Stonehenge: A History

foreign became a world heritage site and a global symbol of the mysteries of unrecoverable pasts Stonehenge was a bidable icon for Notions of British Antiquity and identity in the Middle Ages it was given a life it was given life in a world of Arthur Merlin and British origin myths in the 18th century it became recognized as a human Monument but one from an unknown past defined by its opposition to the classical world the stones had been raised by the people Caesar invaded in the 1960s to take one last example it was drafted as a computational Observatory morphing into a confusion of Earth Mysteries aliens and alternative lifestyles but its most enduring modern evocation was shaped in the first quarter of the last century whenever we have a national crisis wondering what being British means we invoke Stonehenge the centerpiece the epitome of our past and Island identity the stories we tell draw both on Research and on attitudes held by nation that once boasted the world's largest and most culturally varied Empire the first scientific excavation at Stonehenge occurred in the year Queen Victoria died and the first modern book about it was written by a British engineer of the Indian railways that quarter century was also the era in which modern archeology began ideas about Stonehenge were reflected in wider visions of antiquity that continue to dominate popular histories today I propose to consider that image of national antiquity and how it was framed at Stonehenge by asking how the monument was built on outline an alternative to the popular Vision that reflects the wealth of new archeology we judge pre-history as deficient and thus by implication as we will see recent and modern peoples too I will ask you to think about prehistoric communities in a different way and I hope to convince you that what I propose is more suited to Modern Britain and to a global community I need to start however with a quick introduction to how archeology works the common image of archaeologists is that we Bumble along until we fall over a discovery which changes everything we thought we knew archaeologists themselves seem to enjoy explaining how difficult it is to know anything about the remote past we give lectures about it write books about it now I understand if you're not an archaeologist it's easy to imagine that we make it all up so here briefly is why the opposite is the case you need to know that archeology is actually very good at writing history though I should add that that's not the same thing as saying that we always get it right there are three parts to getting stories that were never written down we collect data we try to make that information useful and we try to see the lives of real people through those efforts each of these is being continuously explored by a whole range of professions and sub-disciplines so first we collect data we survey sites we dig things up we analyze them and use a lot of science here's me collecting data on the left in 1979 my first excavation at Stonehenge and on the right in 2008 at another excavation at Stonehenge now this data this fills stores and libraries but it's only the start or it's only part of the beginning for at the same time a great deal of research and thought goes into how we can read those data which has several steps removed from The Real World Past how and why does stuff get buried and what doesn't what happens to it when it's there and which bits are going to tell us things we actually want to know and then there's what matters most tonight given what we have achieved with all the science and stuff how can we read what people in the past were doing and thinking and here we can experiment we can make pots we can grow rare crops we can build Bridges or we can see what other people do both of these have been very useful we couldn't begin to understand what was in the mind of a homo erectus millions of years ago when they were making a stone hand ax if we hadn't learned how to make one ourselves alternatively we could go say to Mexico or turkey and see how hand looms of a particular type that might have been used in Iron Age Britain work and so on doing this helps us escape the very restricted mindset and the particular technologies that the world in which we ourselves live there's an old archaeological phrase for this using ethnographic parallels we can go further than this beyond the particular and seek to identify apparent behavioral constants telling stories and making music for example seem to be Universal so we might imagine that Ice Age people didn't just paint animals on Cave walls they told tales about them if I could go back in time and see Stonehenge being built I wouldn't ask why are you doing that I wouldn't expect to get a meaningful answer I'd say sing me a song archaeologists often forget that it is human to laugh people need to sleep not everything we can know about the past has to be dug up okay getting the right blend of these tactics is tricky today's science dominates advances in radiocarbon dating and DNA studies are allowing us to map how people moved about and were related to each other the building blocks for social insights undreamt of when I was a student at the beginning however at the beginning of this Quest into the past there were only texts the Bible and for Britain medieval mythology in which Stonehenge was built by Merlin after flying the stones over from Ireland and classical observations of people on The Fringe of Empire Roman descriptions of the British emphasize their barbarity dressed in skins or naked covered in body paint in a cold land of