones had been pulled from their sockets. Their imprints, preserved in the damp chalk of the site, revealed the distinctive pillar-like form of the bluestones. However, even before arriving on Salisbury Plain, it is possible that the bluestones had already had a complicated history. The geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer have produced geochemical evidence suggesting that the spotted dolerite from Stonehenge originated at the outcrop of Carn Goedog in Preseli (see Fig. 2.3). Mike Parker Pearson and colleagues have recently examined this site where ready-formed squared pillars of stone could be prised from the mass of vertically bedded rock. This team have also excavated a quarry at Craig Rhosyfelin, located in the deeply incised valley of the Brynberian stream only three kilometres away. Here they have demonstrated that the rhyolite rock-face was exploited during the Neolithic period for the extraction of tabular stones. Parker Pearson has speculated that the stones may originally have been quarried to construct one or more monuments in the Nevern Valley, before these were demolished and the stones carried overland to Wiltshire.
The repeated relocation of the bluestones, and their movement over very long distances, recall the reuse of decorated stones in Irish passage tombs, discussed in Chapter 3, and the incorporation of fragments from broken standing stones into passage tombs in Brittany. Evidently, the bluestones represented more than just a source of suitable building material: their appearance and the known history of their extraction and use, and the effort involved in their removal, would all have contributed to the respect or even awe with which they would have been regarded. Darvill and Wainwright have proposed that the stones were brought to Salisbury Plain because of their perceived healing powers. This thesis was argued on the grounds that there are numerous examples of skeletal trauma amongst prehistoric burials in the immediate vicinity of Stonehenge, and that in The History of the Kings of Britain of 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth relates that the philosopher-magician Merlin advocated the removal from Ireland of a stone circle endowed with curative properties. This correlation is perhaps open to question, but the interpretation has the merit of reinforcing the idea that the special colours and textures of the Preseli stones imbued them with their own power, efficacy, and even animacy, rather than simply constituting attractive but inert matter. The idea that prehistoric communities perceived stone as a vibrant substance that embodied metaphysical forces and was capable of causing effects in the world is actually quite compatible with Parker Pearson’s view of Stonehenge as having been principally concerned with managing the forces of death and ancestry.
The large sarsen stones that make up the trilithons and the great lintelled circle probably arrived at Stonehenge during the twenty-sixth or twenty-fifth century bce (that is, sometime between 2600 and 2400 bce). Sarsens are boulders of silicified sandstone rock that are found scattered across the chalk landscape of Salisbury Plain, but such massive examples as those used at Stonehenge are likely to have been brought instead from the Marlborough Downs, some twenty kilometres to the north, at the centre of which stands Avebury. During the eighteenth century William Stukeley described a group of stones of appropriate size at Clatford, but these have since vanished, presumably broken up for building purposes. The construction of the distinctive sarsen settings at Stonehenge, together with the creation of the double bluestone circle, coincided with the principal period of activity at Durrington Walls. This place, located some three kilometres to the north-east of Stonehenge, is the largest of all Britain’s henge monuments. It is nearly 500 metres in diameter, and encloses the head of a dry valley facing downhill eastwards towards the River Avon, and forming a natural amphitheatre (Fig. 5.22). But as with other henges, the enormous bank and ditch post-dates the most intensive activity on the site.
The settlement of small houses at the eastern entrance of the henge actually runs under the bank. Taken together with further occupation traces in other parts of the enclosure, this constituted a very large-scale occupation of the site indeed. The houses clustered around a broad ‘track’ made up of closely packed flint cobbles between two chalk banks, which led from the bank of the River Avon up to the large Southern Circle of timber uprights. Thus both Stonehenge and the Southern Circle, which share some architectural similarities, would eventually have been linked to the river by another kind of ‘avenue’, and might arguably constitute the two ends of a single passage of movement. Moreover, the two structures have complementary solstitial alignments, suggesting that there may have been particular times of year when it was appropriate for people (or, as Parker Pearson has suggested, the spirits of the dead) to pass from one to the other. The area later enclosed by the henge also contained the Northern Circle with its four huge central posts, and the western enclosures mentioned above, small buildings inside penannular ditches and palisades, arranged around the head of the valley.
Immediately to the south of Durrington Walls stood another large timber circle known as Woodhenge, which was, like The Sanctuary near Avebury, later replaced by a stone setting.
