Who Built Stonehenge?

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What is the date of the erection of Stonehenge? The finding of so many implements of flint in the excavations of 1901 shows that the structure belongs to a period when flint was still largely used. The occurrence of a stain of oxide of copper on a worked block of stone at a depth of 7 feet does not necessarily prove that the stones were erected in the bronze age, for the stain may have been caused by the disintegration of malachite and not of metallic copper. At the same time, we must not infer from the frequency of the flint implements that metal was unknown, for flint continued to be used far on into the early metal age. Moreover, flint tools when worn out were simply thrown aside on the spot, while those of metal were carefully set apart for sharpening or re-casting, and are thus seldom found in large numbers in an excavation. We have, therefore, no means of accurately determining the date of Stonehenge; all that can be said is that the occurrence of flint in such large quantities points either to the neolithic age or to a comparatively early date in the copper or bronze period. It is unlikely that stone tools would play such a considerable rôle in the late bronze or the iron age.

Stonehenge from the South-west

At the same time it must not be forgotten that Sir Arthur Evans has spoken in favour of a date in the first half of the third century B.C. He believes that the great circles are religious monuments which in form developed out of the round barrows, and that Stonehenge is therefore much later than some at least of the round barrows around it. That it is earlier than others is clear from the occurrence in some of them of chips from the sarsen stones. He therefore places its building late in the round barrow period, and sees confirmation of this in the fact that the round barrows which surround the monument are not grouped in regular fashion around it, as they should have been had they been later in date.

Many attempts have been made to date the monuments by means of astronomy. All these start from the assumption that it was erected in connection with the worship of the sun, or at least in order to take certain observations with regard to the sun. Sir Norman Lockyer noticed that the avenue at Stonehenge pointed approximately to the spot where the sun rises at the midsummer solstice, and therefore thought that Stonehenge was erected to observe this midsummer rising. If he could find the exact direction of the avenue he would know where the sun rose at midsummer in the year when the circle was built. From this he could easily fix the date, for, owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the point of the midsummer rising is continually altering, and the position for any year being known the date of that year can be found astronomically. But how was the precise direction of this very irregular avenue to be fixed? The line from the altar stone to the Friar's Heel, which is popularly supposed to point to the midsummer rising, has certainly never done so in the last ten thousand years, and therefore could not be used as the direction of the avenue. Eventually Sir Norman decided to use a line from the centre of the circle to a modern benchmark on Sidbury Hill, eight miles north-east of Stonehenge. On this line the sun rose in 1680 B.C. with a possible error of two hundred years each way: this Sir Norman takes to be the date of Stonehenge.

Sir Norman's reasoning has been severely handled by his fellow-astronomer Mr. Hinks, who points out that the direction chosen for the avenue is purely arbitrary, since Sidbury Hill has no connection with Stonehenge at all. Moreover, Sir Norman determines sunrise for Stonehenge as being the instant when the edge of the sun's disk first appears, while in his attempts to date the Egyptian temple of Karnak he defined it as the moment when the sun's centre reached the horizon. We cannot say which alternative the builders would have chosen, and therefore we cannot determine the date of building.

Sir Norman Lockyer has since modified his views. He now argues that the trilithons and outer circle are later additions to an earlier temple to which the blue-stones belong. This earlier temple was made to observe "primarily but not exclusively the May year," while the later temple "represented a change of cult, and was dedicated primarily to the solstitial year." This view seems to be disproved by the excavations of 1901, which made it clear that the trilithons were erected before and not after the blue-stones.

Nothing is more likely than that the builders of the megaliths had some knowledge of the movements of the sun in connection with the seasons, and that their priests or wise men determined for them, by observing the sun, the times of sowing, reaping, etc., as they do among many savage tribes at the present day. They may have been worshippers of the sun, and their temples may have contained 'observation lines' for determining certain of his movements. But the attempt to date the monuments from such lines involves so many assumptions and is affected by so many disturbing elements that it can never have a serious value for the archæologist. The uncertainty is even greater in the case of temples supposed to be oriented by some star, for in this case there is almost always a choice of two or more bright stars, giving the most divergent results.

Next in importance to Stonehenge comes the huge but now almost destroyed circle of Avebury (see picture 1). Its area is five times as great as that of St. Peter's in Rome, and a quarter of a million people could stand within it. It consists in the first place of a rampart of earth roughly circular in form and with a diameter of about 1200 feet. Within this is a ditch, and close on the inner edge of this was a circle of about a hundred upright stones. Within this circle were two pairs of concentric circles with their centres slightly east of the north-and-south diameter of the great circle. The diameters of the outer circles of these two pairs are 350 and 325 feet respectively. In the centre of the northern pair was a cover-slab supported by three uprights, and in the centre of the southern a single menhir. All the stones used are sarsens, such as are strewn everywhere over the district.

picture 1. Avebury and the Kennet Avenue. (After Sir R. Colt Hoare.)

An avenue flanked by two rows of stones ran in a south-easterly direction from the rampart towards the village of Kennet for a distance of about 1430 yards in a straight line.

At a distance of 1200 yards due south from Avebury Circle stands the famous artificial mound called Silbury Hill. It is 552 feet in diameter, 130 in height, and has a flat top 102 feet across. A pit was driven down into its centre in 1777, and in 1849 a trench was cut into it from the south side to the centre, but neither gave any result. It is quite possible that there are burials in the mound, whether in megalithic chambers or not.

South-west of Avebury is Hakpen Hill, where there once stood two concentric ellipses of stones. A straight avenue is said to have run from these in a north-westerly direction. Whether these three monuments near Avebury have any connection with one another and, if so, what this connection is, is unknown.