The Origins Of Stonehenge: A Deep Dive Into Europe's Ancient Wonder

Of all the great monuments of the past, Stonehenge is one of the most enduring and enigmatic. A mystery which appears to present more puzzles the more we attempt to discover its secrets. It stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire in the southern part of modern day England where it has endured the trials of five thousand years. I mean one of the probably the most exciting things about Stonehenge is that why it was built for what purpose and exactly how to even to this day with all the technology and the advancement of technology we really don't know. It is a mystery. There has been a henge on the site for some five thousand years. The present stone structure took shape some three thousand years ago around 1000 BC. But the first stages of Stonehenge were created around 2800 BC just after the end of the Mesolithic age which makes Stonehenge older than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Unlike the pyramids, Stonehenge resolutely defies explanation. In the distant times when it was built, farming techniques were primitive, crops uncertain. Wild wolves roamed the woodlands and the scattered bands of hunters lived a precarious existence. Stonehenge in its prime must have been an awesome site. The single largest structure which any of its visitors would witness in their whole lives. One of the problems that we've had in understanding Stonehenge has been the fact that although a very large part of it has been excavated, those excavations were not written up for a variety of reasons. So a great deal of the information that has come out about Stonehenge has been based really on very little archaeological fact. That gives us some facts on which we can base various ideas and various thoughts but it will only take us so far because we can only look at the physical remains and as archaeologists and scientists we try to work out what has happened from those physical remains. It's for anybody and everybody to decide what those remains actually represent in terms of how people felt, what they were doing there, how they thought about things. We can't get that information from the archaeology. Despite the very best efforts of some of the best brains in the world of archaeology, it stubbornly declines to fit any of the theories advanced and remains as unexplained today as it did when it first entered the realms of folklore. In one of the earliest written records of Stonehenge recorded in the 12th century, Henry of Huntington named it even then as one of the wonders of Britain. This contemporary print depicts the legend that the stones had been magically transported to Salisbury Plain by the great magician Merlin. Stone circles as an enduring feature of the British landscape have always attracted myths and legends and there are a great many different theories about what they were there for, who built them even, and of course the myth that Merlin built Stonehenge by transporting huge rocks across from Ireland and so on. They are magical places and they're very mysterious and some of them quite wonderful. The powers of magic are no longer the favoured explanation, but Stonehenge is a mystery that may never be solved. Older than the great pyramid of Giza, Stonehenge marks time as an object of wonder and almost natural beauty. 150 generations of people have regarded it with awe and admiration. It marks the beginning of a natural heritage. The wonder of Stonehenge has always drawn the crowds, but it is now a victim of its own immense popularity. Today the Stonehenge site is encroached by modern roads and fenced off from the general public. English heritage wants eventually to return Stonehenge to its dignity in isolation and it would be wonderful if one day Stonehenge was here without the roads and that you could walk to the stones, you could follow the processional avenue and perhaps then people will formulate even more of their own opinions. Stonehenge is at the centre of an extraordinary concentration of Neolithic monuments found in southern Britain and it may have been the centre of intense ritual activity for at least 2,000 years. Since the time of Henry of Huntingdon, dozens of alternative theories have been advanced involving Belgae, Phoenicians, Danes, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and Druids. However, very little information about its builders has come from Stonehenge itself. Some tools, some broken pots and some burnt bone are all that have been recovered. These few unspectacular relics are now housed in the museum at Salisbury. It is very little evidence upon which to build a picture of a whole society but in popular imagination Stonehenge will always be associated with lurid tales of Druids and speculative descriptions of all kinds of fanciful rituals involving human sacrifice. But there is no tangible evidence to link Stonehenge to such practices. However, these colourful and graphic tales have always gripped popular imagination. The association of stone circles and particularly Stonehenge with the Druids is really down to two people, the antiquarians John Aubrey and his successor the Reverend Dr William Stugley. Of the two, John Aubrey is by far the more respectable antiquarian, an early archaeologist, a very close observer of stone monuments and an early enthusiast. But one of the things he said and it's almost an offhand comment, has come down an almost haunted archaeologist ever since and this was a description of Stonehenge as what he