Return of the Aubrey Seven (3)

The Quest for the Missing Dead

Part III

In Part II we discussed Stonehenge as a prehistoric cemetery and the number of individuals buried within. The removal of the remains of over 50 people from Aubrey Hole 7 has permitted the Stonehenge Riverside Project to formulate a revised Stonehenge sequence.

The Stonehenge Sequence
Richard Atkinson is generally credited with formulating the Stonehenge sequence in 3 Stages following his excavations in the 1950's. Atkinson returned to the site in the 1960's and again finally in 1978. [1] He has been heavily criticised by other archaeologists for not releasing his notes (except in book form) and restricting access to the records of William Hawley's 1920's excavations.

William Flinders Petrie carried out a detailed three year survey of the monument between 1874 and 1880 and was probably the first to suspect and record, the likelihood of Stonehenge being constructed in stages. Petrie introduced the megalith numbering system still in use today and proposed that the Stonehenge earthwork was of an earlier date than the stones enclosed within.

In his excavations William Hawley identified the “Stonehenge Layer”, a continuous layer of debris just below the turf. Hawley was of the opinion that the debris was the result of stone chippings from the dressing of the megaliths at the site, concluding that any features covered by this layer had to be prior to the arrival of the stones. He noted that the ditch appeared to have silted up sometime before the working of the megaliths. As his excavations continued, Hawley determined that the monument was constructed over three periods: firstly, the ditch and bank; a wide circle of stones in the Aubrey Holes second; and finally, all the stones erected in the centre. Hawley's notion was lost amongst his notes.

Some thirty years later Atkinson produced an elaboration of Hawley's model of three phases of construction which remained the text book standard for forty years which is necessary to repeat briefly here for comparative purposes:

Period I (1800 BC)
Bank and ditch, Heel Stone and Aubrey Holes dug but did not hold wooden or stone uprights but many found to contain cremated human bones.

Period II (1650 – 1500 BC)
At least 80 bluestones set in the Q & R holes forming an incomplete double circle in the centre of the site, with entrance on the north-east side, opposite which a large pit may have held the Altar stone. Original causeway widened by about 25 feet as axis realigned to mid-summer sunrise. Avenue created.

Period IIIa (after 1500 BC)
The double circle of bluestones (still unfinished) dismantled. Sarsen circle and trilithon horseshoe erected. Slaughter and Station stones set in place.

Period IIIb
20 of the dismantled bluestones, carefully selected and dressed, erected in an oval setting inside the trilithon horseshoe. This bluestone setting contained at least two miniature copies of the sarsen trilithons. Two rings of Y & Z holes dug to receive the 60 remaining dismantled bluestones but for some reason never erected.

Period IIIc
Uprights of the dressed bluestone oval re-set into the bluestone horseshoe. The remainder of the bluestones were set in the circle between the sarsen circle and sarsen trilithons.
Atkinson suggested that all three stages of Period III followed closely on one another with the monument complete by 1400 BC.
In 1995 Rosamund Cleal et al, aware the standard chronology had not been “officially” updated for forty years produced a new report with the aim of bringing together all the evidence from the major excavations over the period 1901-1964. [2] This work tabled a new series of Phases of construction commencing in 2950-2900 BC, some one thousand years earlier than Atkinson's model, which is no surprise considering the advances in modern dating techniques. Cleal et al, stated that the wooden posts of Phase I were removed from the Aubrey Holes and replaced with cremation burials in Phase II c. 2900-2400 BC. Phase II also included numerous post holes indicating timber structures but without any clear configurations to suggest their form or function. Finally the stones were erected in Phase III c. 2550-1600 BC, with the earthwork of the Avenue extended out towards the river Avon as one of the last features to be laid out.

The New Sequence
Over the past few years, from 2003 to 2008, culminating in the discovery of “Bluestonehenge” in 2009, the Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has carried out much of the exploratory work at the Stonehenge world heritage site, including the neolithic “village” at Durrington Walls and the controversial excavation of the Aubrey Hole 7 containing the reburied human remains.