But at Woodhenge the stone circle was enclosed within its own henge ditch; and again nearby there were at least two substantial four-post timber structures (Fig. 5.23). So during the twenty-fifth century bc the Durrington Walls area contained numerous shrines, ceremonial buildings, and dwelling structures, and at times it must have been occupied by very significant numbers of people. The large-scale feasting mentioned earlier appears to have taken place principally at midwinter, and both cattle and pigs were brought to the settlement from elsewhere for consumption. Although many of the pigs at Durrington were quite young, the isotopic analysis of the teeth of both species indicates that only a minority of the animals had spent their lives on the Wessex chalk, and some had come from as far away as the south-west peninsula, or from Wales, or even from Cumbria and Scotland. It follows that people must also have walked these great distances, in some cases the same distances as travelled by the bluestones. Yet the radiocarbon evidence from Durrington Walls tells us that the entire sequence of activity was compressed into a period of less than fifty years. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the short-lived concentration of people, animals, and materials into this area represented a concerted political project, and that this project involved the mobilization of the labour necessary to construct the sarsen settings at Stonehenge.
Rather than seeing this undertaking as an end in itself, the precursor of the festivals that people feel drawn to recreate today, we should understand the creation of the sarsen monument as a means of drawing different groups into a greater community, perhaps thereby securing an overarching spiritual or political hegemony. This kind of unification ‘project’ could possibly also have been responsible for the construction of Silbury Hill, near to the existing henge at Avebury. Although Jim Leary and colleagues have now demonstrated that this mound is only one of a series of such massive Late Neolithic conical monuments with a distribution concentrated around the chalk downs of the Avebury and Amesbury areas of Wiltshire, Silbury Hill remains the largest of the series (and is still the biggest artificial mound in Europe). It was built shortly after Stonehenge, in the twenty-fourth century bce, and by that time the social order that had been created through resurrecting the ideas of house and household was facing quite new challenges.
Dye in the blood: the appearance of Beakers in Late Neolithic Britain
The closing centuries of the fourth millennium bce have been termed the ‘Beaker’ age, and have often been classified as part of the ‘Early Bronze Age’ because of the appearance of a certain number of metal objects along with these distinctive forms of pot, and the reappearance of a rite of burial that mainly involved the interment of a single, flexed body (Fig. 5.24).
More recently, debate has turned upon whether the period from around 2500 bce can instead be defined as a British ‘Chalcolithic’, or ‘Copper Age’, in line with similar classifications in use in mainland Europe. In response, it has been pointed out that individual copper objects could in principle have found their way into Britain from at least the beginning of the third millennium bce, and that also the numbers of such metal objects involved are very small: they do not represent a wholesale technological change. What is significant is that Beakers, as their name indicates, are a distinctive form of pottery with an upright, broadly tubular form that, on the one hand, does not have a direct equivalent from earlier periods and, on the other, had a near-contemporary pan-European presence. This is in marked contrast to the Grooved Ware vessels discussed earlier in this chapter that were an entirely British and Irish phenomenon. However, at least in the earliest centuries of the manufacture and use of Beakers in Britain, they were made and used alongside, that is contemporaneously with, Grooved Ware vessels. Moreover, although the two forms of pottery rarely occur together in the same contexts, Beakers, or more usually pieces of former Beaker vessels, are found time and again placed within Neolithic monuments of earlier date, especially in southern Britain.
While we can be sure that Beakers mark a horizon shared with, and an influence received from, continental Europe, it has proved difficult to argue on purely archaeological grounds that they represent a wholesale migration of people from the Continent to Britain. Two forms of evidence suggest that individuals did make the journey from Europe to Britain, however, and the incidence of this evidence is potentially very revealing of the multiplicity and diverse nature of the contacts concerned.
The first form of evidence is direct, and derives from the analysis of the skeletons of people interred in Beaker graves. The most striking instance of this so far known is the Amesbury Archer, buried not far from Stonehenge in the highly standardized flexed or crouched Beaker burial mode in an oval-shaped pit. Something that is striking about this burial, apart from the fact that the male individual may have been crippled by the loss of a patella (kneecap), is that when he was buried (sometime between 2470 and 2280 bce) he was accompanied by a wide variety and great number of grave-gifts that included no fewer than five Beaker pots, fifteen fine barbed and tanged flint arrowheads, two edge-flaked flint knives, two stone wrist-guards or archery bracers, three copper daggers made of metal from two different sources, four boar’s tusks, a ‘cushion stone’ of a type thought to have been used to work copper and gold, and two gold personal ornaments (basket-shaped earrings or hair-tresses). This is one of the most elaborate Beaker-associated grave assemblages found anywhere in Europe. Strontium analysis of his teeth enamel demonstrated that he was likely to have grown up in southern Germany or the Swiss Alps. Whether the status accorded to this individual was enjoyed in his lifetime or idealized at the point of enactment of his mortuary rites, he had clearly been accepted within the Salisbury Avon valley community after ranging a great distance from his homeland. It has been suggested that he was a craft or ritual specialist, perhaps (as a metalworker) having both these roles simultaneously. The correlation between metal items, metalworking tools, and elaborate burials is found widely in contemporary Europe, indicating that such people were held in high esteem. Nonetheless, although the Amesbury Archer burial is unusual for its richness and exoticism, the theatricality of the placement of grave-goods within an individual tomb is common to many Beaker graves.
