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Authors: Andrew Marr
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the agricultural land and connected by trade links. For all the vivid modern legends of human sacrifice (there may have been some) and violent death, Neolithic Britain has left remarkably little evidence of war or organized violence, and none at all of castles or palaces.
But if so, how were so many people mobilized to create Stonehenge,or the awesome ‘hill’ at Silbury – which involved shifting as much earth as the average Egyptian pyramid being built at the same time – or the stone villages and monuments of the Orkney and Shetland islands themselves?
These were astonishing achievements. We are talking of people with no metal, no towns, nothing we would recognize as writing. But they lived on islands traversed by roadways connecting thousands of village settlements – the ‘Sweet Track’ in the Somerset wetlands, three miles of split oak, needing ten thousand pegs and made six thousand years ago, is Europe’s oldest built road – and must have produced the essential tools, including flint blades and axes, on a virtually industrial scale. The flint mines were deep enough to require miners working with little lamps. The boats carrying produce around the coasts must have been comparatively big – either dugout canoes tied together or even animal-skin vessels on a skeleton of wood. There is evidence of windlasses, of sophisticated joinery and immaculately made stonework. This is a sophisticated and patient culture.
Above all, there was time and there was cooperation. Stonehenge grew over a thousand years, more or less, starting with an earthwork, before it became a vast structure including eighty-two bluestones dragged 150 miles from Wales, and the sandstone, or sarsen, blocks weighing up to 53 tons each, taken from around twenty miles away. These were shaped, smoothed, raised and then topped with more, as lintels. How was it done? Various overground and water-borne routes have been proposed. Wheels were known, but it is thought the stones would have been too heavy, and the ground too rough, for wooden axles to cope. They could have been rolled on logs, but that would have been a very long job indeed. Sledges are thought more likely, drawn by oxen or teams of men, after the Welsh stones had been unloaded from boats.
As to shaping and raising them, there are several possible and plausible techniques, including using wedges and fire to crack the stones, digging wood-lined pits to raise them, and building slowly raised platforms to put the huge lintels in place. It is an awesome achievement but it did not require giants – or tyrants. The large tribal communities of the area, by working together and allowing themselves as much time as it took (rather as the later builders of cathedrals worked in generations of time), could have managed the various evolutions ofStonehenge, and the other great Neolithic sites, even the supremely impressive ziggurat-cum-hill at Silbury.
Hardly anybody disagrees about what Stonehenge was used for. Its alignments to the rays of the rising midsummer sun show that it was a temple of some kind. It was not an accurate stone calendar, as some have claimed, but complex markers for moonrise show a detailed interest in lunar cycles. Some new carbon-dating of post holes, where the measurements were taken, suggests this began incredibly early, around ten thousand years ago – so before Catalhoyuk. We cannot know the details of British beliefs so far back, except that they were associated with the sun, bringer of warmth and fertility, and with the moon, and so must have involved the seasonal celebrations and prayers typical of farming people everywhere. The huge barrow graves, with bones broken and burned before burial, suggest a reverence for ancestors and tribal or family continuity, which is certainly echoed in the white-plastered rooms of Anatolia. Darkness and death, a close interest in the seasons and the awesome power of the sun, family and memory; the rest is detail.
So we must think of
But if so, how were so many people mobilized to create Stonehenge,or the awesome ‘hill’ at Silbury – which involved shifting as much earth as the average Egyptian pyramid being built at the same time – or the stone villages and monuments of the Orkney and Shetland islands themselves?
These were astonishing achievements. We are talking of people with no metal, no towns, nothing we would recognize as writing. But they lived on islands traversed by roadways connecting thousands of village settlements – the ‘Sweet Track’ in the Somerset wetlands, three miles of split oak, needing ten thousand pegs and made six thousand years ago, is Europe’s oldest built road – and must have produced the essential tools, including flint blades and axes, on a virtually industrial scale. The flint mines were deep enough to require miners working with little lamps. The boats carrying produce around the coasts must have been comparatively big – either dugout canoes tied together or even animal-skin vessels on a skeleton of wood. There is evidence of windlasses, of sophisticated joinery and immaculately made stonework. This is a sophisticated and patient culture.
Above all, there was time and there was cooperation. Stonehenge grew over a thousand years, more or less, starting with an earthwork, before it became a vast structure including eighty-two bluestones dragged 150 miles from Wales, and the sandstone, or sarsen, blocks weighing up to 53 tons each, taken from around twenty miles away. These were shaped, smoothed, raised and then topped with more, as lintels. How was it done? Various overground and water-borne routes have been proposed. Wheels were known, but it is thought the stones would have been too heavy, and the ground too rough, for wooden axles to cope. They could have been rolled on logs, but that would have been a very long job indeed. Sledges are thought more likely, drawn by oxen or teams of men, after the Welsh stones had been unloaded from boats.
As to shaping and raising them, there are several possible and plausible techniques, including using wedges and fire to crack the stones, digging wood-lined pits to raise them, and building slowly raised platforms to put the huge lintels in place. It is an awesome achievement but it did not require giants – or tyrants. The large tribal communities of the area, by working together and allowing themselves as much time as it took (rather as the later builders of cathedrals worked in generations of time), could have managed the various evolutions ofStonehenge, and the other great Neolithic sites, even the supremely impressive ziggurat-cum-hill at Silbury.
Hardly anybody disagrees about what Stonehenge was used for. Its alignments to the rays of the rising midsummer sun show that it was a temple of some kind. It was not an accurate stone calendar, as some have claimed, but complex markers for moonrise show a detailed interest in lunar cycles. Some new carbon-dating of post holes, where the measurements were taken, suggests this began incredibly early, around ten thousand years ago – so before Catalhoyuk. We cannot know the details of British beliefs so far back, except that they were associated with the sun, bringer of warmth and fertility, and with the moon, and so must have involved the seasonal celebrations and prayers typical of farming people everywhere. The huge barrow graves, with bones broken and burned before burial, suggest a reverence for ancestors and tribal or family continuity, which is certainly echoed in the white-plastered rooms of Anatolia. Darkness and death, a close interest in the seasons and the awesome power of the sun, family and memory; the rest is detail.
So we must think of
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