* < <../../index.htm> Main Page <../../index.htm>* * Chapter 7* Conspicuous Construction The latter part of the Neolithic period is a time of conspicuous construction when the largest monuments that decorate our landscape were built. One marvels at the amount of labour that was needed to construct them today, built as they were with antler picks and scapulas (shoulder blades) as shovels/scrapers and two questions immediately spring to mind. 1. Who had the power to order and organise the work? 2. Why were the monuments necessary? Both these questions have to be attempted without the aid of historical (documentary) evidence but we can use ethnological, ethnographical or ethnoarchaeological parallels in which living cultures and their artifacts are studied and compared with the archaeological evidence. It is often suggested that the segmental society that existed during the earlier part of the British Neolithic period had changed or developed by the later part of the period. The segmental society consisted of settled farmers living in small hamlets or individual farmsteads, perhaps linked to other settlements by kinship ties but each independent and equal. When they co-operated in communal activities they did so voluntarily. They were the groups responsible for the causewayed enclosures and the earthen and megalithic long barrows. They would have not been capable of building the great monuments of the neolithic Wessex landscape like Durrington Walls henge with an enclosure bank thirty metres wide and three metres high dug out of a ditch 9.8 metres wide and 5.4 metres deep around an area of twelve hectares. This would be a major engineering work today with modern earth-moving machinery. Calculations of the number of Neolithic man-hours involved in the construction vary from 500,000 to 900,000. Such works would have required this substantial labour force of several hundred and supervision over a long period. Food would have to have been produced for them and their absence from the agricultural workforce compensated for. And, at the beginning of the operation the site would have had to have been chosen, acquired and the design and layout of the monument settled. These matters are not likely to have been within the capabilities of the segmental society of the earlier Neolithic. The next stage in the development of society is usually into a chiefdom where there are ranks - differences in social status between people. The head of the senior family has become the chief and rank is determined by how close the relationship is to the chief. Surpluses of agricultural products are given as tribute to the chief who uses them to support his retinue of retainers, priests and craftsmen and perhaps to finance the building of the large structures that were demanded by their religious beliefs. These centres of ceremony were used as sites for performimg rituals that reinforced the authority of the chief and the gods. They become the focus of the whole community and symbolise it as Westminster Abbey does the English establishment today. This is probably the sort of context in which the conspicuous constructions of the later Neolithic period appeared. But in order to validate this hypothesis we need to find other characteristics of chiefdom societies like rich burials or chieftains' residences or the work of craft specialists. This we have found impossible to do so far and it is one of the great problems that we have in understanding late-Neolithic society. We have suggested that the function of these great monuments was ceremonial, the scene of rituals that probably involved two elements - the religious and the secular. As the chief plays an important part in religious activity in most primitive societies and if our analogy with the late-Neolithic period is robust, he would have played a major part in the initiation, construction and use of the monuments. Indeed, in many cases the chief is and could have been both secular leader and chief priest. The most characteristic monument of the later Neolithic period of the British Isles is the henge (Wainwright) associated in England with a particular form of pottery - grooved ware - and large timber constructions. Alongside the grooved ware there appear a range of new artifact types including transverse arrowheads, polished discoidal knives and plano-convex knives of flint with incised chalk plaques and a series of ornate bone pins (see Figure ). Henges can be taken to denote the further stage in the development of the agricultural society that dominated Britain for four and a half thousand years. They needed a large amount of construction that would have soaked up a great deal of what agricultural surplus was generated at the time and their distribution delimits the expanded area of the dominant society of the later Neolithic. By this time, other less successful agricultural societies had probably developed in the British Isles, but they are not as clearly apparent in the archaeological trecord. A henge may be described as a circular area of variable size, varying from some ten metres in diameter to over three hundred, defined by a bank and ditch, the bank normally outside the ditch, with one or two entrances. Henges with one entrance are described as Class I henges, those with two entrances are classified as Class II henges. In some cases no structures have so far been found inside them but, where they have been detected or excavated, they can be pits, burials and timber structures. Later, stone structures appear within them as at Stonehenge