In June the SRP held their annual meeting in English Heritage’s Bristol offices and tentatively announced a new Stonehenge Sequence, which Mike Pitts has subsequently published on his website, [3] offering a substantial revision to the sequence of construction of the monument, with stones present at the site from the very beginning:

First stage: 3000–2935 BC
Circular ditch and bank, enclosing 56 pits of the Aubrey Holes, holding bluestones. The monument's main opening is to the north-east and a narrower entrance to the south. Human cremation burial occurs in and around the Aubrey Holes and the ditch and bank. Most of these burials are of adult males, and the practice continues till at least 2300 BC, constituting the largest known cemetery of its type. [4] The timber posts at the main entrance are thought to belong to this stage. During this time a second stone circle, Bluestonehenge, was built beside the river Avon, consisting of around 25 bluestones possibly marking the site where the bodies were cremated prior to the remains being taken to Stonehenge for interment.

Second stage: 2640–2480BC
Lintelled circle and the trilithon horseshoe constructed of sarsen, erected along with an arc of bluestones (dismantled from the Aubrey Holes and Bluestonehenge?) standing the Q and R Holes. Four Station Stones erected near the Aubrey Hole ring. Two of the Station Stones (now missing) are then partially covered by low mounds known as the South and the North Barrow. The South Barrow is raised over the floor of a D-shaped building immediately east of the southern entrance into the enclosure, from which timber posts mark the way towards the centre of the site. Three large sarsens stand at the north-eastern entrance (today only the recumbent Slaughter Stone remains); the Heelstone stands beyond within a circular ring ditch.
Third stage: 2470–2280BC
The 1.75 mile long earthwork known as the Avenue is constructed from Stonehenge to the river Avon, where it meets a small henge dug at the site of Bluestonehenge following removal of the stones in the Second stage.

Fourth stage: 2280–2030BC
The bluestones having been removed from the Q & R holes are rearranged to form a circle between the sarsen trilithons and the outer sarsen ring, and an oval bluestone setting within the sarsen trilithon horseshoe.

Fifth and sixth stages: 2030–1520BC
A ring of pits known as the Z Holes is dug outside the sarsen circle, and apparently some time later a ring of pits beyond this known as the Y Holes.

This revision to the Stonehenge sequence is yet to receive peer review and is likely to undergo minor changes but the six stage model is unlikely to become the accepted wisdom by all. [5]


Onto Part IV - The Empty Long Barrows

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Notes
1. Richard Atkinson – Stonehenge, H.Hamilton, 1956. (Revised edition, Penguin, 1979).
2. Rosamund Cleal, R. Montague, K.E. Walker, illustrated by L. Coleman, Stonehenge in Its Landscape: Twentieth-Century Excavations, English Heritage, 1995.
3. Mike Pitts - A really new stage in Stonehenge history? Digging Deeper, 10 June, 2010
4. Mike Pitts – Hengeworld, Arrow, 2001, in which Pitts first proposed that as many as 240 individuals could be buried at Stonehenge.
5. It is intended that this revised Stonehenge sequence will appear as a future paper by Tim Darvill, Pete Marshall, Mike Parker Pearson and Geoff Wainwright. Parker Pearson has already published two new essays in 2010 with revised dating sequences: 'Stonehenge', in Encyclopaedia Britannica, and 'If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge' with M Aronson, National Geographic.

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Return of the Aubrey Seven (2)

The Quest for the Missing Dead

PART II

In Part I the enigmatic Aubrey Holes were considered, in Part II we focus on Stonehenge's use as a cemetery and who was buried there.

Stonehenge Cemetery
Although less than half of Stonehenge's area has been excavated it has yielded some 52 cremation burials, numerous cremated fragments and more than 40 fragments of unburnt human bone. It has been estimated that around 150 people were buried at Stonehenge in the 3rd millennium BC assuming that the cremation deposits each contain remains from individual burials. However, if these cremation burials are assumed to be two or three individuals buried together then the number of people buried at Stonehenge could be as high as 240; either figure makes the site Britain's largest known Neolithic cemetery.

