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AMERICAN SCIENTIST

BOOK REVIEW

Monumental Geometry

Alasdair Whittle

SOLVING STONEHENGE: The New Key to an Ancient Enigma. Anthony Johnson.
288 pp. Thames and Hudson, 2008. $40.

General%20plan%20of%20Stonehenge
Click to Enlarge Image 

The great Neolithic monument of Stonehenge gets more rather than less
important with the passing of time. In the past couple of decades,
interest in Neolithic monuments in general has intensified, with the
academic literature awash with ideas about the symbolism of these
constructions and how people might have experienced them, adding to
the work previously done on their social context.

Although many people might straightforwardly conclude that an
undertaking on the scale of Stonehenge must have been an expression of
concentrated power within Neolithic society, the claim cannot be
conceded without thinking about the long processes of inspiration,
discussion, mobilization of labor and periodic reenergizing of all
those involved that must have accompanied such enterprises and indeed
made them possible. The challenge for archaeologists can slide from
simple detection of the presence of power to analysis of the ways in
which social preeminence could be asserted and maintained for what was
all too often just a brief interval.

So research into the ways in which monuments "worked" is crucial. How
did people approach and move around these great assemblies of earth,
timber and stone? Did they do so freely, or were they directed? What
did interventions in nature on this scale signify, and what meanings
could be projected by the materials used in their construction? How
were tradition and innovation respectively regarded? Leaders or
would-be leaders must have had tricky paths to negotiate.

In recent years, research specific to Stonehenge has likewise
intensified. We have seen the Stonehenge Riverside Project, led by
Mike Parker Pearson and colleagues, which involves study of several
key sites and locations close by, including the great henge, or
enclosure, of Durrington Walls, 3 kilometers north of Stonehenge.
Pearson's group has also worked in the 2008 season at Stonehenge
itself, re-emptying one of the 35 previously excavated Aubrey Holes
(56 backfilled pits arranged at regular intervals in a ring just
inside the circular bank and ditch that enclose Stonehenge).

The Riverside project is driven by the overarching hypothesis that
Stonehenge represents a "domain of the ancestors," which is separate
from the "domain of the living" that is represented by (among other
places) Durrington Walls and its newly discovered houses and feasting
remains. Both at Durrington Walls and at Stonehenge itself, midwinter
may have been the key season: a time of death but also of renewal,
when the living and the ancestors could be reunited.

Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright, in a separate project, have
spent several years making better sense of the principal source of the
smaller "bluestones" found at Stonehenge, which match dolerite
outcrops in the Preseli Hills of southwest Wales. In 2008 Darvill and
Wainwright made a small excavation within Stonehenge, investigating
the outer bluestone setting. Their big idea is of Stonehenge as a
place of healing.

Panoramic%20view%20of%20Stonehenge
Click to Enlarge Image 

Meanwhile, in 2007 Jim Leary and colleagues of English Heritage (the
country's Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission) did further
work on the great mound of Silbury Hill, some 20 miles to the north of
Stonehenge--work necessitated by the dramatic collapse of the old
tunnels through the mound. That intervention, thanks to formal
Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon determinations by Alex Bayliss of
English Heritage, is establishing a much more precise estimate for the
start of Silbury Hill, at around 2400 B.C. (All of the B.C. dates
noted in this review are radiocarbon dates that have been calibrated
according to international standards.) It may well be that the mound
was constructed in a series of episodes.

Questions of date are crucial. Bayliss and colleagues have formally
compared the dates of Silbury Hill and Stonehenge, and Parker Pearson
and colleagues have made estimates as well. The major stone phases of
Stonehenge were begun either around 2600 B.C. or, in another reading
of the radiocarbon dating evidence, around 2400 B.C. In either case,
those were stirring times, with more at stake in ancient politics than
simply the development of the individual sites, stunning though these
may be in their own right.

And finally, the Stonehenge Riverside Project has begun to reexamine
and date (according to preliminary reports in the summer of 2008 in
the press and in popular journals) the cremated human remains that
have been found in the ditch that surrounds the monument and in the
Aubrey Holes--physical features that belong to the very first phase of
Stonehenge, going perhaps as far back as around 3000 B.C. Could the
remains be those of some kind of elite, or even a royal dynasty? And
does their deposition overlap with the building of Stonehenge? We
shall see.

Into this dynamic research situation comes the independent
contribution of Anthony Johnson, the author of Solving Stonehenge: The
New Key to an Ancient Enigma. He adds his skepticism about an
elaborate role for Stonehenge as astronomical observatory or
indicator; many others also now regard with considerable caution the
claims made by Alexander Thom and Gerald Hawkins in the 1950s and
1960s. Instead, Johnson redraws our attention, as Thom and others such
as Aubrey Burl did a generation or so ago, to the laying out of
Stonehenge.

