The Evolving Narrative of Stonehenge, From Mythic Origins to Scientific Understanding

“ Even above ground there are striking relics scattered over Europe which it would be hazardous to assign to any race known to history. Those circles of upright stones, of which Stonehenge is the most familiar example, date back to an unknown antiquity. They are found throughout Europe, from Norway to the Mediterranean; and manifestly they must have been erected by a numerous people, and faithful exponents of a general sentiment, since we find them in so many countries. They are commonly called Celtic or Druidic ”

“ A learned band of inquirers are induced to consider Stonehenge as a Druidic temple, reared on the solitary plain long before Roman, Dane, or Saxon had set foot within the country. Still, Stonehenge was the work of two distinct eras: the smaller circles are attributed to the Celtic Britons, and the other to the Belgæ. There is a common notion that the [Pg 14] stones cannot be counted twice alike; but when Charles II. visited Stonehenge in 1651, he counted and re-counted the stones, and proved to his satisfaction the fallacy of this notion. ”

“ It is one which learned men are unable to answer. The general opinion is that Stonehenge was formed as a temple for the worship led by the Druids, the priests of the ancient Britons, but of this one cannot be certain. The men who built Stonehenge have left no other record of their mighty labours save the vast stones they raised, and the secret of this most ancient monument is lost in the darkness of prehistoric days. ”

“ When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. ”

“ When we reached the spot, we found a picnic-party just finishing their dinner, on one of the overthrown stones of the druidical temple; and within the sacred circle an artist was painting a wretched daub of the scene, and an old shepherd —the very Shepherd of Salisbury Plain sat erect in the centre of the ruin.
There never was a ruder thing than Stonehenge made by mortal hands. It is so very rude that it seems as if Nature and man had worked upon it with one consent, and so it is all the stranger and more impressive from its rudeness. ”

“ Neither does this mystery end here, for around the monuments which were reared by the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain, there still reigns a deep darkness; we know not what hand piled together the rude remains of Stonehenge; we have but few records of the manners, the customs, or the religion of the early Britons; here and there a colossal barrow heaves up above the dead; we look within, and find a few bones, a few rude weapons, either used in the war or the chase, and these are all; and we linger in wonderment around such remains. ”

“ But for written records, Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman remains would be as mysterious as the ruins of America; and to come down to later times and countries comparatively familiar, tradition sheds no light upon the round towers of Ireland, and the ruins of Stonehenge stand on Salisbury plain without a tradition to carry us back to the age or nation of their builders.
The second argument I shall notice is, that a people possessing the power, art, and skill to erect such cities, never could have fallen so low as the miserable Indians who now linger about their ruins. ”

“ Till antiquaries are agreed whether the circles are temples or tombs or observatories, whether the dolmens are monuments of the dead or altars for sacrificing living men, and whether the mounds are tombs or law courts, it seems impossible, without arguing every point, to write anything that will be generally accepted. Still more, till it is decided whether they are really prehistoric or were erected at the periods where tradition and history place them, it seems in vain to attempt to explain in a simple narrative form either their age or uses. ”

“ Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a “monument to all time,” speak not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years. No good has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of “scientific” men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone chippings. ”

“ It is a fortunate circumstance, therefore, that the fall of one of the stones at Stonehenge (q.v.) at the end of the 19th century, and the increasingly perilous state of some of the others, caused the owner, with the advice of the Society of Antiquaries of London, to undertake the raising of the great leaning stone in the interior of the circle. The work was superintended by W. Gowland, F.S.A., who made special investigations during the necessary digging, for the purpose of recovering any remains of man’s handiwork that had been left by the builders of the monument. ”

“ From these and similar indications he concludes that the gradual building of the great monument was probably between 300 and 150 B.C. He is now inclined to place the date earlier.
In 1901 a small committee of the Society of Antiquaries and two other societies reported on the desirability of setting upright a very large leaning stone at Stonehenge, which showed signs of breaking up as well as of falling still further down. ”

“ Many a day he might have been seen within the magic circle of Stonehenge, pondering on the origin of the most massive ancient monument in England. His work on the prehistoric remains in Great Britain was but a preliminary to his greater work in the land of the Pharaohs.
With the coming of Flinders Petrie, all the old, haphazard methods went by the board. What he [Pg 26] sought was evidence, something that would throw light on the past, that would help to fix dates. The actual intrinsic value of an object was of no concern to him. ”

“ The principle of stratigraphy is one of the archaeologist’s most useful theoretical tools as it allows one site to be compared with others. Our example has shown how artifacts (pots and arrowheads in this case) and sediment types can be placed in stratigraphic order to provide a clock for archaeological dating. Other objects which are commonly used as horizon markers in stratigraphic sequences are fossils. Remains of extinct animals are often used to prove extreme antiquity. ”

“ The incredulity and even contempt with which the application of a system of archæological periods to the antiquities of Britain was received, in recent years, by a certain class of critics, was inevitable, from the exclusive attention previously devoted to Roman and medieval remains. But the attention of the antiquary, as well as the geologist, is now being directed to conclusions forced on both by the traces of man in the stratified gravel of post-pleiocene formations. ”

“ The procedure in scientific excavation is directed to collecting and interpreting all the information that can be obtained from the excavation as to the history and nature of the site explored, be it town, temple, house, cemetery or individual grave, wasting no evidence that results from it touching the endless problems which scientific archaeology affords—whether in regard to arts and crafts, manners and customs, language, history or beliefs. ”

“ And now, since the Mound-builders left no written history behind them, we must get acquainted with another branch of science in order to obtain the information we desire. This new science is known as Archæology, and the man or woman who works at it is called an archæologist. Archæology is really the science of old things; that is, it concerns itself with the things which human beings did before they became intelligent enough to write and leave behind them their own histories. ”