The second form of evidence is the formal and decorative similarity between individual Beaker vessels found in Britain and other such vessels from Continental locations. An example is the AOC-LC (All-over Cord impressed Low Carinated) vessel from Newmill, Perthshire. This has a striking formal and decorative resemblance to a very few individual pots (of Dutch 2IIc style) from the Netherlands, including those found at Barger-Oosterveld (Emmen), at Soesterberg, Barrow 3 (Amersfoort), and at Aalten (Drenthe). This implies close links featuring individuals who have migrated from, or the presence of people who had visited, the Low Countries. Although made from local clays, the closeness in style evident in the Newmill and Dutch vessels makes it highly likely that the potter concerned made two pots at an interval of only a few months in widely separate locations and using local clays in both instances, and that in effect they replicated one another. This suggests that the networks of exchange that were developing at this time included the exchange of marriage partners and shifts in residence that cemented these contacts.
This does not automatically mean that such contacts between Britain and the near Continent were a novelty at this time, but rather that the pan-European nature of the making and using of Beakers made such linkages visible. The relatively rapid appearance of the Beaker phenomenon, and the close similarities of some aspects of practice (and in particular the eponymous vessels) across a wide area including the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, (especially northern) France, Brittany, northern Italy, Spain and Portugal, Britain, and Ireland, has been explained in a number of ways apart from ‘migration’. The variety of local practices that occurred in all these places indicates basic continuity of occupation and peopling, but it has been suggested that, rather, the use of Beakers became so widespread because it represented adherence to a cult, or suite of related ritual practices, or an ethos of prestige display. Furthermore, the large-scale isotopic study of Beaker burials across Britain has demonstrated that although an appreciable number of them had been interred in locations remote from their places of birth, there was no sudden ‘arrival’ of Beaker folk at the beginning of the period. Instead, there was a pattern of more or less consistent mobility on the part of a significant minority of individuals and small groups throughout the period between 2400 and 1500 bce. Yet most of these had travelled far shorter distances than the Amesbury Archer, and it may occasion no surprise in the light of the discussions in the middle part of this chapter that a number of those buried in the Stonehenge area appear to have been brought up in western Wales.
Into this interpretive ‘mix’ there has recently been cast a bombshell: the claim based upon genetic studies that the Beaker phenomenon in Britain (and uniquely so in Europe) resulted in the near-total replacement of the indigenous, Neolithic population of Britain by the middle of the Bronze Age. This claim has arisen from an entirely different kind of study that has involved looking at the ancient DNA preserved in partial form in the bones of people who had lived in the fourth, third, and second millennia, and comparing it with modern populations. The study concerned, reported in 2017 in an article authored by an international team of 110 scientists and archaeologists, involved the analysis of DNA extracted from 170 prehistoric individuals across Europe, matched against a sample of 2,572 present-day individuals. Among the most interesting results of this study, in which a group of 100 Beaker-associated individuals was central to the 170 prehistoric people whose aDNA was tested, was the discovery that there was very limited genetic affinity between Iberian and central European Beaker-complex people. As a consequence it was concluded in the study that migration could be discounted as a significant factor in the spread of Beaker use and practices into and within Spain and Portugal.
However, in marked contrast to the Iberian situation, migration was understood as a result of this genetic study to have had an important role in the dissemination of the Beaker complex to, and within, Britain. The data from eighty newly analysed samples from prehistoric people in Britain dated to between 3900 bce and 1200 bce showed that British Neolithic farmers were closely similar genetically to contemporary populations in continental Europe, and in particular to Neolithic Iberians (see Chapter 2). But from the Beaker period onwards, this pattern changed to a much closer affinity to people of Steppe ancestry eastwards from central Europe: and it is this group that are claimed to have influenced the population genetics of most of north-central continental Europe. This mirrors the strong stylistic affinities evident in the material culture, and particularly the Beaker pots found in Britain, with the lower Rhine region that we have already alluded to. However, the genetic links with this region were found in the study to have been particularly strong, with fourteen of the nineteen individuals concerned having an especially close ‘match’ with populations (ancient and modern) from the area around Oostwoud (in Noord-Holland in the Netherlands). The most remarkable conclusion of the study, however, results from the investigation of the later (that is, ‘post-Beaker’) Early Bronze Age and Middle Bronze Age samples, from which the claim arose that the Beaker migrants and their descendants effected a 90 per cent replacement of Britain’s Neolithic gene pool within a few hundred years.