considered to be a great church or cathedral of the Druids or the ancient Britons. From the evidence of the cremated human bones found on the site, it has been suggested that Stonehenge was a huge burial ground. But despite numerous archaeological digs, only one complete set of human remains have been discovered on the site. But the skeleton of the man discovered at Stonehenge did reveal that at least one violent act had indeed taken place. For there, embedded in the skeleton, were the remains of the three arrowheads which had been fired into his body. The most famous burial that we have from Stonehenge is the so-called archer who is lying in the ditch. He is, he goes with the earliest stone monument, is an easy way of putting it. He is of the same date and he was killed by being shot with arrows, some of which got him in the back and some of which got him in the front. Whether he was a sacrificial victim, whether he was mugged and thrown in the ditch, we really have no way of knowing. It's a very nice scenario to suggest that he was a human sacrifice, particularly because he happens to be close to it, like the entrance to the monument, but we don't know. The bones of the murdered man of Stonehenge are now housed in the museum at Salisbury and they remain the only significant find of its type. In spite of the presence of at least 460 barrows or burial mounds in the immediate area, it would appear that Stonehenge was not developed as a cemetery, at least as far as excavation has so far proved. Besides the burial ground theory, a huge variety of other ideas have been offered, some stranger than others, but Stonehenge has yet to be proved to have been a king's palace, a battle ring, a place for sport and pleasure or the site of an alien landing. There are all sorts of different theories, none of which we can particularly prove. We are able to, to some extent, to disprove in as much that we're fairly certain it was never used for sport, for example. The most widely accepted current theory is that it was an astronomical computer used to chart the passing of the seasons. A whole host of bewildering explanations have been offered for this, usually revolving around the fact the monument aligned with midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. Beyond that, despite the great number of theories, the flimsy evidence for alignments of lunar and solar eclipses grows more and more suspect. Well, there's no doubt that there is an astronomical alignment to do with the sunrises and the sunsets at the solstices, but people who have worked on this in recent years have not been able to find any other true astronomical alignment or configuration that we can definitely say has any bearing on Stonehenge itself. It is estimated that Stonehenge was in use for more than 1,500 years, then it fell into ruin and became the enigma we see today. It has descended into oblivion, a relic whose real purpose is long forgotten, an enduring reminder of the unforgiving march of time. There are over 900 surviving stone circles in the British Isles. This is Avebury, which is situated near to Stonehenge. Others are further afield, such as these stones at Castlereagh in the Lake District. This is Calanish, which lies on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. Stonehenge itself is not only the biggest Neolithic structure in Britain, it is also the largest and most complete megalithic monument in Europe. The surviving stones of Stonehenge can today be conveniently classified into three main types. The blue stones, these are the smaller stones near the camera. The larger stones which loom up behind them are the famous sarsen stones. The blue stones comprise the stones of the original blue stone circle and blue stone horseshoe and are the oldest stones of Stonehenge. Most of these are indeed blue-grey in colour, especially when wet. The sarsen circle of uprights with their lintels framed the great circle of the completed structure. The sarsen trilithon horseshoe originally composed of five groups of three stones arranged in a horseshoe shape. This would have been the most striking feature of Stonehenge. Nowadays we take the ability to move huge weights for granted. Stones are ripped from the ground by machines, transported by ship or lorry and delivered right to the door of the customer. Every intermediate stage is helped by cranes and other. But the people who made Stonehenge possessed only very primitive technology. Some of the sarsen stone used to make Stonehenge was fairly local, but the blue stone did not occur within 200 miles of Stonehenge. The question which had puzzled researchers up until this century was, where did the blue stones come from? The blue stones come from the Preseli Mountains in South Wales. That may seem a very strange place for them to have come from and it may seem sort of weird and wonderful that they've come that distance to Stonehenge, but we know that there were contacts between the people who lived in the Stonehenge area and those people who were living in South Wales at possibly from as early as 3500 BC and we know that because stone objects that were produced in one area are found in another area of where the stone doesn't exist naturally. The question of transporting these heavy stones from the area where they occur naturally to their present locality on Salisbury Plain is still a matter of debate. Some 80 blue stones weighing up to seven tonnes each would have been required for the double blue stone circle of Stonehenge phase two. If