Mists and swamps a vague notion of barbarity permeated early Antichrist visions of ancient Britain and to help them picture those vanished people they drew on reports from the new world as Caroline Dodd's penok tells us in her new book on Savage Shores thousands of indigenous Americans came to Europe from the days of first Contact for antichrists these people were walking illustrations of how ancient britons might have looked and who better to show us this than John White artist and governor in 1587 of Roanoke colony in Algonquian territory in what is now North Carolina famously white Drew many Algonquian figures and scenes he also Illustrated ancient britons including these two pictures of boats were published together and explicit comparisons were made between them the juxtaposition showed I quote how the inhabitants of Great Britain have been in times past as Savage as those of the of Virginia some argue today that there was an underlying purpose to this to show a Europeans European colonists that they had little to fear from the algonquians who were more civilized than ancient britons their Warriors bows show greater craft skills than the Britain's brutal swords they dressed better and their body paint was more subtle while ancient British women paraded naked with nothing but weapons Algonquian women also dressed well prepared food and looked after children dress and body ornament has told us sorry breast dress and body ornament were important signifiers of identity in early modern England habit was how you dressed as well as how you behaved even skin color perhaps was a cultural choice here's another 16th century view of Britain's at the time of Julius Caesar this time drawn by Lucas to here a contemporary of whites then working in London even if classical texts do very occasionally say North Europeans were naked and it is very occasionally it's hard to think that to here would have drawn this if he hadn't heard about people who lived in warmer climates funny enough to hear was also the first person who we know to have given us a shot at a realistic depiction of Stonehenge so we have early modern Europeans observing other peoples in a way we might call ethnographic rather than myth-making and we have the first Antichrist notably William Camden who published his first edition of Britannia in 1586 the Year John White Was preparing to sail to Virginia figuring out how to tell stories about ancient britons without falling back on medieval myths the comparisons start at precisely the same time and they are never given up over the following three centuries and Chris worked out ways of writing histories before history they looked at standing monuments like Stonehenge and chance fines of strange artifacts they started to dig into Earthworks often often finding Graves with more strange things they realized these artifacts could be arranged into a Time louder a stone bronze and then iron the word prehistory was coined in Denmark in the 1830s excavation began to be treated as a science and in 1901 a man who'd spent most of his career in Japan directing directed the first proper dig at Stonehenge but we're getting ahead of ourselves in the 16th century up to a point there was no great investment in the state of other peoples Britain's or Algonquins they were just being observed but any element of disengagement soon fell away writing in the later 17th century John Aubry author of brief lives and at Stonehenge the man after whom archaeologists named the Aubry holes thought the early inhabitants of Wiltshire were as Savage as the beasts whose skins were their only Raymond their druidic priests were described by Caesar and the stone circles at Avery and at Stonehenge were their temples they had the use of iron however which made them and I quote two or three degrees I suppose less Savage than the Americans such judgments soon became commonplace analogy is between observed peoples and imagined ancients moved steadily back in time as the living were deemed inferior to the extinct traveling on the beagle in the 1830s Charles Darwin described people he came across as Savage the lowest barbarians and in Tahiti Those Who quote would have formed a fine picture of man inhabiting some primeval Forest Daniel Wilson a Scottish archaeologist who coined the English word prehistoric developed his interest in ethnography when he moved to the University of Toronto in 1862 he published a massive work on prehistoric man that's the title of his books for him North America was like a distant planet viewed from Earth so far away that what he saw in his telescope was long past its forests its animals and its peoples were yet to suffer the oppressive effects of Millennia of history that a Europe had endured perhaps there he could identify the Primeval condition of man as he had existed after leaving Eden so for example on the Pacific northwest coast he finds quote rude tribes living in the simplest condition of nomadic Savage Life and remember Wilson's books are about prehistoric man not modern peoples move forward a century in Roger Fry's influential work on on Art published in 1920 vision and Design he compared Ice Age cave art in Spain to Modern Art in South Africa the prehistoric art was better he said but the South African Bushman had somehow held on to some of that ice age genius as they were descendants of Paleolithic man though the achievements were otherwise at the same rudimentary stage move forward to a couple of months ago the conversation a website promoting academic research Illustrated an article about the supposed origins of language seventy thousand years ago