and Avebury. About a hundred henges have been recognised, some only known from aerial photographs, and are found all over the British Isles. On a distribution map, concentrations can be picked out: in the valley of the Salisbury Avon, on Mendip in north Somerset and around Ripon in Yorkshire. There are also similar examples in Scotland and Ireland and on the Continent. As far as we can tell at the moment, the smaller henges are the oldest and so most of the Wessex ones date to later in the period. But an example of a smaller henge in the area is Stonehenge, lately dated to c3000BCE. Untypically, the ditch is outside the bank. Within the bank is a circle of holes referred to as the Aubrey Holes that are thought to have been the footings for a ring of posts. The earthwork is about 115 metres in diameter. A smaller henge at Arminghall in Norfolk which also encloses a ring of posts has a diameter of only 30 metres and far fewer but more massive posts - eight, compared with Stonehenge's 56. In northern England, the most impressive concentration of henges is around Ripon in Yorkshire each with diameters of around 245 metres. Finest are the three Thornborough Circles just over 4.8 kilometres east of Ripon, each with two entrances through a bank originally about three metres high and two ditches, one each side of the bank, but separated from it by some twelve metres. Its ditches are twenty metres wide and some three metres deep. In Scotland the Ring of Brodgar is one of the most striking henges. It is on the Mainland Island in Orkney and consists of a ditch with no bank broken by two entrances and is about 112 metres in diameter. Inside was later placed a ring, originally, of some sixty upright stones with an average height of two metres. In West Lothian is Cairnpapple which in its destroyed second phase consisted of a henge containing a later oval setting of stones. At Priddy on Mendip, a few kilometres north of the city of Wells, are four henges set in line like the Thornborough henges but having diameters of about 180 metres. The banks are placed within the ditches as at Stonehenge and each has a single entrance. Excavation of one bank shows that the ditch material was originally piled up between two concentric circles of three-metre high posts and faced with drystone walling. The ditch of the excavated example was about four metres wide and just over a metre deep. This would have produced a structure in which the interior was set apart from the outside world In Ireland there is a henge in Co Down at Ballynahatty called 'Giant's Ring'. The diameter is 183 metres, the bank built of material scraped up from the interior is c20 metres wide at the base and c3.5 metres in height. At Grange in Co Limerick the enclosure is some 65 metres in diameter with a well-defined entrance through the bank and ring of great stones set with their backs up against the inner side of the bank (see page 63). A fine collection of henges is in the valley of the Salisbury Avon and includes the smaller henges of Stonehenge, Knowlton in Dorset and Maumbury Rings outside Dorchester. At Knowlton, in an area that was apparently sacred at the time, three henges arranged in the characteristic almost straight line are surrounded by groups of later round barrows. The southern circle has a diameter of c240 metres with a ditch on the inside and two entrances. To the north the central circle has a diameter of around 105 metres with two entrances with a bank today about four metres high and the ditch about 10.5 metres wide. In the middle of the enclosure are the ruins of a medieval church. The northern circle which can only be seen from the air is D-shaped with a long axis measuring about 82 metres. Maumbury Rings was later turned into a Roman amphitheatre but originally consisted of an enclosure around 105 metres in diameter with a large bank and an internal ditch constructed out of a series of contiguous pits, some up to 10.5 metres deep, presumably for a circle of enormous posts. There was a single entrance. The Rings was part of a large sacred complex including Mount Pleasant henge. Flagstones enclosure and the timber circle at Greyhound Yard in Dorchester. At Flagstones the enclosure consists of a circular, segmented ditch some 100 metres in diameter in which were found five burials. At four points in the side of the ditch carvings of lines, arcs and circles were scratched on the chalk surface. The ditch is dated at round about 2100BCE and in the middle of the enclosure were the remains of a later round barrow over a pit with a crouched inhumation. At Greyhound Yard in Dorchester and in Church Street parts of a large timber circle have been discovered surrounding a projected area of around 380 metres in diameter. Apparently some 600 mature oak tree trunks would have been required for its construction. A radiocarbon date for it is also around 2100BCE. Avebury henge, including both the bank and ditch, is some 400m in diameter and the ditch originally measured some 16m from bottom to the top of the surrounding exterior bank which is pierced by four equally spaced entrances. This enormous structure dates from between c2900 and 2600BCE Inside are the later stone settings and circles. Durrington Walls is in Wiltshire to the north of Amesbury. It consists of a nearly oval 12-hectare enclosure surrounded by a ditch with an external bank about 30 metres wide and about three metres high. There are two entrances. Across the longer diameter the distance is 487 metres and, across the shorter, 472 metres. An