they were moved by human endeavour all the way from Wales this meant a minimum journey of about 240 miles. This was something of a puzzle because it was not necessary for the Stonehenge builders to travel to Wales for supplies of durable stone. Large outcrops of equally suitable building stone were available less than 20 miles away. We know that the smaller stones, the blue stones, came from the Preseli Mountains and that certainly when you touch them versus the larger stones, the sarsen stones, the smaller blue stones are warm to touch even on a cold day. So whether or not, as rumour has it or as legend has it, that the people that built Stonehenge thought they were magical, we don't really know. The theory has been advanced that these stones were deposited close to the site of Stonehenge by glaciation but there is no clear evidence of other glacially derived material in the Salisbury Plain area. In view of this, it is accepted that the blue stones must have been moved from Wales to their present setting by human effort. The most likely of the possible routes for the transport of the blue stones was overland from Preseli to Milford Haven on the coast. Then they were taken by some sort of craft around the coast of South Wales and across the mouth of the Severn to the Bristol Avon. From there they travelled along the River Froome, then overland for six miles to the River Wylie at Warminster. Finally they joined the Avon at Salisbury and they took the stones two miles overland to Stonehenge. All this of course took place before the widespread adoption of the wheel. The distance on land by this route is about 24 miles, over which the stones would probably have been drawn by sledge. It was then a further 216 miles by water. Blue stones individually are not that big and it's quite likely, in fact it's almost certain, that if they were brought from the Preseli Mountains, as we think, that they were brought by sea rather than by land on a raft of some sort. We know that people at that time were perfectly capable of seafaring and the waters around the southern coast of England are not too difficult. The other stones at Stonehenge, and visually the most striking, are the huge sarsen standing stones. This type of sandstone can be found scattered unevenly over the greater part of the Wessex region, with a concentration on the Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles to the north of Stonehenge. Despite the shorter distance, the task of transporting more than 80 of these enormous boulders from the Marlborough Downs was undoubtedly more difficult than the removal of the blue stones from Preseli. It has been estimated that the task of preparing and shaping the sarsens, preparing haulage equipment and transporting them to Stonehenge may well have taken years. It is obvious that stones of a particular size would have been sought after and this undoubtedly involved splitting larger boulders to pre-set requirements. In this respect, an additional attraction of the sarsens may have been their tendency to occur naturally in tabular blocks. Any reduction in size would have been accomplished by applying hot and cold stresses to the brake line, and by driving wooden wedges into the cracks. Minor quarrying, shaping and dressing was achieved by pounding the stone, using very hard sarsen mauls. While the masons were putting the finishing touches to each stone, and it was nearly ready to be raised, workmen began preparing a socket in the ground. Finally, ropes tied around the stone's head were passed over an A-frame and harnessed to oxen or men who needed to haul the stone into a vertical position. The final position could be adjusted with packing stones hammered in all around the base of the stone until it was exactly vertical. It is in itself a huge feat of engineering and without the use of slide rules and computers, the precision with which it was built was quite amazing. So whoever was organising the building of it was very structured in their own format. They obviously had quite a culture and were very aware of the needs for perfection, I suppose. Then came the most astonishing achievement, the raising of the lintels. Without pulleys and cranes, it is almost inconceivable that the lintels could be placed onto the tops of the stones with such mathematical precision. As we can see, the top of each standing stone was crafted to include a semi-circular raised tenon designed to fit snugly into an aperture known as a mortise, carved into the underside of the lintel. Obviously, with the primitive measuring techniques available, mistakes were made. This lintel, which has fallen down, has two mortise holes carved into it. One was in the wrong place, causing the builders to have to make a second on the other side. Raising the lintel was also a puzzle. The most likely solution was that the lintel was eased into place on a timber crib at ground level, a metre from the uprights. A long wooden lever was used to raise the lintel, and a chalk of timber was pushed underneath. The process slowly continued until the crib was elevated into a tower, with the lintel raised to the same level as the tops of the uprights. When all this was ready, the lintel was levered sideways until it was perched securely. The thing about Stonehenge is that it's the biggest and the best. But they actually, if you break it down into its individual elements, most of those elements occur elsewhere and sometimes in quite profusion. There are a lot of monuments that are similar to the different bits of