with photos of modern people in southern Africa funny enough that bison on the left is from the cave that uh Roger Fry was writing about Envision and design but this is an older book um and this issue shows starkly in the work of the Victorian politician banker and Popular Science writer John Lubbock rightly hailed as the man who created the concept of giving historic remains in this country legal protection his ancient monuments Bill received its first reading in Parliament 150 years ago this month in 1865 he published a book called prehistoric times as illustrated by ancient remains it's important this and the manners and customs of modern Savages went down well glowingly reviewed in nature its seventh edition was published in 1913. I tell you I'd be pleased at something like that it was an extraordinarily detailed Roundup of archeology there was also a survey of more or less contemporary people around the world whose lives thought Lubbock could help his readers understand the Ancients who were his main subject there's some pretty rough stuff the progress of science will erase ignorance and so on but he did have considerable respect for the technological skills he was describing there's plenty about Stonehenge incidentally which he compares to megalithic structures in India now Lubbock followed up this book with another one about prehistoric people first published in 1870 it too was popular and reprinted several times but this was no catalog of facts here Lubbock was on a mission the book was called the origin of civilization and the Primitive condition of man it has a revealing subtitle the mental and social condition of savages in later Edition Stonehenge features two opposite the title page I suspect the publisher was hoping to revive sales Stonehenge always sells but it's nowhere else in the book instead it's a lengthy polemic about the behaviors of living Savages studies of the lower races of man he says has direct importance in an Empire like ours minds are impenetrable and communication in this Empire is often impossible how can you govern like that answer you need to understand Savage Life Lubbock warns his readers to expect facts which are very repugnant to our feelings yet still all this is wrapped up in the idea that these wild uncontrollable people that somehow Britain is trying trying to rule are in some ways like prehistoric folk and can help us understand the past it too was repeatedly praised by reviewers in nature and so we come to Stonehenge by the turn of the 20th century Stonehenge have been bombarded by endless debate about its age and purpose and in the absence of any evidence it was completely mystifying and random a key question was where had the stones come from for example but there was no answer but there but there'd be little advance in real understanding since the 18th century and the days of the great antiquary William stukley meanwhile the site had decayed people had dug holes all over it a cart track ran through the middle visitors horses scattered manure underfoot and people left broken bottles some of the largest megaliths had fallen over and Stones within easy reach have been very badly damaged by souvenir Hunters within 25 years all that had changed began in 1901 with a small excavation that remains one of the best ever conducted at the site the project focused on straightening a large Stone people feared might fall on visitors and it was led by William gowland he was a retired engineer common form of wildlife at Stonehenge who had worked in government in Japan while there he got really interested in archeology and excavated megalithic sites he's better known in Japan for his archeology than he is here his experience showed in Wiltshire today thanks to more excavation and radiocarbon dating we can see the monument was changed at various points over as much as a thousand years it didn't take a thousand years to build it took a year or two to build but then there would be a few you know a century or so then they'd change it again and then leave it and then change it again we still basically agree with gallon's conclusion that Stonehenge have been built at the end of the Stone Age or at the start of the Bronze Age we'd now say around 2500 BC give or take a few centuries let's dig the owner sold the stones and in 1918 the buyer Cecil charba local Barrister and worthy gave it to the nation Stonehenge was now permanently protected or to put it another way any damage done was authorized by the government a larger conservation program began accompanied by further excavations which continued until 1926. directed by William Hawley who's the chap on the right with the mustache who'd served with the Royal engineers in South Africa these revealed most of what we know today as well as insights into what lies underground there were a couple of significant spin-offs from this work the stones at Stonehenge had long been divided into two types the big assassins a local sandstone and the other smaller megaliths made from a variety of foreign rocks that had come to be known collectively as blue stones suggestions as to where these originated were not limited to Southern Britain and extended even to Ireland Finland and Africa hawley's team found a lot of rock debris and Herbert Thomas the government's photographer had a good look at it he definitively established that almost all the blue stones had in fact come from pembrokeshire and the only way they could have got to the site is by people bringing them this is a model the geologists had made and is now in the science museum each of the stones is made from Rock collected