If we are not yet entirely ready to tear up our observations from the preceding pages of this chapter concerning the Beaker phenomenon in Britain, it is to a large degree owing to the caveats acknowledged by the authors of the article concerned. Several concern the science around making comparisons between relatively few and fragmentary ancient DNA samples and modern populations. The biggest concerns that have already been voiced by archaeologists are nonetheless about the sampling biases inbuilt into the study. To begin with, the sample of British Beaker-associated skeletons was limited to nineteen individuals. Within these there was a strong imbalance between the ‘Beaker’ bodies sampled from eastern Britain (several) and western Britain (a handful). This is despite the strong indications of a western maritime element that may have linked western Britain and Ireland to populations in Iberia. Moreover, the samples are inevitably biased towards inhumations, for which the bones have survived sufficiently well preserved to enable aDNA to be extracted. And yet both during and after the ‘Beaker period’, cremations accounted for a considerable, if statistically uncertain, proportion of the population. So if the rite of cremation became a practice that was used to differentiate indigenous from migrant communities, the contribution of the former to the overall population would be systematically underestimated: and this would be a bias affecting the later samples as well as the earlier. Furthermore, both cremation burials and inhumations together only represent a small minority of the contemporary population who were treated preferentially in death. As is the case throughout the Neolithic, the great bulk of the people who lived and died during this period have not left tangible remains that are accessible to us. Those who were buried with Beaker vessels might easily constitute an elite of Continental origin who had imposed themselves on an indigenous population who are archaeologically invisible.
These concerns should not be taken to detract from the intrinsic interest and importance of aspects of the study, although the claim for what is in effect population replacement remains to be substantiated by future investigations. Whatever eventual further research produces, there can surely be no doubt that Beakers became a must-have kind of object, and their association in sites in both Scotland and England as containers with meadowsweet and other sweeteners, and their cup-like form, have led to the suggestion that the cultic practice concerned involved the consumption of quantities of intoxicating beverages (Fig. 5.25).
Appealing though this interpretation is (especially to a generation of British archaeologists habituated to the personal consumption of sometimes prodigious quantities of real ale), given that the size-trend for Beakers is much smaller than the bucket-like Grooved Ware, it does not necessarily explain the ubiquity of Beaker vessels in a variety of contexts. At least equally likely is the possibility that it is bound up instead with the emergence of a category of people of special repute, probably as metalworkers and ritual specialists, who in some cases were connected with cult practices including performative archery. The perhaps deliberately emphasized exoticism of such individuals, and the practices they were associated with, may therefore have been emulated by very many individuals and their kin through the possession and use of these distinctive vessels in what was nonetheless a wide variety of places and circumstances. In other words, simple emulation and prestige-association, rather than adherence to a particular religious or cultic practice, may have been the mechanism by which the practice of Beaker-using spread so rapidly.
Despite this variation in the context and location of use, there is a sense in which the Beaker burial rite was both standardized and stereotypical. The body posture, the presence of the Beaker vessel in a specific location in the grave, and the addition of other items from a rather restricted repertoire indicate adherence to a widely accepted way of representing a person in death. In some cases, the identity that was being constructed in the funerary performance was clearly at variance with reality. Some of those who were buried with archery equipment possessed infirmities that would have precluded them from ever using a bow. More generally, the emphasis on warlike paraphernalia (battleaxes, metal and flint daggers, arrowheads, and wrist-guards) conflicts with the rather limited incidence of skeletal trauma amongst these burials. Apparently there was appreciably less interpersonal violence in the Beaker era than in the Early Neolithic period. Fascinatingly, it has now been demonstrated that the ‘round’ skull shape that was once seen as an indication that the ‘Beaker folk’ were a distinct racial group is more likely to be the result of deliberate cranial deformation in infancy. Seemingly, both in life and death, considerable importance was now being attached to personal appearance, as a means of securing one’s recognition as a person of importance.
Both single crouched burials in pits with grave-gifts and small round barrows were a feature of insular British funerary practice in the later fourth millennium. Equally, massive round mounds at Marlborough, Knowlton, Droughduil, and the Conquer Barrow at Mount Pleasant, Dorset, formed part of the suite of Late Neolithic monumental architecture, alongside henges, palisaded enclosures, and timber circles (Fig. 5.26).
