Stonehenge (England)
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, 2 miles (3
km) west of Amesbury. It consists of a ring of standing stones, with each
standing stone around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, 7 feet (2.1 m) wide and weighing
around 25 tons. The stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the most
dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including
several hundred burial mounds.
Archaeologists believe it was constructed from 3000 BC to 2000 BC. The
surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase
of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC. Radiocarbon dating suggests
that the first bluestones were raised between 2400 and 2200 BC, although they
may have been at the site as early as 3000 BC.
One of the most famous landmarks in the UK, Stonehenge is regarded as a
British cultural icon. It has been a legally protected Scheduled Ancient
Monument since 1882 when legislation to protect historic monuments was first
successfully introduced in Britain. The site and its surroundings were added to
UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1986. Stonehenge is owned by the Crown
and managed by English Heritage; the surrounding land is owned by the National
Trust.
Stonehenge could have been a burial ground from its earliest
beginnings. Deposits containing human bone date from as early as 3000 BC, when
the ditch and bank were first dug, and continued for at least another five
hundred years.
Etymology
The Oxford English Dictionary cites Ælfric's tenth-century glossary, in
which henge-cliff is given the meaning "precipice", or stone, thus
the stanenges or Stanheng "not far from Salisbury" recorded by
eleventh-century writers are "supported stones". William Stukeley in
1740 notes, "Pendulous rocks are now called henges in Yorkshire...I doubt
not, Stonehenge in Saxon signifies the hanging stones." Christopher
Chippindale's Stonehenge Complete gives the derivation of the name Stonehenge
as coming from the Old English words stān meaning "stone", and either
hencg meaning "hinge" (because the stone lintels hinge on the upright
stones) or hen(c)en meaning "hang" or "gallows" or
"instrument of torture" (though elsewhere in his book, Chippindale
cites the "suspended stones" etymology). Like Stonehenge's trilithons,
medieval gallows consisted of two uprights with a lintel joining them, rather
than the inverted L-shape more familiar today.
The "henge" portion has given its name to a class of
monuments known as henges. Archaeologists define henges as earthworks
consisting of a circular banked enclosure with an internal ditch. As often
happens in archaeological terminology, this is a holdover from antiquarian use,
and Stonehenge is not truly a henge site as its bank is inside its ditch.
Despite being contemporary with true Neolithic henges and stone circles,
Stonehenge is in many ways atypical—for example, at more than 7.3 metres (24
ft) tall, its extant trilithons supporting lintels held in place with mortise
and tenon joints, make it unique.
Early history
Plan of Stonehenge in 2004. After Cleal et al. and Pitts. Italicised
numbers in the text refer to the labels on this plan. Trilithon lintels omitted
for clarity. Holes that no longer, or never, contained stones are shown as open
circles. Stones visible today are shown coloured
Mike Parker Pearson, leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project based
at Durrington Walls, noted that Stonehenge appears to have been associated with
burial from the earliest period of its existence:
Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in
the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's
sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the
monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the
dead.
Stonehenge evolved in several construction phases spanning at least
1500 years. There is evidence of large-scale construction on and around the
monument that perhaps extends the landscape's time frame to 6500 years. Dating
and understanding the various phases of activity is complicated by disturbance
of the natural chalk by periglacial effects and animal burrowing, poor quality
early excavation records, and a lack of accurate, scientifically verified
dates. The modern phasing most generally agreed to by archaeologists is
detailed below. Features mentioned in the text are numbered and shown on the
plan, right.
Before the monument (8000 BC forward)
Archaeologists have found four, or possibly five, large Mesolithic
postholes (one may have been a natural tree throw), which date to around 8000
BC, beneath the nearby modern tourist car-park. These held pine posts around
0.75 metres (2 ft 6 in) in diameter, which were erected and eventually rotted
in situ. Three of the posts (and possibly four) were in an east-west alignment
which may have had ritual significance.[citation needed] Another Mesolithic
astronomical site in Britain is the Warren Field site in Aberdeenshire, which
is considered the world's oldest Lunar calendar, corrected yearly by observing
the midwinter solstice. Similar but later sites have been found in
Scandinavia.[citation needed] A settlement that may have been contemporaneous
with the posts has been found at Blick
Mead, a reliable year-round spring 1 mile (1.6 km) from Stonehenge.
Salisbury Plain was then still wooded but 4,000 years later, during the
earlier Neolithic, people built a causewayed enclosure at Robin Hood's Ball and
long barrow tombs in the surrounding landscape. In approximately 3500 BC, a
Stonehenge Cursus was built 700 metres (2,300 ft) north of the site as the
first farmers began to clear the trees and develop the area. A number of other
adjacent stone and wooden structures and burial mounds, previously overlooked,
may date as far back as 4000 BC. Charcoal from the ‘Blick Mead’ camp 2.4
kilometres (1.5 mi) from Stonehenge (near the Vespasian's Camp site) has been
dated to 4000 BC. The University of Buckingham's Humanities Research Institute
believes that the community who built Stonehenge lived here over a period of
several millennia, making it potentially "one of the pivotal places in the
history of the Stonehenge landscape."
Stonehenge 1 (ca. 3100 BC)
Stonehenge 1. After Cleal et al.
The first monument consisted of a circular bank and ditch enclosure
made of Late Cretaceous (Santonian Age) Seaford Chalk, measuring about 110
metres (360 ft) in diameter, with a large entrance to the north east and a
smaller one to the south. It stood in open grassland on a slightly sloping
spot. The builders placed the bones of deer and oxen in the bottom of the
ditch, as well as some worked flint tools. The bones were considerably older
than the antler picks used to dig the ditch, and the people who buried them had
looked after them for some time prior to burial. The ditch was continuous but
had been dug in sections, like the ditches of the earlier causewayed enclosures
in the area. The chalk dug from the ditch was piled up to form the bank. This
first stage is dated to around 3100 BC, after which the ditch began to silt up
naturally. Within the outer edge of the enclosed area is a circle of 56 pits,
each about a metre (3 ft 3 in) in diameter, known as the Aubrey holes after
John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquarian who was thought to have first
identified them. The pits may have contained standing timbers creating a timber
circle, although there is no excavated evidence of them. A recent excavation
has suggested that the Aubrey Holes may have originally been used to erect a
bluestone circle. If this were the case, it would advance the earliest known
stone structure at the monument by some 500 years. A small outer bank beyond
the ditch could also date to this period.