at the sources he identified while new studies backed by new science have changed almost all the details of the original work Thomas's two principles remain Southwest Wales human transport the other outcome was a book published in 1924 it was called the stones of Stonehenge and it was written by one Herbert Stone there are two funny enough there are two archaeologists who had quite a big impact in the last century on Stonehenge and both of whom had surnames Stone and I often wondered if you know if only they'd live longer the three of us could have written a a probably a often referenced article but it's not talked about much this day these days Herbert Stone's book further restoration and excavation occurred later in the century one of the archaeologists involved then Richard Atkinson wrote a bestseller which gave the impression it All Began in the 1950s in reality most of his data were drawn from the 1920s excavations and Herbert Stone's book although Richard Agustin directed excavation at Stonehenge she actually wrote the book before almost all of his excavations had begun in any way popular culture had already absorbed Stone's ideas which were further backed up by the official guidebook which from 1953 was written by one of hawley's excavation assistants the Stonehenge most of us know today is pretty much a child of the 1920s you probably can't see it and I certainly can't but if you've got really good eyes you could see that stone 2 Herbert stone 2 was an engineer in fact he was a very distinguished engineer he studied maths and science at King's College London and spent most of his career working in Asia first at Simla in Calcutta then on the Rangoon Railway in Burma I'm using obviously names of the time and finally as chief engineer of the East ending East India Railway based at Hydra the bad here is a station on a line he worked on and below is what is now the neru setu Railway Bridge another of his schemes when built the longest in India and said to be the second longest in the world on projects like these he will have visited stone quarries and you would have heard from other Colonial staff in India especially in the Northeast about people who were then creating megalithic monuments which could be compared to Stonehenge I suspect his wife would have said that after retirement Stone became obsessed with Stonehenge in his book he describes a quarry at Hyderabad here is granite broken up with stone hammers that he calls malls and that he characterizes as the native system here is another view in the same Quarry where steel hammers have been used which one imagines many seeing the photo at the time would have read as British Order and efficiency but on the far left is a rounded Boulder this is a native Stone Mall they were used to split off a layer of granite for building use a row of men says Stone each holding a mall between two hands above his head stood along the rock face at a signal from a foreman they brought down their moles simultaneously and a crack would open up back in England the railway engineer found that the megalus at Stonehenge had also been carved with malls many had been found in the recent excavations in the center are a couple from his book and on the right a selection in the British museum Stonehenge exhibition last year now megalus says Stone was split by hammering with moles aided by setting a line of fire which would be doused with water such use of fire had been reported to the Royal anthropological Institute in London in 1871 observed by a man who was an aide to comp in the second anglo-burmese war and later joined the Survey of India and here it is a quarry scene drawn by Brian hope Taylor an archaeologist who was also a talented illustrator for a 1960 National Geographic feature here are the malls and the lines of Fire what we also see are Timber levers and rollers the use of these have been described especially in Indonesia where people have been photographed moving megalus in 1915. and hear from Stone's book in 1924 is a model illustrating the use of rollers he made these little models and took them around when he gave lectures they must have been wonderful but sadly they don't seem to exist anymore now he wasn't the first to show this this striking scene is from the romance of early British Life by G F Scott Elliott a well-traveled botanist born in Calcutta published in 1909 the book's a fantasy often comical in its absurdities and anachronisms one of the things these ancient British do is they make wine although it's not very good apparently but the great king offers the people and I quote the privilege of volunteering to help in building Stonehenge the work went on for years neither slave nor volunteer and I hear Scott Elliott puts the word volunteer in quotation marks ever returned to his native Village a stone is prized from a quarry with wooden wedges and dragged over giant rollers they eat unleavened bread rather like the chapatis of India this is this is supposedly prehistoric Britain now the artwork is by lancelot's speed who among other things Illustrated Edward boulier littens The Last Days of Pompeii this is not a huge distance from Alan sorrel's Vision on the right drawn for the for a Ministry of Works guidebook in the late 1950s in both we see rollers half naked men being ordered about and an overall sense of dark drama and fear and here taking Stone's idea to its ultimate conclusion is a full-size model megalith on rollers at the Stonehenge Visitor Center you can test your strength by pulling on the rope so the megaliths are dressed at the quarries put on wooden rollers and pulled my men on