“ Meanwhile the archæologist may derive some hope from the remembrance that astronomy was once astrology; that chemistry was long mere alchemy; that geology has only in our own day ceased to be a branch of unreasoning antiquarianism; and that ethnology has scarcely yet passed the jealously guarded porch, as the youngest of all the recognised band of sister sciences.
In nothing is the want of the intelligent cooperation of the kindred sciences which bear on the study of antiquities more apparent than in the present state of our public collections. ”

“ In Avebury the Sarsen is a rough unhewn monolith; in Stonehenge it is squared, dressed, and crowned with its lintel. All evidences of a slow evolution from Neolithic to Bronze culture. But whereas the circle alone is used at Avebury, Stonehenge has in addition the horseshoe series of Trilithons and foreign uprights, and in this particular differs from all other Cromlechs in this country. It is the climax of the Megalithic monument, and its use very certainly must have been connected with the religion of the race which set it up. ”

“ The astronomer, in his quest for alignments, will convert barrows into observation mounds, without reference to their uses and contents, and without allowing for the ignorance of the period, while the anthropologist often allows his imagination to carry him beyond the limits of actual fact. Time, and constant careful investigation, will pierce some of the mists which must always shroud the origin of Stonehenge, but the true solution will be for the field archæologist, rather than to the weaver of theories or the student in his library. ”

“ While it is quite possible that the Hele Stone was erected to mark the Solstice and to afford a definite means of determining the year, this may not justify the theory that the entire structure was an astronomical observatory and dedicated entirely to sun worship, with elaborate ramifications, and "observation" mounds for celestial phenomena. Weighing, therefore, the archæologist's and astronomer's evidence, it is fairly safe to conclude that Stonehenge can be dated at about B.C. 1700, and that its use was religious; probably a temple, in which the sun may have been adored in some way. ”

“ There must exist a very wide gap of anything from seven hundred to a thousand years between the "May Year" Druids of whom he writes, and the builders of Stonehenge, and an interval possibly as great or even greater between Stonehenge and Avebury and those other north-east and south-east temples to which he attributes a Druidic form of worship. It is even a matter of grave question if the race who built the Stone Circles was not entirely different to the late Celtic inhabitants of the plain. ”

“ I would suggest that the Stonehenge erratics, instead of being brought from any great distance, may have come from a wide plain at the mouth of the Avon, then two or three miles further seaward. From thence they were rafted far up the navigable fjord, not yet silted up, and were only carried a short distance uphill. Igneous rocks such as these, found in a country consisting essentially of chalk and Tertiary strata, would be valuable and probably endowed with magic properties, hence their employment in this inner circle. ”

“ Indeed, the time may yet come when they will be as extinct as the Great Bustard who once strutted among them, and their memory will survive only in their accidental use in a prehistoric monument like Stonehenge.
The Foreign Stones
While the Sarsens usually awake the greatest interest by reason of their bulk, and the problem of how a primitive people was able to deal with them, a far greater problem is presented by the small uprights, or Foreign Stones, the like of which cannot be matched within a hundred miles of Salisbury Plain, while some can only be found [21] upon the continent of Europe. ”

“ This disproportion in distribution cannot altogether be the result of accident; it must bespeak a special attraction for the spot by the builders of the Barrows, and from the very fact that Stonehenge was erected at a time when these people were first arriving on Salisbury Plain, it does not seem extravagant to claim that they had some reason for wishing their remains finally to rest within easy distance of what must have been to them a sacred spot. ”

“ It does not follow, however, from the fact that only stone tools were found at the bottom of the trenches that the monument was constructed when metal tools were unknown, because none of the Stonehenge tools have the characteristic forms of Neolithic implements, so that they might have been specially improvised for the purpose of roughly hewing these huge stones, for which, indeed, they were really better adapted, and more easily procured, than the early and very costly metal tools of the Bronze Age. ”

“ One of the sarsen stones is stained with copper oxide, and this fact has been taken to point to Stonehenge being erected somewhere in the Bronze Age—that is, not longer ago than 2000 B.C. Excavations about twenty years ago brought to light a number of stone tools, fragments of pottery, coins and bones. ”

“ It is quite possible that the ring of rough blue stones were erected by a primitive race of stone men and that a continuous tradition of sanctity clung to the spot until, in the time of those heirs and successors of theirs who used bronze weapons and were acquainted with the rudiments of engineering, the imposing temple that we call Stonehenge came into being. ”

“ It was, in short, a religious structure, probably used for the observation of the sun, and possibly connected with "nature worship."
The fact that the sun rises over the Hele Stone on the Summer Solstice, and that it can be observed in direct alignment with the centre of the Great Trilithon, can hardly be due to accident. Chance might bring two stones into such a position on the Solstice, but, in this case, the entire monument is so arranged as to place the rising sun in a due line with its axis on this particular day. ”

“ In point of fact we have no knowledge whatever of the use of Stonehenge or its purpose, and not a scintilla of evidence on its being used for human sacrifice. But the cinema public will have it so.
Historically the whole talk of human sacrifice as original to religion is quite worthless. There is no general evidence of the thing in the remains of prehistoric civilization; no picture, no sculpture, no language test. We may safely prophesy that if this nameless perversion reappears among men—as it well may—it will reappear not in their simplest societies, but rather in their most refined. ”

“ Stonehenge dates from the close of the Neolithic Age, and most of the smaller circles belong to the early Bronze Age, and are probably pre-Celtic. In any case they were primarily places of sepulture. As such they would be the scene of ancestor worship, but yet not temples in the strict sense of the word. The larger circles, burial-places of great chiefs or kings, would become central places for the recurring rites of ghost-worship, possibly also rallying places of the tribe on stated occasions. ”