Rewriting-the-history-book stories about Stonehenge come so often that it was a bit of a shock last week when geologists announced something that really did feel like a change in the game. It made me wonder about the monument and the people who made it, and even what the place might mean to us today.
At the centre of Stonehenge is a megalith known since the 18th century as the altar stone, the only one in the circle with a name. It’s an enigma.
Unlike most of the site’s parts, we don’t know when it got there or whether or not it was once standing. It’s bigger than the stones that came from Wales, but smaller than all the large standing stones, which reached Stonehenge from 20 miles to the north. We barely know what it looks like: it’s all but buried, and invisible to the ordinary visitor. And it consists, uniquely, of sandstone found geologically nowhere near the site. Until now, even that source was a mystery.
Now we are told that Neolithic people brought it from north-east Scotland, possibly from as far as Orkney or even Shetland – on a journey that could range from 450 to more than 800 miles. My immediate reaction, like many, was to question the geology. Was the identification right? And, even if so, could the stone not have been brought south by an ice-age glacier?
I asked geological colleagues who have been successfully seeking sources for Stonehenge’s Welsh stones for decades in the hills of Pembrokeshire. They are on the altar stone team, though the actual analysis was done by a PhD student at Curtin University in Perth, Anthony Clarke, using hi-tech kit available thanks to Australia’s mining industry. Yes, I was assured, it’s good science. Although the British team had recently narrowed the search down to northern England or Scotland, they were as astonished as anyone at the final result. And no, no glacier was involved.
It’s a surprising discovery. And yet the idea fits into the cultural narrative that archaeologists have been developing for the times. Are we rewriting the books? No. Is it sensational? Yes. It widens our horizons, and suggests in a way that none of us had quite accepted that the monument really was part of a Neolithic world spanning a huge area.
The clues were there. First, the sheer scale and engineering challenges of Stonehenge must have drawn workers from far beyond immediate communities. Scientific data suggests cattle and pigs were brought from northern England or Scotland to a village housing the builders. There is a distinctive style of pottery, common in Wessex at the time Stonehenge went up, that was first created in Orkney.
Most remarkable is a lovely carved stone, looking like a large boiled sweet with a hole to take a handle, which was excavated at Stonehenge in the 1920s. It’s known as a macehead, and geologically it came from the Hebrides, where the famous Callanish stone circles consist of the same rock. Very similar artefacts have been found in Orkney at sites from the same era as Stonehenge; archaeologists even wonder if the Stonehenge macehead was itself made in Orkney, with stone imported from the Western Isles.
Recently, ancient DNA has brought a new dimension to prehistoric travel, revealing not just individual journeys, but migrations from the continent.
Shortly after Stonehenge was built, about 4,500 years ago, people arrived with new values and technologies; they introduced the first metals, and surely new languages. They had paler skin than the farmers already here, who were massively outnumbered by the new arrivals. We are descended, with much further mixing over the millennia, from migrants who probably never knew why Stonehenge had been erected. But they saw it, buried their powerful dead in its shadows, and added their own marks to the already historic site.
The altar stone could have been moved by land or sea – both were well within Neolithic capabilities – but I strongly favour land. The journey would allow people to take part, celebrate, create memories and show loyalty to the authority behind the idea. Stonehenge was not just a sacred monument: it was about people. Transport and construction, expressing power and control, were key parts of its purpose and identity. A slow overland passage for the altar stone (a likely route passes through the Thornborough Henges in Yorkshire) extended that capability to all of Neolithic Britain.
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A likely context for such extraordinary outreach from the south is competition and the building of alliances between different groups. Locally, we see five political and religious centres grow over centuries in Wessex. Making Stonehenge might have brought these five together. Going to Scotland for the altar stone – or accepting it down from Scotland – suggests an altogether greater ambition, greater even than similar connections made with Wales. In some indefinable sense from the distant past, perhaps the stone represents people, more than 4,000 years ago, seeking creativity and strength in a community of belief and commitment to each other that spanned the entire British Isles, even as migrants were preparing to cross the sea and, in time, honour the stones in their own way.
Ahead of a Brexit vote in parliament in 2018, the Sun newspaper featured Stonehenge in a cover montage. It was a symbol of taking back control, celebrating uniquely British achievements. In far-right fantasies, the stones were raised by indigenous white Britons. Archaeology shows that makes no sense. But perhaps with this new discovery, there is a valid alternative for Stonehenge as a contemporary icon: a creation of multiple ethnicities, coming together in a shared, islands-wide project to honour that diversity.
And, surely, to baffle the future.
Mike Pitts has directed excavations at Stonehenge, and is the author of How to Build Stonehenge