ropes until they reached the building site here Herbert Stone tells us they were raised with sheer legs and this is how that looks in English heritages 2022 Stonehenge guidebook quite complicated stuff but the people who built Stonehenge as the 1920s guy book says Were A Primitive race so how did they do it Herbert Stone agreed that the stones were erected by A Primitive people but they were told what to do by an expert this quote architect and engineer was a man of extraordinary ability the words of a man who'd overseen construction of India's railways and was probably a foreigner a wise man from the East so we have a bunch of ideas about how to shape move and erect large stones all of these have been imported from Asia mostly by Colonial officers who had recorded local people making megaliths sheer legs alone I think came from Stone's engineering own engineering works we also have a judgment about the sort of people who did it native britons Were A Primitive race but they pulled off the extraordinary engineering achievement of Stonehenge because they were directed in the mere manual labor not quite as slaves but neither were they volunteers by a higher being from another land and I quote A Primitive people under the immediate guidance and supervision of an expert now far-fetched as that might sound it was espoused in the 1950s by Richard Atkinson in the guise of a priest from Bronze Age Greece and as such it survived well into the 1970s and you can still find it kicking around today in odd corners let's recap a bit more this Stonehenge vision a civilized man abroad directing primitive laborers was created in the 1920s by a former Imperial Indian Railway engineer he was 22 when the first edition of Lubbock's book about Savage minds and lives was published a book which not only compared modern with prehistoric people but advocated their study as important because it would make them easier to rule I don't think archaeologists at the time or since were explicitly conscious of this pedigree in the way that say John Lubbock would have been they just thought this is what happened at Stonehenge they didn't think that Stonehenge people were like the modern subjects of Empire up to a point they may have done it with Innocent intentions but archaeologists throughout the last century turned to Modern people around the world as models for antiquity we have round houses in arnid Britain build round houses in Kenya let's look at those they use Stone ax blades in near Olympic Britain they use Stone ax place too in New Guinea let's look at those or has happened on the conversation in 2022 we want to illustrate a story about the origins of speech seventy thousand years ago let's use modern photos of quote the indigenous Sun people in the Kalahari Desert a distinguished archaeologist now retired wrote a book for her colleagues about ethnographic parallels published in 1981 defines anthropology as the study of primitive societies unconscious I think but both Antiquity and modernity are being judged they are deficient just as the image of ancient Stonehenge is informed by modern peoples that comparison judges modern peoples it works both ways one person who made no bones at all about the Primitive nature of the prehistoric world was a popular writer on Stone circles the late Aubry burl in a 1987 book he compared Stonehenge people quote short-lived superstitious Sun worker worshipers who lived in dirty hovels in a dark land and feared death but fear the dead more to quote 19th century Zulus in southern Africa a lifestyle I made that out but I didn't and here's the rub when it came to Stonehenge Herbert Stone got almost everything wrong for a variety of reasons none of his proposals now enshrined in modern Stonehenge mythology could have worked now all this might seem like nitpicking but bear with me we're going somewhere fire would not have worked on the Stonehenge types of rock and there is no evidence for its use in this way the roller idea had long been supported by ethnographic records in Indonesia but this was based on a misreading in this photo on the left taken around 1915 in Sumatra the stone is not being pulled over rollers as everybody said it was but a longer fixed track and the poles are pegged into place and despite best intentions experiments which are really quite common always show rollers to be a barely controllable liability and as for sheer legs as for sheer legs much loved by experimenters they would have been impossible at Stonehenge there just wasn't room it might have worked for one or two stones in a field but not in the confined spaces of a building site you'd have to do the sort of things the illustrator John Civic does here now I'm not blaming John Civic for this he will would have been doing what he was told to do to suit what an archaeologist had written for a magazine feature but what he does is he moves the tall trilethons which um on the far right there's two uprights with a single Stone over the top so slightly taller than the rest of them he moves them so far out that they touch the Stone Circle he shrinks the workforce literally and as you still don't have the distance to get the leverage you push the stone up from the back just one more I love these these fabulous scenes are from a 1961 ladybird book drawn by John Kenny splitting described at one Indian Quarry but geologically inappropriate in the UK rolling and ramping Earth ramping was another thing that Herbert Stone picked up from India he proposed it as a way to raise the horizontal lintels at Stonehenge if it had been used at Stonehenge there would be physical evidence