Stonehenge. Where Stonehenge differs from everything else is that the final phase of it was in stone. The mathematical and astronomical abilities of the Neolithic people are hotly debated. It is not possible to infer from the evidence of archaeology alone that prehistoric man in Britain had an interest in science and knowledge for its own sake. There is no clear evidence that his concern with the heavens was either scientific or metaphysical. Almost certainly, interest in astronomy was connected with practical considerations, insofar as it might control the smooth running of the farming calendar. Now it has been said that stone circles were probably calendars for agricultural purposes, but it's been pointed out that any farmer that relied on observations from the stone circles probably wouldn't be very successful, because in many ways the readings, the astronomical readings that you can take from the stone circles are hopelessly inaccurate. But that is not to say that the stone circles themselves didn't form a part in the process of calendar making. The establishment of a calendar was extremely important for a culture, for cultural purposes. It told the cycle of the seasons in a broad sense, but also the calendar itself often embodied ideas of birth, growth, death, decay, which is the very heart of all the world's major religions. The observation of the mid-summer and mid-winter solstice would probably have enjoyed some religious or ceremonial significance. The shortest day of the year was important to the agricultural communities. As the hours of daylight increased, the certainty came that the seasons were going to follow their natural order. Spring would come after winter, crops would grow and life would go on as before. Well, the site is certainly significant. What we don't know is why it is significant. It was certainly significant and very important to the people who built it. What we do know is that the mid-summer alignment of the summer sun has some significance. To what extent and what significance that is, we don't really know. If it was a heavenly observatory, Stonehenge was not a particularly accurate one. The supposed alignments of sun and moon have been interpreted in many different ways, none of which justify the creation of such a complex structure. In its day, the building of Stonehenge was clearly a massive task. The impetus for such a drive is unknown, but it must have required the involvement of large sections of society. The scale of the project suggests an elite clearly existed that could give orders and see them carried out. We don't know exactly who built Stonehenge, but we do know that it had to have been built to a large extent by people living in the area. How precisely it was built in terms of who the labour force was, we cannot know. There's no way of knowing. It's quite possible that slave labour was used, but archaeologically we could not find any evidence for that. I think it's equally possible that it was a great honour to be involved in building Stonehenge. It seems the scope of Neolithic technology was startlingly ambitious, and the more we learn about it from detailed studies of the tools and reconstructions of the way they were used, the more impressive it is that so much could have been achieved with so few tools made from just flint, stone and bone. What is truly awe-inspiring, though, is the vast amount of time that many of the techniques required. But the roots of Stonehenge could be traced back to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC. Ice Age man had lived a nomadic existence and hunted all his days. These nomads followed the herds to their successive grazing grounds, never settling in one place. But as the ice retreated, it became possible to set down roots, to capture stock and breed domestic animals for food and produce, and to develop primitive agriculture, sowing and reaping, and eventually storing his own food supply. These changes took place over a long span of time, some 6,000 years to approximately 4,000 BC, about the end of the Mesolithic Age. During this period, the semi-nomads were also making tools for cutting and shaping timber. These earliest tools were made of flint and stone, and a trade in them grew, with established roots over hundreds of miles. Mesolithic man was also becoming a builder, and the first permanent settlements were beginning to take root. The earliest Neolithic settlers in Britain have been called the Windmill Hill People, simply because their main archaeological remains have been found at a 21-acre causewayed site of the same name. It is located not far from Stonehenge. This site has yielded artefacts and information about the primitive society just before the construction of Stonehenge. The enclosures of the Windmill Hill People, with their banks, ditches and gaps, were probably not used for penning livestock or as habitation settlements. It appears they were used for ritual or ceremonial purposes. It was structures like these which were the ancestors of Stonehenge. Looking at Stonehenge today, what we're actually looking at is the end product of something like 1500 years of monument building. We see the ruins of the very last monument that was built at Stonehenge, and in fact it's a whole series of monuments, one inside the other. The first monument that was built there was a simple ditch with a bank on the inside of it, and the people who built that bank and ditch were just the normal everyday people who lived in and around the Stonehenge area. And it's not