These mounds might easily have inspired a return to funerary mound building on a smaller scale. Yet as we have seen, from 3000 bce onwards most of the funerary deposits identified in Britain are cremations, and the size of most round barrows was, relatively speaking, rather modest. Conversely, in both Corded Ware and Beaker times in areas such as the Lower Rhine, flexed burials with accompanying pots are found both in isolated pit-graves and beneath small round mounds. It is therefore possible to cast British Beaker mortuary practices as either a deliberate throwback to long-established traditions, or something new and intrusive. The impression of a continuing link to local ritual practices from the Neolithic is reinforced by the evidence for the reopening of some pits, the removal of some bones, and the insertion of bones from elsewhere (the Amesbury Archer, for instance, had a rib removed at some point subsequent to his burial). And yet there were significant changes in practice, as with the emergence in Britain of the placing of wooden chambers, or coffins, as containers for the body in the burial pit, a phenomenon well attested across Europe. Beakers are a frequent accompaniment to these burials, but not in all cases, and from around 2300 bce cremated bone was often placed into graves otherwise containing inhumations.
Although the Beaker rite of crouched inhumation and orchestrated funerary display including flint knives, barbed and tanged flint arrowheads, and stone ‘wrist-bracers’ was a novelty widely evident in Britain from around 2400 bce, contemporary burials occurred in other forms and places, including in monuments that had last been used up to a millennium earlier, such as causewayed enclosures and long barrows. Meanwhile there were numerous cases of insertion of pieces of Beaker pottery and characteristic flintwork in pits and midden-spreads in such places. The frequency of occurrence of such referencing of earlier monuments is such as to render unlikely the notion that this was a deliberate attempt to legitimate incoming groups by identifying with or appropriating these earlier remains. Rather, it suggests that there were manifest and continuing links between the people who were burying their dead at this time, and their ancestral communities.
What, then, do Beakers tell us about the ‘ending’ of the Neolithic in Britain? To whatever extent migration was a factor in the changes observable for the later third millennium bce, Beakers do mark the beginning of a significant change in the nature of the communities and their activities from that time onwards. This represented to some degree a break with earlier traditions, with the ending of some long-established practices, and especially the Grooved Ware-associated creation of major monument complexes. However, there was also a renewed emphasis on some other well-attested practices and the amplification of certain trends. So while the particular kinds of gathering and feasting associated with the making and breaking of Grooved Ware appear to have faded away in this period, Beaker pots were often smashed and their pieces placed in (for example) the re-dug tops of causewayed enclosure ditches, as well as isolated pits. Changes in farming practice seem also to have been taking place in at least some parts of Britain at this time, such that while the attachment to cattle and feasting associated with the accumulation of herds continued unabated in some areas, there appears to have been renewed interest in cereal cultivation, and hints of the emergence of fixed plots farmed on short rotations.
This perhaps quite localized ‘stabilization’ of arable cultivation was mirrored in the forms of inhabitation represented by buildings, again drawing upon but amplifying earlier traditions of practice. So it is that roundhouses comparable in size to the buildings found at Neolithic sites such as Trelystan close to the English–Welsh border in Powys around the turn of the third millennium bce begin to appear in greater numbers towards the close of that millennium, this time associated with Beaker pottery. Moreover, other practices attested in the Neolithic, such as the heating of stones in a fire and their immediate transfer to large containers of water to heat it for cooking (with a resulting accumulation of shattered burnt stones), or for the processing of fibres to create fabrics, become more common and more widespread at just this time. The focus upon such practices presages changes to a whole suite of activities that we tend to think of as being associated with the Bronze Age, not least the development of barrow cemeteries that differ markedly from the repositories of the remains of (some of) the ancestral dead that characterize the Neolithic. Often these barrows comprise a sequence that includes an originating inhumation burial, later covered over by a mound, followed by the later insertion of subsequent ‘mortuary’ deposits (most often of cremated bone) that reference that primary burial, or the mound itself. In very many cases, that originating burial comprised an inhumation featuring the ‘Beaker’ rite of a flexed corpse accompanied by the eponymous vessel. The cumulative addition of more barrows, and further subsequent burial deposits, nonetheless presents another aspect of continuity. The continuing theme is the emphasis upon descent and lineage, and its marking, or mapping, monumentally. The overriding impression across both fourth and third millennia is that there remained a concern with the charting of inheritance, and through that, the tracing of a lineal history: and it is this creation and sustaining of history that the next chapter will focus upon.