sadly there is none now I puzzled over these illustrations for some time Lady Bird books often go AWOL with pre-history but where did the inspiration for these illustrations come from they are so vivid I thought he hasn't just made these up and then I found it Rapa Nui the photo is from torhea doll's best-selling book about Easter Island published in 1958 so just a couple of years before the ladybird book came out obviously based on the photograph now in fact it's only something like this that would have been possible at Stonehenge by sheer accident this illustrator had hit on more or less the right thing now we don't have the evidence for Earth and rounds but the same effect could have been achieved with Timber and we do know that people then were in the habit of using and working very large Timbers with skill now you might be thinking realistic people got the stones up these are just details but there is a bigger point the ideas that came from observations in Asia weren't really thought through Stone and other archaeologists didn't look carefully enough at what was being done in India neither did they think they had to get close to the stones at Stonehenge to understand their materials to scrutinize the evidence for how they'd been dressed and to imagine not just one stone being pushed about but an entire complicated Monument all of that came only this century we now know where at least some of the large stars and Stones came from this is West Woods 20 miles north of Stonehenge high on the Marlborough Downs this gives us the chance to look for quarries we have much to learn it means we can map the journey the stones took knowing each end point this shows a wooden track early last century made for dragging lard Timbers out of forest in Malaysia in Northeast India people used to carry small megaliths in wooden frames these are both viable techniques in neolithic Britain I can't imagine how you could get 75 sarsons to the site from more or less the same location averaging 20 tons and many weighing more than 30 and tied to a 10 ton Sledge without a fixed track and we do know that people were laying wooden tracks that more or less this time elsewhere in Britain study of the megalith surfaces at Stonehenge has revealed them to be far more heavily shaped than we had realized and people didn't just bash with large malls they used tools of varying sizes in a sequence of ever finder dressing grinding and smoothing were as important as hitting the evidence was always there it was just that like Lubbock Herbert Stone had her mindset that encouraged him to think that he the engineer was the boss everyone else was a laborer primitive hands in need of instruction to understand the simple technology you needed to do no more and give it a quick glance it didn't occur to anyone that superstitious Sun worshipers might be able to do things the archaeologists could not and the final irony is if they'd looked more closely in India they might have got it right when Herbert Stone in retirement was defining a Stonehenge for the 20th century social and cultural anthropology were taking shape bronislav malinowsky in Britain and France boas in North America we're promoting the idea that peoples or cultures could only be understood on their own terms they could not be judged there was no point and it was meaningless and it led to misunderstandings partly they were reacting against that very dismissal of other peoples as savages the living counterpart the archaeologists Primitives Lubbock's lower races of man now archeology too was taking shape at this time but here emphasis was self-consciously on the new Sciences of excavation and artifact study archeology had something to prove that it was a proper field of study and it did that by focusing on digging the earlier Reliance on knowledge of other peoples rapidly fell away as a result Stonehenge archaeologists missed what was going on in anthropology and more immediately in India some people there continued to move and raise large stones and some of the new observers recorded them in particular John Hutton Hutton joined the Indian civil service in 1909 he later became commissioner for the census of India encouraging officials and I quote to produce descriptive accounts of the tribes and backward communities with which they were familiar he resigned in 1936 to become professor of anthropology at the University of Cambridge but by then he'd been able to conduct substantial field work among people living in the Naga Hills in the Northeast here he recorded Megalis being created in Vivid detail what's striking is how much what he observed seems relevant Stonehenge as he himself recognized and I'll mention just one thing how Stones were raised upright Hutton saw no sheer legs instead he described how people gathered around a stone and by pushing and pulling wedging and Levering with poles and a bit of rope they just worried it into place which is pretty much what we see here on the left on Rapa Nui says Heidel it took 18 days to get a small statue upright from horizontal hour by hour it was barely possible to see anything move it was a very gentle human affair and Stonehenge nudging Stones up with Timber frames levers and short ropes has to be the only realistic option we get the megaliths upright with Timbers and as seen here on the right in West Samba and other islands in Indonesia we use Timbers to lift the lintels and people because labor is not a costly resource to be managed and minimized but the social engagement of entire communities who actually want to be part of the project whether or not they're needed because