the only monument of its type in the country. There are lots and lots and lots of circular monuments with banks and ditches all over the country, and it's something that had been going on for already a thousand years before any monument was built at Stonehenge. In the beginning, the Stonehenge site was a simple circular earthwork, or henge, an open space bordered by a chalk bank and large enough to hold several hundred people. For a thousand years, this earthwork continued to be a meeting place of native farmers. It was then altered by the digging out of a circle of 56 pits just within the bank. These pits are now known as the Aubrey Holes, after the 17th century antiquarian John Aubrey. The Aubrey Holes were part of a structure which was the very first at Stonehenge. It was a wooden structure, we know that there were wooden posts there. We don't exactly know how those posts related to each other. Again, we have theories. This, we believe, was one of the earlier phases and represents sort of one of the many phases of Stonehenge. This Stonehenge phase one was probably completed around 2800 BC, but it was to be nearly 600 years before the familiar outline of Stonehenge as we know it today would take shape. In the intervening years, phase two was created. It saw the entrance slightly realigned so that from the center it faced approximately towards midsummer sunrise and in the opposite direction to the midwinter sunset. An avenue of two parallel banks with external ditches was laid out for about 530 meters towards Stonehenge bottom. Four small stones known as the station stones were set up on the inner edge of the ditch, two of them enclosed by small ditches of their own. It would appear that at this stage it was decided to erect a double circle of blue stones in the center. About three quarters of the circle was set up, but a change of plan seems to have brought the work to a sudden stop. The stones were cleared away and the holes refilled. This took place about 2045 BC at the beginning of the Bronze Age. The circular monuments that we have belonging to the Neolithic period, and they begin about 3500 BC and they go along for 1500 years or so, they seem to have almost been like, one could say sort of like regional fairs, that we tend to find artifacts in them which have come from a wider area than you would expect. They're certainly communal monuments in the sense that they seem to be a place where people came together to do things and it may have been people from a wide area. It is generally accepted that the steady growth in population from the end of the Ice Age allowed a higher degree of organization which made the building of Stonehenge possible. The precision of much of the stonework is notable and some reasonably sophisticated measuring techniques must have been perfected. Since most traces of the people who made Stonehenge have long gone, succeeding generations have speculated endlessly about the purpose of monuments like this and the identity of the builders. With the arrival of phase 3, the great sarsen stones were transported from the Marlborough Downs and set in an outer ring of 30 uprights. Inside it had a horseshoe of five trilithons, all crowned with sarsen lintels. In phase 3b, around 1540 BC, an oval of blue stones was arranged inside the five trilithons and two rings of holes were dug, probably to hold the remaining blue stones. However, this project was abandoned and the blue stones were rearranged in the horseshoe and circle setting which partially survives today. One final event, phase 4, was the extension of the avenue from Stonehenge Bottom to the River Avon at West Amesbury, making its entire length one and a half miles. This phase was completed around 1075 BC. Stonehenge is undoubtedly one of the most magnificent monuments in Europe, if not the world, and I think it's very easy to be overawed by it and I think it's very easy for us to look at it and think this has to have been something utterly splendid. I think in its final form, with all the stones in position and everything, it must have been the most incredible thing. It still is. But the problem we have, I think, is that we tend to project our own ideas onto the people who built it and ultimately we don't know why it was built but we do know that it was a very long process building it, so whatever the significance of the site in the first place, it was dead important for a very long period of time and it persisted to be important over something like 1500 years, which is an enormous amount of time. We simply do not know enough about the nature of Neolithic society. Until the present century, the popular view of Stonehenge was still coloured by lurid tales of druids and sacrifice. Neolithic Britons were characterised as savage and barbaric. The elaborate monument on Salisbury Plain was used as evidence of a wild society, populated by druids and warriors. The great number of axes and earthenware from the period were interpreted as signs of warlike tendencies and human sacrifice was taken for granted. The modern view, from our own less religious age, is that it was constructed before the time of the druids. The consensus is firmly in favour of the theory that it was a huge astronomical observatory. But this view does not adequately explain the scale of Stonehenge and the complexity of the design. If you place yourself in the position of the early peoples who might have built them and try to imagine what it would have been like seeing the heavens rotating around, of course for