excavation in advance of road construction in 1967 uncovered two timber post complexes the southern pattern of postholes represented the remains of two circular structures. A large circular post-holed structure more than 38m across stood alongside a smaller one with a diameter of 27m. They may have been shrines or perhaps domestic buildings. Calibrated radiocarbon dates for Durrington Walls range from c2800 to around 2400BCE. The two circles have been suggested as thatched roundhouses (Mackie) for within the southern circle traces of hearths and some pottery were discovered. The same hypothesis has been suggested for Woodhenge (see below). Close to Durrington Walls recent excavation has uncovered a few of a large number of huts identified by geophysical survey surrounding the monument. The structures are sub-rectangtular, five metres square or 2.5m by 3m with chalk plaster floors and central hearths and are furnished with wooden beds and furniture identified by floor slots as though they were wooden versions of the Skara Brae stone structures (see above). Bone food debris littered the floors but may be evidence of feasting rather than normal occupation litter. There is some argument about the purpose of these huts. It has been suggested that they accommodated the builders of the trilithons at Stonehemge, a mile or so away since they date to the period of their erection. The site is linked by a track to Stonehenge that takes a circuitous route along the river. (Mike Parker Pearson) Two grander buildings were found, each within a circular earthwork and a timber fence and situated so that they looked down to the southern Durrington timber construction and the river. These huts, however, lacked the domestic litter that characterised their humbler associates. Woodhenge is a site 60 metres south of Durrington Walls. The ditch surrounding it is approximately circular with a diameter around 86 metres and a single entrance. Traces of a bank outside were very slight. Excavation showed that the ditch was between 1.8 and 2.1 metres in depth with a broad bottom some 3.6 to 4.8 metres wide. Inside were six concentric egg-shaped rings of postholes. Near the centre of this structure was a small pit containing the crouched skeleton of a three-year old child with a cleft skull while dug into the floor of the surrounding ditch the crouched burial of a young man was found. Amongst the finds were fragments of a polished greenstone axehead from Cornwall which matched a similar find from Durrington Walls and other artefactual remains from Woodhenge are very similar to those from the southern circle inside Durrington Walls. A date for Woodhenge would lie around 2250BCE. Mount Pleasant henge is one of the large Wessex hanges and lies about a mile east of Dorchester. Its bank was originally about four metres high surrounding an egg-shaped enclosure about 370 metres along its longer axis and about 320 metres along the shorter one. Originally the 4.8 hectare area was entered by four entrances. Outside the bank is a ditch that has a diameter of about 43 metres. Within the enclosure were the remains of a circular timber structure consisting of five concentric rings of postholes which date from round about 2000BCE. Later on, a central setting of pits and sarsen monoliths was set up to replace the timber setting. Animal bones and about 3000 worked flints, antler picks and Food Vessel and Collared Urn pottery were found in the ditch. Within and running parallel to the main ditch about twelve metres away a palisade foundation ditch was dug. The palisade itself must have been a major engineering job as some 1600 oaken posts would have been required. Either side of the two entrances were large timber door jambs. It has been estimated that the palisade could have been six metres high and the posts nine metres long. Wainwright, its excavator, suggests that this amazing construction dates to around 1700BCE and demonstrates a continuity of use into the Bronze Age. Limited excavations at the henge monument of Marden in the Pewsey Vale of north Wiltshire took place in 1969. The ditch terminal and bank terminals at the north entrance, one of the two entrances were examined and a timber structure located in the interior. Marden is an incomplete enclosure with the south-eastern perimeter closed off by the River Avon. About 14 hectares are inside with internal dimensions of 530 metres from north to south and 360 metres from east to west. Radiocarbon determinations intimate a date of around 2400BCE for its construction. Inside a timber structure was in the form of a circle of postholes some 10.5 metres in diameter and with an average depth of some 15 centimetres that suggests that the structure could not have been very substantial and certainly could not have been the remains of a building. Similarly, Springfield henge in Essex has a timber circle as its focal point. So far excavation inside these large henges has been limited and it is difficult to draw any conclusions about their functions until we know what other and how many other structures can be identified inside them. Electro-magnetic survey at Durrington Walls has established that there are a number of other interior features lying beyond the timber structures discovered by the excavation. Perhaps the best guess we can make at the moment is that the henges were 'central places' like the causewayed enclosures where people congregated on a number of different occasions for ritual or trading exchange or other communal activities. But were they also