Stonehenge Bonkers as it is and undeniably an architectural and engineering challenge is more than anything about people politics religion sharing and being seen the more the better contrast that with sheer legs this is a scene during filming for a BBC broadcast in 1994. first a stone is rocked into a pit with the help of a large weight then it is pulled vertical with giant poles and long ropes this project is the inspiration behind the English Heritage guidebook illustration once everything's in place the actual erection is over in a matter of minutes it happens fast with an element of genuine Danger now I've I've already pointed out that you couldn't do this at Stonehenge because there's no room and too many stones in the way but what I want to draw your attention to here is the distance between the stone and the people moving it somewhere far out of frame are gangs pulling on the ropes contrast this with the Rapa Nui scene where people are close to the Statue here there is an intimate Affair between laborers and stone drawn out over half a month they were close to the stone in Hutton's description too in all he writes about megalus in India creating them is not just about engineering there's an understanding between people and stone a slow careful respect in one of his articles Hutton described people erecting wooden Memorial posts in 15 pages only two are actually about carving and raising posts the rest is about ceremonies symbolism ritual preparations drinking and sacrificing animals this is not of course just about a few people in India any construction of a ceremonial or religious Monument where we have information is a huge social event we're seeing here I think one of those universals that as archaeologists we can bring in as a working hypothesis that entirely changes the way we think about how Stonehenge was built it's about people stupid another man who looked at Living peoples in the 19th century and through them thought he could see prehistoric times was Edward Tyler inspired by John Lubbock he wrote an influential book primitive culture first published in 1871 searching through and there's lots of quotes here records of the low races of mankind he contrasts lower tribes and higher Nations he identifies progress and degradation and he comes up with a scheme primitive culture steadily gets better so that over time all peoples might progress from a stage of savagery through barbarism to civilization in the present some people remained primitive others had regressed in the Mississippi Valley writes Tyler native tribes in modern times do not rank high even as Savages though in the past they were a somewhat Advanced race in the states Louis Henry Morgan did something similar in his book published in 1877 this was explicitly a historical scheme that began sixty thousand years ago with lower savagery while Tyler was happy to compare his stages to the three archaeological ages of stone bronze and iron and Morgan less so there are clear parallels here were schemes in which the past and people in the present assessed are somehow still living in that past were judged the further back in time the less sophisticated the less complete Morgan and Tyler are themselves Now history but the Three Ages live on in popular narratives and in academic thinking nominally of course ages of stone bronze and iron are just handy ways of dividing up an immensely long past yet it's hard to escape the impression that an element of judgment remains even among archaeologists the further we go back into the past other things being equal the less there is for us to dig up early populations were smaller they had less of a physical impact early Technologies generated less varied waste age decays less survives from a lot of times for the archaeologist it's undeniable that this had has the effect of making older records at once less complicated and harder to read that easily becomes a version of lives was simpler then and when you're in the habit of thinking about culture changes over millennia it is also easy to slip into an unspoken version of Morgan Tyler progression and all that happens in the context of the archaeological profession that began with judgments about modern peoples which as we've seen at Stonehenge remain embedded in popular imaginations and of course it's not just about Stonehenge in 1911 The Illustrated London News ran a feature about a newly excavated Iron Age Village at Glastonbury very important side it was headlined not the woad-dawged Savage of the old history books the Civilized ancient Britain after More Than A Century of research which has transformed understanding of the past that line is still being used every week something turns up to show us that ancient people were not as primitive as we thought because we do think ancient people were primitive and that is a judgment not just on the past which has no voice our understanding of prehistoric people is so tied up with reports of recent people that is also a judgment on anyone alive whose technology culture or lifestyle is not the same as ours on at least on at least two occasions men from Africa turned the argument around and in doing so exposed its nonsense in his Memoir published in 1789 used it to counter slavery and I'm I've no doubt he would have been able to deliver this line better than I can but let the polished and haughty a European recollect that his ancestors were once like the Africans uncivilized and even barbarous did nature make them inferior to their sons and should they too have been made slaves every rational mind answers no nearly two centuries later primitive britons