Issue 117

Mar / Apr 2011

Contents

news

All the latest archaeology news from around the country

on the web

Historical recipies to tempt the taste buds

requiem

Our tribute to the losses of 2010

my archaeology

rancis Pryor on his accidental career

spoilheap

Why study archaeology, and can it reveal the past?

letters

Your views and responses

features

10 big questions archaeology must answer

What can archaeology do for us?

THE BIG DIG: Winchester

St Mary Magdalen Hospital, with evidence of leprosy, TB and that Romans treated wounded soldiers

Return to La Cotte

Neanderthal butchering at this Jersey cave site

Dear Lord Chancellor

The human remains "crisis" continues, and children thank organisers

The one with archaeological evidence to support it

How the Stonehenge megaliths might have been moved

The Varmints Show

In the Varmints' fifth exploration of music and archaeology, we look at the 1990s Seattle grunge music scene.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

feature

The one with archaeological evidence to support it

How were the stones moved to Stonehenge? Hardly a new question – but this time, it was asked by an archaeology graduate working with a professor of archaeology. Andrew Young presents the case for his answer.

In Aberdeenshire, north-east Scotland, is a group of monuments called recumbent stone circles. Stonehenge is iconic, but the largest stones in Britain are in fact built into these circles: the heaviest sarsen at Stonehenge weighs about 45 tons, compared to the largest recumbent stone of some 70 tons. The Scottish circles incorporate a feature which I see mirrored at Stonehenge – the recumbent stone always lies between two upright pillars, and these three stones are always the largest in the circle. This very particular arrangement – epitomised at Cothiemuir or Midmar Kirk – is the inverted mirror of the Stonehenge trilithons, which are graded by height like uprights in the recumbent circles. The Aberdeenshire monuments may be connected with the moon; the main Stonehenge alignment is with the sun.

There is also an association between recumbent stone circles and Scottish carved stone balls – echoing the carved chalk balls found at and around Stonehenge. Carved stone balls originate in Orkney and Aberdeenshire, and are associated with a style of pottery called Grooved Ware, which spread southwards throughout Britain. Most carved stone balls have geometric patterns of grooves carved across their surface, depicting a series of shapes known as the Platonic Solids or compound polyhedra. The number of bosses carved on the balls demonstrate these neolithic people were able to count and use complex geometry. Recumbent stone circles and carved stone balls suggest that a group of people in north-east Scotland and Orkney were conversant with mathematics, geometry and astronomical alignments in a pre-literate context.

The stone balls have constant diameters. After watching some of the replicas I had made rolling across the ground as my children played pétanque with them, I hit upon an idea. Experiments with concrete weights and a small scale model confirmed the theory. From these basic experiments I was certain I could move very heavy stones such as the sarsens at Stonehenge. With the help of Bruce Bradley, associate professor in archaeology at the University of Exeter, I obtained funding from Nova (which was making a TV film called Secrets of Stonehenge, first broadcast November 2010), to build a full-scale model.

We built a wooden trackway on Cranborne Chase, Dorset, and used carved stone balls to move extremely heavy weights with just a handful of workers. We were able to move a weight equivalent to the bluestones of Stonehenge by hand with just eight people, and at a rate which would mean we could cover 20 miles a day (30km). Wooden balls performed as well as the stone balls. Using this method, people and a team of oxen could have moved any stone in a prehistoric monument in the British Isles.

The original builders of Stonehenge were capable woodworkers and would have had access to unlimited quantities of oak. We had to use a relatively soft wood, and the surface of the trackway distorted a little under the weight. We into their architecture, and count and inscribe precise designs onto stone objects, were clearly great engineers, mathematicians and geometers and as intelligent as we are today.

Replica Scottish stone balls carved by the author

So why are there no carved stone balls at Stonehenge? My hypothesis is that ideas travel easily, and that wooden balls could have been made locally, avoiding the need to transport stone balls from north to south. Maybe the carved stone balls were particularly venerated objects, reserved for decorating the recumbent stone circles in Aberdeenshire and considered too valuable to take away from the area. There is evidence in the ditches at Stonehenge for burnt cattle bones. Maybe the oxen that pulled the stones were ceremonially slaughtered and the wooden balls burnt in an act of conspicuous consumption.

Perhaps there was a group of people in Scotland behind all this. People who studied mathematics, geometry and astronomy would be ideally placed to devise a mechanism to move heavy stones with the limited available technology. Perhaps they had special training, aybe they were even the equivalent of priests.

Of course ideas can travel in either direction: a notion conceptualised in Wessex could have been adopted and venerated by people who had a strong interest in mathematics and geometry in Scotland – though the complementary evidence in my opinion strongly suggests it was the reverse. That we can detect links in the material culture, vernacular architecture and cosmological beliefs of these distant peoples is sufficiently informative.

I have devised a simple means by which prehistoric people could have moved very heavy stones using the technology available to them at the time. We were able to transport very heavy weights much more efficiently than any of the methods attempted previously – and my hypothesis is the only one with archaeological evidence to support it.

Andrew Young is a doctoral student at the Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter.

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