The Henge Builders	Volume 61 Number 1, January/February 2008
by Mike Pitts

New discoveries inspire archaeologists to re-envision the culture that created Stonehenge.

At dawn on the summer solstice, revelers celebrate a century-old Stonehenge tradition. Some archaeologists believe the winter solstice was more significant to the megaliths' builders. (Andrew Dunn/Wikipedia Commons)

In 1856, American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne hired a carriage for a 10-mile journey from the rural town of Salisbury to Stonehenge. Of the great megaliths he wrote, "There never was a ruder thing made by mortal hands as if Nature and man had worked upon it with one consent, and so... all the stranger and more impressive from its rudeness."

Some 150 years later I'm following Hawthorne's route across Salisbury Plain, along a rough track that opens onto sweeping fields and skies. I can see Stonehenge less than a mile away, on a gently sloping spur, dwarfed by surrounding hills. There, massive blocks of sarsen sandstone rise 17 feet, encircling even larger sarsen stones and rings of bluestones up to eight feet high that had been transported more than 200 miles from the Preseli Hills in Wales. Scattered around the landscape are earthen mounds 12 or more feet high, covering the Bronze Age graves of people once thought to have built the mysterious monument.

New excavations at Durrington Walls are revealing links between an ancient village and this ritual site by the River Avon and nearby Stonehenge. (Mike Pitts)

The view has changed little since Hawthorne's time, but my vision of Stonehenge today is very different. Artists, mystics, and scientists have contemplated the stones for centuries, calling them everything from a place to summon demons to the world's first computer. Hawthorne didn't find any answers here. It is, he wrote, "a mystery as to who built it, and how, and for what purpose." But now, as modern archaeology reaches beyond the stones, we are finding a ceremonial landscape as unique as the megaliths within it:

• The remnants of mid-winter feasts at the nearby town of Durrington Walls show that the winter solstice may have been the important time for celebrations at Stonehenge.


• Chemical analysis of bones from burials near Stonehenge reveal that people were immigrating to the area from the European continent.


• New carbon-14 dates indicate that Stonehenge is 1,000 years older than archaeologists previously believed.


• A wooden henge at Durrington Walls that has lead to the contorversial new idea that wood henges were associated with rituals for the living while Stonehenge was associated with rituals for the dead.

Animal bones and artifacts from Durrington Walls testify to ceremonial feasting. At Stonehenge such finds are scarce, implying separate ritual areas for the living and dead. (Mike Pitts)

During last June's summer solstice, I joined the crowd at Stonehenge, estimated to be 24,000. We knew where to look, but we still checked our watches for the moment of sunrise as pink-tinged clouds obscured the horizon. The brightening day revealed no sun, but instead a packed mass of tired, brightly clothed people trailing saxophones, drums, and plastic bags full of belongings.

Many of these celebrants like to think they are sustaining, at least in spirit, their remote ancestors' festivities. Yet now archaeologists claim the significant time was the winter solstice. In contrast to the carnival atmosphere of the summer solstice festival, winter solstice is an occasion of near-private tranquility. This has become my favorite moment, when the sky darkens on December 21. It is cold, and I have to watch from outside the rope around the stones. But as the brilliant red disc sets between the megaliths, the effect is spectacular.

We are uncovering a new, rich story of Stonehenge that promises to affect our modern engagement with the site as much as our understanding of its history. When the winter solstice comes around this year, I hope to be there, seeing something that was important to people thousands of years ago, and wondering what our new excavations will reveal in the years to come.

Mike Pitts is an archaeologist, editor in chief of British Archaeology, and author of Hengeworld.

© 2008 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/0801/abstracts/henge.html

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