were again invoked to admonish the patronizing British in this case it was Hastings Banda premier of what is now Malawi the nysaland addressing his Parliament he criticized white missionaries for calling out dancing as Savage and sinful and wonderfully he names Stonehenge I wish he said I could bring Stonehenge to nyasaland to show there was a time when Britain had a culture that was Savage we are back with John White and his Elizabethan counterparts Imagining the inhabitants of ancient Britain to be as Savage as the people of Virginia but the solution to this is not a primitive shouting match it is to drop such terms altogether and not just the vocabulary but most importantly to escape the whole judgmental thing the world of Stonehenge was very different from our own or from that of any other people today including the appearance and the genetic makeup of the Stonehenge people themselves but here is my key point we must recognize that those differences were down to history and choice the particularities of time and place not to any qualitative failings either in culture or individuals in Britain then or I need to add in view of the way some people approach Stonehenge today now if we can achieve that open curiosity that Wonder for such alien differences in our midst bereft of judgment then we can claim Stonehenge to be part of the past of everyone anywhere thank you we have time for one or two questions depending on the length of the answers according to tradition we always give the first question to our online community and I'm going to take the biggest one from that which is of a few sentences Mike now what do we know and don't we know about Stonehenge that was that was the question yeah well what do we know God for gonna say um we know a great deal about Stonehenge we know a lot about the materials about the chronology the complex history of the structures that were built at Stonehenge the people who lived in the area and where they lived and what they were doing what we don't know is what we would learn were we to conduct new excavations actually out in the monument um there are a lot of details in that history that are completely mysterious to us um but there is an extraordinary amount I mean give one example DNA um is really Asian DNA is a really new field and so we're still feeling our way with it but already we've discovered that under burials in the Stonehenge landscape that are contemporary with the later history of the monument we've actually been able to identify individuals who are related to each other so here in one part of Wiltshire there's somebody who's an uncle of somebody else who was a cousin of somebody else in a different barrier I mean it's just utterly extraordinary and we've just begun this Napoleon has been suggested as being the father of modern archeology is that something you agree with or don't agree um I think I sort of yes and no I mean certainly if you're French you probably say yes I think that I don't think there's really a father or a single person I think archeology is it's such a huge complex thing it Embrace is just absolutely everything I was talking to the man who taught me a-level archeology when I was at school the other day and he said what he liked about archeology was that it was multi-disciplinary teaching it at school it was geography anthropology maths physics science statistics anything you call geography anything to think of and so archeology emerged from all these different fields of study and it worked best even today when you have dozens of people coming from different backgrounds bringing their different perspectives working together but yeah and apparently it was a big figure not least of course as a collector thank you I wonder if you've got any comment on the way in which Stonehenge is kind of appropriated by people now ranging from sort of you know new ages called warriors on the one hand to kind of far right this is part of our white Heritage kind of on the other side and you can sort of seemingly read anything you like into stormhenge and I wonder what you what you think about that I think I'm often unhappy with the way that that's done because I I think Stonehenge belongs to all of us so when you have a particular narrow Group whatever it is whether it's in the far right or the Looney left or anything in between um you feel this is actually taking something away from the place because it's so much bigger than these narrow Fields but you're never going to stop it it's always it's always been the case and always but I mean I as an archaeologist I'm conscious you know that some people may feel the archaeologists um claims don't hinge as their own you know they have a particular perspective on what's going on there um I do find I mean like the the stuff that happened I'm really pleased that there's no longer a festival there I think when in the um 80s when the festival was going I think that was a huge distraction and although it's very popular with a lot of people um not least academics um it was a huge it made visiting for the ordinary business tourists and so on it made it almost impossible to get near the place or appreciate it and I think for me the most important thing is that we should all be able just to go and experience Stonehenge in our own imagination and take their whatever we like and Come Away with whatever we like without having that Disturbed too much a wonderfully uplifting news from which to end we need to end at seven and the iron hand of time is upon that hour so I shall thank you [Applause]

2023-03-03 20:55

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