Between 1919 and 1926, William Hawley excavated the western half of Stonehenge and recovered cremated human remains mainly from the ditch and the Aubrey Holes. Hawley excavated 25 of the Aubrey Holes in 1920 and then a further seven in 1924. Stuart Piggott and Richard Atkinson excavated a further two in 1950; of these Aubrey Holes excavated to date, all but eight have been found to have contained cremated bones.

On excavating the Aubrey Holes, Hawley was initially of the opinion that they once held small upright stones, after noting the crushing of the basal chalk in two holes and compaction of the sides in many of them. After visiting Maud Cunnington's excavations at Woodhenge he changed his mind, noting that the postholes there seem to correspond exactly to the original conditions of the Aubrey holes, thus leaving the debate unresolved on whether the Aubrey Holes originally held posts, stakes, or small megaliths. Of the two Aubrey Holes that Atkinson excavated in 1950 he considered that these, and consequently all of the rest, were simply pits. Within Hole 32 he encountered hard, compact primary fill material, seemingly consistent with stone-holes but he discounted this interpretation.

Although some unburnt human bones from Hawley's excavations have been lost and some were retained in Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, an estimated 58 of the cremation deposits excavated from Stonehenge, were reburied by William Young and R.S. Newall in 1935. These remains were placed into sandbags and re-interred into Aubrey Hole 7, accompanied by the following inscribed lead plaque:
Atkinson's 1954 excavation revealed cremation deposits from the fills of the ditch to the west of Stonehenge's north-east entrance, the earliest of these has been recently dated to 2920 - 2870 BC. However, the earliest date comes from the cremated remains found in Aubrey Hole 32, excavated by Atkinson in 1950, producing a dating of 3030 - 2880 BC. Thus, the Aubrey Hole cremation burials have been dated to around the end of Stonehenge's first phase and thought to have been prior to the first stone construction and the arrival of the bluestones.

In 1978 , Atkinson accompanied by John G. Evans, excavated the remains of an adult male whilst re-examining an older trench in the outer ditch and bank of Stonehenge. The man was thought to be local to the area and aged about 30 when he died. Owing to the stone wrist-guard and a number of flint arrowheads buried with him he came to be known as the 'Stonehenge Archer'. Several of the tips of the arrowheads were actually located in the skeleton's bones and therefore must have pierced his body, suggesting that they were probably the cause of his death. He was then deliberately and carefully buried in the ditch. To date, he is the only prehistoric inhumation found at Stonehenge; the skeleton of a decapitated man buried within the sarsen circle indicates that he met his fate in the post-Roman period and has been termed an Anglo-Saxon execution. The Stonehenge Archer's remains are now held in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

The axis marking the path of the solstices at mid-winter sunset and mid-summer sunrise was clearly held in special reverence with human deposits marking the alignment; two fragments of human skull found in different segments of the ditch either side of the north-east entrance, from one or possibly two individuals who died in the early 3rd millennium, has recently returned a dating of 2890-2620 BC, during the 2nd Stage of construction, a period when inhumation burials were very rare in Britain.

Although it must be stressed that less than half of Stonehenge has been excavated, most activity seems to be recorded in finds on the east side, reflecting a commonality with the nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. The Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP) has proposed that that Durrington Walls, the largest Neolithic settlement of its age in north-west Europe and possibly home to the builders of Stonehenge, was a complementary structure to Stonehenge, reflected in similar solstice alignments in the Southern Circle and the avenue to the Avon.

Mike Parker Pearson, SRP Director, suggests that the timber circles at Durrington Walls represented the land of the living whilst the land of the dead was represented by the stone monument and encircled by over 300 burial mounds in the Stonehenge landscape. The two sites were connected by their respective avenues to the River Avon completing a ceremonial procession route, interpreted as representing the transition from life to death. The theory that Stonehenge was a cemetery and the domain of the ancestors is supported by the large quantities of pottery and flint arrowheads found at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge but largely absent from the stone monument. Conversely, human remains are common at Stonehenge but there are relatively few at Woodhenge and very little at Durrington Walls.