the centre of 'special areas' crowded with other adjacent monuments like round barrows that were certainly connected with rites of death and burial? It is clear from what we have said that there is an association between timber circles (Gibson) and henge monuments. Later, we find timber structures being replaced in this association by standing stones as at the Sanctuary and at Stonehenge. This link is strengthened by the fact that the stone trilithons at Stonehenge were put together using carpentry techniques. One is tempted in this circumstance to suggest that the timber structures we have been describing could have been designed as tripartite structures (the wooden equivalent of stone trilithons) and that the timber circles were joined at the tops with a continuous lintel as with the stone circle at Stonehenge. In Somerset at Stanton Drew, the latest unassociated timber structure to be discovered consisted of nine concentric rings of oaken posts with an outer diameter of some 93m set inside a henge c120m across and is provisionally dated to c3000BCE. It was similar but larger than Woodhenge and it has been suggested that it was replaced with the present standing stones of the Great Circle c26/2500BCE. Evidence for timber settings has been discovered elsewhere. At Balfarg in Fifeshire is an earthwork enclosure surrounded a timber circle 25 metres in diameter that was associated with Grooved Ware pottery. Outside it there was evidence for five concentric circles and an outer ring that may have been palisade-type structures. Dates range from 2465BCE to 2085BCE. Also in Scotland, at Strathallan in Perthshire, twenty-four large, ramped postholes (postholes with the groove alongside in which the post was slid into position) formed a ring enclosed by a ditch with an external bank that had two opposed entrances. Dates ranged from 2155BCE and 2090BCE. In a commanding position at the head of the Kilmartin Valley in Argyll a timber circle measures some 46m across with a possible timber avenue leading to it out of the valley. At both Moncrieffe in Perthshire and at Milfield North in Northumberland postholes for similar but smaller, timber rings have been identified. An interesting discovery was made on the seashore at Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk where a small timber circle with surviving oaken post stubs surrounding an ancient oak-tree stump was found in the inter-tidal zone. Using a statistical technique with dendrochronological dating it has been established that the trees were cut down in April 2050BCE! Excavations at Dorchester-on-Thames found postholes for an egg-shaped timber circle which was aligned along the axis of a cursus (see below) and was dated to around 2000BCE. Horseshoes of timbers have been found at Croft Moraig in Perthshire and Arminghall where the eight ramped postholes were two metres deep and were around a metre in diameter. A date for the site is around 2500BCE. How people at the time were able to cut down and work such large timbers is something we still do not know but it is clear that timber circles could be built on a grand scale that rivalled the size of the stone structures at Avebury. At Hindwell, 4.8 kilometres east of New Radnor in Powys, is another egg-shaped oval with a perimeter of 2.5 kilometres, a diameter of over 0.8km and an area of 34 hectares. At its western end was the entrance flanked by enormous timber posts facing towards the sunset on midsummer day. Also of oak were the 1,400 timbers that formed the perimeter. Inside, the area was kept clear for almost 3000 years ? from 2,700BCE in the later Neolithic period when it was built, down to the beginning of the Romano-British period, around 2000 years ago. The area seems to have been sacred from the beginning of the Neolithic perhaps reserved for shamans or for special ceremonies with a spring as its focal point. Remaining monuments of conspicuous construction are bank barrows, cursus monuments and Silbury Hill. Bank barrows are long mounds and ten or so are known. No doubt more will be discovered by aerial survey. Well-known examples are in Dorset, one on St Martin's Down, Long Bredy (RCHM Dorset), which is 196.6 metres long and about 1.8 metres high with a ditch along each side. Not far off is a long barrow which is 35.4 metres long and 1.5 metres high that rivals West Kennet long barrow in the size of its mound. Another example of a bank barrow is within the ramparts of Maiden Castle Iron Age fort. It is 545.6 metres long and flanked by ditches. It was excavated by Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s and yielded a burial at its eastern end containing the skeletons of two young children with a small pottery cup beside them. Cursuses are a type of monument that is not at all well understood and have remained an enigma for many years. We know they date from the Neolithic period and that they are one of the most common of Neolithic monuments, with over 150 so far identified. Some excavation has been carried out on a few of the best-known. The Stonehenge Cursus (Stone) which, like other examples, is a lengthy enclosure, measuring some three kilometres long with enclosed ends where the banks are at their most obvious, varies in width from 100 metres to 150 metres. Its bank is about 6.5 metres across and 0.4 metres high dug out of a ditch of comparable size and is dated to between 3600 and 3300BCE. A smaller cursus lies not far off. The largest-known cursus is the Dorset Cursus running for 9.6 km from Bokerley Down to Thickthorn Down (Atkinson). Its banks are about 91 metres apart and, like the Stonehenge example, has enclosed ends. Investigations have shown that it was built in two sections and this seems to be a feature of cursuses that they are constructed in incremental additions, not all at the same time, rather like a medieval church. Incorporated into the Dorset Cursus are long barrows that suggest to some that the monument may have had a relationship with the ancestor cult. We can say that it is aligned towards the winter solstice. At Thornborough in Yorkshire a cursus underlies a henge. Dates for cursuses seem to range from c3600BCE to c3000BCE, the earliest in Scotland where the largest so-far identified is Cleavon Dyke near Blaithgowrie in Perthshire which is 2.4 kilometres long. Silbury Hill in Wiltshire (Atkinson) not far from Avebury, is the largest man-made hill in Europe towering up to 39.8 metres and containing about 354,000 tons of chalk. Its base covers some 2.2 hectares with a top some 30.5 metres in diameter. The lowest 7.6 metres of the mound is solid chalk for the mound is based on a sloping natural spur. Early phases of Silbury consisted of a number of small mounds which were later sealed under a series of local materials - clay, chalk, topsoil and turf together forming a low mound incorporating a few rounded sarsen stones. At least five successive chalk banks were built to surround it, the material coming from encircling ditches. This mound was added to incrementally, each ditch as it was progessively covered by the expanding mound being recut further out another three times. The early phases of the mound date to around 2400BC while the final work on the mound dates to either shortly after 2400BC or (alternative model) around 2000BC. As it was being constructed at the same time as Avebury henge it may be that it had some relationship with that monument. The mound?s structure has proved in recent years to be unstable and an earlier investigative shaft and tunnel inside it have been filled with rammed chalk to stabilise it. To sum up what we have said about the Neolithic Period. It was the period of a new way of life. People became farmers manipulating domesticated plants and animals in an increasingly-tamed landscape in which they became permanently settled. Pottery and developing domestic modes of production (farm equipment, domestic artifacts, food processing) were also new. It was the period of polished stone. Communal monuments and the development of what we call a society seem to go togther and both were novelties in Britain. We no longer believe that there was an invasion of agriculturalists. In fact the latest research on genes shows that almost all of us are descended from the indigenous British who were hunter-gatherers during the Mesolithic period. This means that our ancestors had to learn the techniques of farming from what we suspect were only a small number of immigrants who were already farmers who brought the knowledge and the domesticated animals and domesticated grain to this country. A further presumption is that people for some time would have carried on a way of life that was a mixture of the old and the new, the hunter-gathering (Mesolithic) and the agricultural (Neolithic). Chronology is still a problem. One way in which we are going to better understand the Neolithic is by the refinement of the techniques of dating and the provision of many more chronological points. So far we have over 1100 radiocarbon determinations which relate to artifacts and monuments. However, the relationship of the dated materials, particularly with monuments, is not always precise and it is sometimes difficult to know exactly what the dates are telling us about them. Our other problem is with understanding the perceptions that Neolithic people had of the secular ednvironment about them and of their spiritual and religious world. That they were concerned with such things we know from the size and number of the ritual monuments that took up so much of their time, effort and wealth but we don?t know what part they played in their lives. /By now, the agricultural way of life had become traditional in Europe. The artificial divisions that archaeologists previously made in the prehistoric period between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are becoming less meaningful nowadays since for generations of people at the time the years up to the Roman Conquest would have appeared as an unbroken continuum. But on the Continent there is a chronological division, known as the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) period, that may have impinged on people?s lives and lasted a long time. The first smelted copper was in use in Balkan Europe by c4,600BCE alongside gold when six kilograms of gold were unearthed from a 6000 year-old cemetery at Varna on the Black Sea coast. Both are pretty metals, used for jewellery, and their appearance stimulated trading activity in the eastern Mediterranean. Bronze, the alloy of copper and tin, a much more durable metal used for tools and weapons, did not appear until 2,500BCE. Burial under round barrows begins in eastern Europe and Brittany and stone alignments make their appearance at Kermario in Brittany and el.sewhere but apart from two examples in Brittany there are no stone circles outside the British Isles./ **** ** <../../Templates/onlinetexts-index.htm>************ * Craftmanship ** <../cap.htm>* * * * main page <../onlinetexts-start.htm>* ** <../onlinetexts-start.htm>** * Approaching the Second Millenium * * * *** ** *