them the movement of the stars, the movement of the sun and the moon and so on, was terribly important. They needed to know of the cycles of seasons in order to know when to plant and so on and so forth. Debate about the origins and uses of Stonehenge is not new. In 1655 the architect Inigo Jones published a book, Stonehenge Restored, following acrimonious debates about the connections between the mysterious stones, Merlin, the druids and the Romans. What is certain is that at some time after 1000 BC Stonehenge was savagely damaged. The destruction of Stonehenge can be convincingly argued as the work of man or the work of nature or more probably both. Some scholars believe that natural processes are mainly to blame. In modern times some of the stones have fallen down unaided as they have become unsafe and this suggests that time and weather may be enough to explain the damage to the monument. In support of this idea much of the damage seems to be on the southwest side, the side that bears the brunt of the severe weather. Gusting gale force winds from the southwest could have rocked the uprights in their sockets and dislodged the lintels. Whatever effect the weather has had in dislodging the stones, pillaging has been a major factor. Some stones may have been collected after they fell as a result of natural processes. Others have clearly been rooted out and with some force. The broken blue stones provide evidence of this. We should not overlook the possibility that Stonehenge was never completed and that the remains represent the furthest point to which the structure was advanced. The ruins that we see at Stonehenge were not the last monument that was going to be built on the site. There was going to be at least one other. Around the stones there are two circles of holes. You can't see them now because they're filled in and they appear to have been dug to hold stones of about the size of the blue stones but we can tell from the bottoms of them that no stones were ever placed in there and we know really that this was an unfinished monument. In the present day some modern repairs have been effected using the concrete which can clearly be seen here. This obvious blend of old and new is a deliberate policy on the part of English heritage designed to clearly differentiate the original from the modern repair. The images and metaphors that supposedly made up the prehistoric mythology and religion that surrounded Stonehenge have left an enduring legacy. A fertile hunting ground for artists and illustrators. We can only speculate on this temple of the sun god, the earth goddess and who knows what other deities of the moon and sky. But there has been no shortage of artists ready to fill in the gaps. Most famous of all is Turner's atmospheric evocation of the elements Stonehenge. By the 18th century Stonehenge was already a tourist attraction. The mystery of the great stones rising out of Salisbury plain lured visitors to count the tumbled pillars to chip bits off them and to speculate about their origin. Maybe it was for something to do with worship and something to do with the sun and the moon. Was it an event that was perhaps started or pushed by other beings? I think it was worship the sun or something. Worship any kind of gods or something yeah. You know it's just it's beautiful and maybe they just wanted to leave something for other people to see. I don't know I think it was a religious symbol probably. Worship the sun and so on. I've heard the the legends about you know anything from aliens did it to you know being a temple to the gods or whatever. It's kind of easy to say that they've had help from like extraterrestrials but it's definitely a mystery and that goes without saying. The volume of visitors in recent years has grown to such an extent it was obvious something had to be done to protect what was left of the finest megalithic monument in Europe. In March 1978 after much careful deliberation a fence was erected. The streams of visitors to Stonehenge find very little in the way of explanation when they arrive there and many naturally assume that it is all a matter of speculation and imagination. Whatever importance was placed on it centuries ago that importance is still there and in a way I suppose the nice thing about it is is that it means different things to different people. The same is true today. Some would see it as a monument to the victims of prehistoric battles. To others it is an astronomical calculator or a temple as alive today as when it was built. For many though the constant function of Stonehenge is a magnet attracting both interest and speculation. Why Stonehenge became the ultimate if you like in terms of prehistoric monuments I don't think we can ever be entirely sure but it has something to do with that area being special and I actually think one of the possible explanations for it is actually fairly mundane which is that it was the breadbasket of England at the time. It was an extremely rich area for agriculture. Now how it came to be that I don't know but in terms of the technology that was available the way people were living it's very likely to me that the most important reason was the fact that it was just such a good area for growing food. Antiquarians, artists and present archaeologists have all combined to contribute to a rich written and visual record of a unique monument. This is the strange and challenging story of Stonehenge. The continuing enigma. A thing of beauty that continues to delight without striving to inform.