Stonehenge begins to yield its secrets

About 6,300 years ago, a tree here toppled over.

For the ancients in this part of southern England, it created a prime real estate opportunity — next to a spring and near attractive hunting grounds.

According to David Jacques, an archaeologist at the University of Buckingham, mud was pressed into the pulled-up roots, turning them into a wall. Nearby, a post was inserted into a hole, and that may have held up a roof of reeds or animal skin.

It was, he said, a house, one of the earliest in England.

Last month, in the latest excavation at a site known as Blick Mead, Jacques and his team dug a trench 40 feet long, 23 feet wide and 5 feet deep, examining this structure and its surroundings. They found a hearth with chunks of heat-cracked flint, pieces of bone, flakes of flint used for arrowheads and cutting tools, and ocher pods that may have been used as a pigment.

“There’s noise here,” Jacques said, imagining the goings-on in 4300 B.C. “There’s people here doing stuff. Just like us. Same kids and worries.”

About a mile away is Stonehenge.

For Jacques, the house is part of the story of Stonehenge, even though the occupants of the Blick Mead home never saw that assemblage of massive stones. The beginnings of Stonehenge were more than a millennium in the future.

But Blick Mead, he said, helps fill in the sweep of hunter-gatherers who became farmers and then built Stonehenge and other prehistoric monuments dotting the English countryside.

“The stone monument is iconic,” said Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna. “But it’s only a little part of the whole thing.”

Discoveries in the past decade, some via modern technologies like ground-penetrating radar, have revealed more about the people for whom the giant monuments held great meaning.

A parade of monuments

The story of Britain starts at the end of the last ice age. In the cold, Britain emptied of people. With so much ocean water frozen in glaciers, sea level was lower, and Britain was connected to the rest of Europe. As the world warmed, they walked back until rising waters severed the land bridge.

Around 3800 B.C., the first large monuments appeared — rectangular mounds known as long barrows that served as burial chambers.

Around 3500 B.C., a 2-mile-long, 100-yard-wide ditch was dug close to the Stonehenge site, what is known as the Stonehenge Cursus. (Cursus is Latin for racetrack; the discoverer in the 18th century thought it was a Roman racetrack.)

The first stage of Stonehenge itself, a circular foundation ditch, was carved around 2900 B.C., and rings of timbers were erected.

About 400 years later came a heyday of henges. (The defining characteristic of a henge is not the rocks or timbers sticking upward, but a circular ditch surrounded by a raised bank. In this sense, Stonehenge today is not a true henge; its raised bank is inside the ditch.)

Twenty miles north of Stonehenge is Avebury, with three stone circles, the outermost more than 1,000 feet in diameter, so large that the town of Avebury has spread into the henge; at the center is a pub, the Red Lion, founded four centuries ago.

Closer to Stonehenge is Durrington Walls, a circular earthen structure about 1,600 feet in diameter.

Michael Parker Pearson of University College London has excavated houses at Durrington Walls and along the nearby River Avon, and he has proposed this is where the builders lived for the grandest stage of Stonehenge’s construction, which started around 2600 B.C. The giant stones, weighing some 40 tons, were moved and carved. He believes smaller bluestones, about 2 tons each, had been taken to Stonehenge during the initial construction from the Preseli mountains in Wales and now more, larger ones were hauled over.

Because early Britons had no written language, the simplest question — Why was it built? — has yet to be conclusively answered.

In Parker Pearson’s view, Durrington Walls was the land of the living, symbolized by the timbers of Woodhenge, while Stonehenge was the land of the dead. He believes early Britons gathered at Durrington Walls to feast and then proceeded to Stonehenge to honor their ancestors.

Last month in the journal Antiquity, Parker Pearson and his colleagues described fatty acid residues they identified on the inside of cooking pots.

“We’ve got the menu,” he said: beef and pork, boiled and grilled, with a smattering of apples, berries and hazelnuts. “They’re basically eating a very meat-heavy diet.”

People came from near and far for the festivities, Parker Pearson said. He said analysis of cattle teeth showed different isotopes of the element strontium, which vary based on the local minerals in the water, indicating the animals had been raised elsewhere and then taken to Durrington Walls.

Timothy Darvill of Bournemouth University, who conducted a small excavation at Stonehenge in 2008, has a different idea about the monument’s significance, pointing to the bluestones, which he said were not added to the monument until the second phase, around 2500 B.C., and in legend possess healing powers. “Those stones are pretty special,” Darvill said. “Perhaps their significance wasn’t fully understood.”

He said Stonehenge originally may have been “the land of the dead,” as Parker Pearson asserts. But Stonehenge later became more like a prehistoric Lourdes, where people came seeking healing, Darvill said. “We see Stonehenge more as a place for the living,” he said.

Peering into the past

Much more may lie beneath the surface.

“We presume the bits we knew about are the important ones,” said Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford. “What we need to do is to find out really what is out there.”

The idea of using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers to peer into the ground without digging goes back decades. In recent years, the equipment — particularly the computers to analyze the data — has become cheap enough and fast enough to be widely used in archaeology.

Neubauer collaborated with Gaffney to survey 8 square miles around Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. “It’s been like an army moving across it,” Gaffney said.

In September, they announced a surprising claim: Buried in the banks of Durrington Walls are about 90 standing stones, some up to 15 feet tall. Gaffney said there may originally have been 200, more than twice as many as at Stonehenge. “That tells you the scale of this thing,” he said.

If true, that would jumble Parker Pearson’s differentiation of Durrington Walls as the land of the living from Stonehenge, the land of the dead. But he is skeptical of the findings, which have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Jacqueshopes to expand the digs to look for not just a house but a village.

“These people are the first Britons,” Jacques said. “We’ve found the cradle to Stonehenge.”

This story was originally published November 16, 2015 at 4:21 PM with the headline "Stonehenge begins to yield its secrets."