Stonehenge may have been built to symbolise a unification in Stone Age Britain. The idea could explain why so many of the stones making up the monument were brought in over huge distances.
Located on Salisbury plain in southern England, Stonehenge seems to have been built in phases between 3100 and 1600 BC. There is an outer ring of vertical sarsen stones topped by horizontal lintels; inside that is a smaller ring of vertical bluestones and a number of other stones, including a horizontal slab called the altar stone.
In recent years, geologists have shown that the stones were brought in from a variety of places. In 2015, researchers led by at University College London , from where they were transported to Salisbury plain. A 2020 study found that most of the sarsens came from the West Woods in Wiltshire, England, about 25 kilometres away. Finally, in August, it emerged that the recumbent altar stone came from north-east Scotland.
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Parker Pearson and his colleagues now want to put these findings into the archaeological context of Neolithic Britain – which Parker Pearson argues was remarkably unified.
“We know that, by this point, they’re sharing a material culture,” he says. “There’s a commonality of material culture that extended all the way from those Scottish islands [like] Orkney down to the south coast of England.”
The altar stone is key to Parker Pearson’s argument. Unlike most of the stones at Stonehenge, it lies flat on the ground. Archaeologists have long wondered if it might have once stood upright, but “nobody’s ever been able to find a convincing hole that it would have stood in”, says Parker Pearson. This implies it was laid flat when it was first brought to Stonehenge.
In north-east Scotland, where it now seems the altar stone came from, Neolithic peoples built recumbent stone circles in which the stones were laid flat. “I think it’s echoing and responding to that, rather than ever having been a vertically standing stone,” says Parker Pearson.
The implication is that Stonehenge represents a deliberate fusion of monument styles: the standing megaliths of southern Britain mixed with the recumbent stones from the far north-east.
To bolster this case, Parker Pearson highlights other commonalities. For instance, a type of pottery called grooved ware seems to have been invented in Orkney and then rapidly spread throughout Britain. “You’ve got a sharing of a style of ceramic right across the island in a way that just hadn’t happened before,” he says. “These are also much more mobile communities than we’d ever appreciated,” says Parker Pearson, highlighting isotope data from human remains that show “up to half the population ends up being buried somewhere different to where they grew up”.
However, there were also significant regional differences in behaviour and culture, says at the University of Exeter in the UK. Grooved ware and other practices seem to have skipped entire regions of Britain. “There’s a really interesting question about whether you can say that the whole islands are unified, or whether it’s just these link nodes between which people are obviously travelling and sharing art, artefacts and ideas.”
On the European mainland, Neolithic peoples sometimes , but they didn’t transport them over such great distances.
Archaeology International