The ditch, the Aubrey Holes, the four Station Stones that were once
set just inside the surrounding bank as if on the opposing vertices of
an octagon, the iconic sarsen stones standing in their linteled circle
and the trilithon horseshoe, the bluestones in their comparable
settings, and even, to some extent, the enigmatic later concentric
circles of Y and Z holes--Johnson finds the layout of all these
features to be careful, highly accurate and symmetrical. He argues
that the prehistoric surveyors, although they may have used pegs and
cords to lay out the site, understood not only arcs and circles but
also how to set out squares, how to create octagons within circles by
using a combination of squares, and how to subdivide the circumference
of a circle (so that the 56 Aubrey Holes could be measured off at
repeating distances).

Understanding the geometry of squares and circles allowed the builders
of Stonehenge to achieve impressively regular proportionality between
the different elements of the stone monument as a whole, Johnson
argues. The side of a square dropped over the inner face of the sarsen
circle, for example, is half the length of the square contained within
the supposed Station Stone octagon. The sarsen trilithon horseshoe
could have been established with precise symmetry relative to the
surrounding sarsen circle by use of intersecting circles laid out from
different pegs along a shared axis.

Similar knowledge, Johnson claims, must have underlain the laying out
of the astonishingly regular, in some cases curved, designs on the
gold lozenges that were made in the region during the Early Bronze
Age, although those are a little later in date than Stonehenge itself.
Johnson further speculates on the significance of the numbers 56 and
30, the latter being the quantity of sarsen uprights in the great
sarsen circle: He is inclined to relate both numbers to the lunar
cycle.

In a nice final twist, Johnson suggests that the whole creation could
have been offered to the gods as an unmatchable gift of human
ingenuity, to be left as an inviolable sanctum. As a parting thought,
he raises again the possibility that the creators of Stonehenge came
into contact with the knowledge held by civilizations in the Near
East. However, earlier in the book Johnson argues that the principal
context for the monument is the phenomenon archaeologists call the
Beaker complex.

The Beaker complex refers to, among other features, graves and burial
mounds that contain objects made of copper and gold, and often ceramic
beakers, which are found in Britain beginning around 2400 B.C., and in
other parts of Europe as well. Amesbury, 5 kilometers east of
Stonehenge, is the site of one such grave, which contains the remains
of the Amesbury Archer, a man who lived around the time that
Stonehenge was built and whose tooth enamel suggests that he grew up
in northern central Europe. Another grave, containing the remains of
seven people, was discovered at Boscombe Down, 6 kilometers from
Stonehenge.

Thom's work in the 1960s showed that prehistoric people could lay out
many different shapes apart from circles, including ellipses and egg
shapes. Thom claimed that simple Pythagorean triangles were used, but
most scholars were not persuaded. Johnson's book is therefore not
breaking fresh ground here. It is, however, a useful reminder of the
complexity and accuracy of the Stonehenge layout. He makes a
convincingly plausible argument that the sarsen circle had to have
been a prefabricated construction in order for its lintels to have
curved properly and to have fitted with their neighbors and the
upright stones. However, the builders seem to have been much less
anxious about precision, and perhaps more concerned to create
deliberately differing textures, in other dimensions of the monument,
such as the varying surfaces of the sarsen uprights.

It would take a reviewer much more mathematical than myself to judge
Johnson's more ambitious arguments decisively, but I worry that his
ideal solutions are an overelaborate explanation of challenges that
could have been met with the simpler methods of laying out with cord
and peg, pacing and eye (or in the case of Early Bronze Age
goldsmiths, simply by hand and eye). The great stone phase at
Stonehenge may have been set up before the Beaker complex came into
existence in Britain. Because local timber buildings provide a good
precedent for circular form and stepped profile, there seems no need
to invoke connections with the Near East. (That kind of argument was
used in the 1940s by Christopher Hawkes, and in the 1950s by Richard
Atkinson, to support the idea that Mycenaean knowledge was behind the
construction of Stonehenge--an idea that has since been rejected,
because Stonehenge has been shown by radiocarbon dating to have been
constructed before the Mycenaean civilization came into existence.)

I myself, however, have speculated in print that the great mound of
north Wiltshire could have been in some way inspired by awareness of
the first pyramids. In any event it is wise to keep an open mind on
the ways in which knowledge and ideas could have traveled and been
developed in the world of the third millennium B.C. Johnson's
principal hypotheses would enhance either of the big current models
noted above, but those stand without the veneer of the geometrical
sophistication that he argues the site displays.

Alasdair Whittle is Distinguished Research Professor in the School of
History and Archaeology, Cardiff University, and a Fellow of the
British Academy. He has written extensively about Neolithic Britain
and Europe, and is the author of Europe in the Neolithic: The Creation
of New Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 1996).