The argument presented by the SRP for targeting and recovery of the human remains from Aubrey Hole 7 was to obtain a dating from a selection of bone to establish whether any of them were contemporary with Stonehenge's three principal stages of use within the 3rd millennium BC. The SRP was the first excavation of an Aubrey Hole in nearly 60 years; recovery of this bone for modern examination was the prime goal of the excavation.

The cremation deposits were generally placed in a secondary relationship within the Aubrey Holes suggesting the possibility that funerary rites might not have been the principal purpose behind the construction of the circle of 56 pits; the holes dug, then apparently filled in again shortly afterwards. However, as there is no stratigraphic dating within the Aubrey Holes, the assignment of the Aubrey Holes within the Stonehenge phases of construction has always been uncertain and open to debate. Parker Pearson states that SRP's recent experience in excavation of postholes at Durrington Walls, Woodhenge and the Bluestonehenge site by the River Avon suggest that it is unlikely that the Aubrey Holes ever held posts.

He argues that the profiles, depths and diameters of the Aubrey Holes, on average about 1.10m maximum diameter and 0.88m deep, are indistinguishable from those of known bluestone sockets of the later phases including, the double arc of paired Q and R holes, previously thought of as the earliest bluestone setting at Stonehenge. The re-location of the bluestones from the Aubrey Holes to the bluestone arc of the Q and R holes could have occurred any time between the 29th and 26th centuries BC. This arc was cut by the erection of the sarsen circle in 2580 – 2470 BC.

Thus, Parker Pearson reasons that there is a strong case to be made for the Aubrey Holes having held stones, and these stones must have been bluestones simply because all the Stonehenge sarsens are much larger, and they must have been erected in their undressed state since no chippings can be identified from this earliest phase in the ditch and are absent form the primary fills of the Aubrey Holes. This re-interpretation of the Aubrey Holes puts the arrival of at least 56 bluestones at Stonehenge much earlier than previously thought; at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC.

The use of Stonehenge as a cemetery seems to have gained momentum over a period of time. It is thought that initially, there was a minimum number of two cremated individuals buried in the monument's first century of use. Over the next next three centuries about 12 cremation burials took place. By far the greatest number of cremation burials, around 27, occurred during the linteled sarsen building phase in the three centuries of the up to c.2400 BC. This gradual increase over seven centuries has led Parker Pearson to propose that these burials at Stonehenge may have evolved from a single dynasty, raising the possibility that they were a ruling elite, “Recovery of the cremated bones from Aubrey Hole 7 in August 2008 can now allow this demographic and social model to be more fully evaluated”.

In his book Stonehenge (1956) Richard Atkinson proposed three main stages of construction of Stonehenge from the bank and ditch, Aubrey Holes, to bluestones to sarsens. This model held out for forty years but was revised recently by Rosamund Cleal et al in Stonehenge in its Landscape (1995) which proposed a new Phase 1 as the ditch, bank and possibly the Aubrey Holes, Phase 2 as the timber structures and cremation burials prior to the stone constructions of the 3rd Phase.

Parker Pearson argues that the new dates obtained as a result of the SRP excavations supports a further revision of the Stonehenge sequence. He proposes that the new date obtained from the remains from Atkinson's excavations of Aubrey Hole 32 suggests that the initial digging of the Aubrey Holes is “within the period of Stonehenge's first phase of use when its encircling ditch was dug; this fits the evidence of the shared concentricity and regular spacing of pit circle, bank, ditch and counterscarp.” In other words, they were all laid out at the same time. He goes on to suggest that a new three-part sequence can be applied as a provisional model to suggest when the cremation burials recovered from the Aubrey Holes would fall within the overall Stonehenge construction sequence. SRP's new model proposes the initial stages of Stonehenge as a cremation cemetery in use from the early 3rd millennium BC set out within a circle of 56 Welsh bluestones, later removed to leave the pits we know today as the Aubrey Holes.

In Part III we look at the proposed new stages in more detail.


Sources:
Mike Pitts – Hengeworld, Arrow, 2001
Mike Pitts – A Year at Stonehenge, Antiquity, March 2009
Mike Parker Pearson et al - The Human Remains at Stonehenge, Antiquity, March 2009

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