stonehenge - English Heritage

047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:20 PM Page 102
STONEHENGE IN ITS REGION
There can have been few if any times in prehistoric and
historic times when the Stonehenge Landscape as defined
here represented the total living-space of a community; the
Stonehenge Landscape must be seen as part of much larger
environments, territories, and regions. Such spaces can be
seen in the structure of medieval and later administrative and
political units: first estates, townships, and hundreds; more
recently parishes, districts, and counties. The earliest
identifiable territorial division relevant to the Stonehenge
Landscape is the Roman civitas of the Belgae centred on
Venta Belgarum (Winchester). The Stonehenge area lies in the
northwestern corner of this administrative region but it may
have provided many of the social, political, and economic
needs of the numerous communities living around
Stonehenge at the time (Frere 1967, figure 1). How far back
the geographical limits of these tribal Romano-British units
can be projected is not known, but it is interesting that
throughout the later first millennium BC and early first
millennium AD the Stonehenge Landscape was on the edge
of, or at the junction of, a series of four or five large territorial
units extending off in all directions. A similar territory may
have existed in the sixth and fifth centuries BC to judge from
the distribution of All Cannings Cross – Meon Hill style pottery
(Cunliffe 1991, figure 4.4). Ellison’s (1981) analysis of Deverel-
Rimbury ceramics of the later second millennium BC allows
the recognition of a wide distribution of Type I fine wares
across central southern England, again possibly indicative of
a social territory of some kind. In the second millennium BC
differences in the construction styles of round barrows either
side of Bokerley Dyke/River Avon have been noted, at least
in relation to its southern reaches (Bowen 1990, 79–81), with
ring-and-tongue barrows confined to the area west of the line
and elongated paired barrows only east of the line.
During the third millennium BC, when Stonehenge was
at its zenith, there is some evidence to suggest that the
group of monuments hereabouts was at the centre rather
than the edge of a sphere of interest. In this connection it is
interesting that the Stonehenge Landscape lies fairly central
to the main distribution of Case’s Group D series Beaker
pots (Case 1993, 260–3 and figure 3). All across Britain
there are major ceremonial centres of the third millennium
BC at intervals of about 40–50km. Around Stonehenge
these include Knowlton to the south; Priddy to the west;
Marden and Avebury to the north; and Dorchester on
Thames to the northeast. Each comprises a selection of
monuments of similar general types drawn from a fairly long
list of possibilities: henges, henge enclosures, palisade
enclosures, hengi-forms, pit circles, cursuses, and so on.
Many lie near earlier foci. Various interpretations have been
placed on these sites, amongst them the idea of central
places within substantial chieftain-based territories
(Renfrew 1973a, 547–54), or that they were fixed points
within cycles of movement by essentially peripatetic
communities (Barrett 1994; Whittle 1997c).
In the fourth millennium BC the region within which the
Stonehenge Landscape fits might be rather different and
based more on the catchment of the Avon and the group of
long barrows and oval barrows clustered to the west side of
the Avon and around the Nine Mile River (Ashbee 1984b,
figure 6). These may be associated with the causewayed
Illustration 81
Social territories in
Neolithic Wessex:
Renfrew’s 1973 model of
developing organizational
scale. A: Fourth millennium
BC. B: Third millennium BC.
[After Renfrew 1973a,
figures 3 and 4.]
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