stonehenge - English Heritage

047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:20 PM Page 103
enclosure at Robin Hood’s Ball which in Renfrew’s model of
Neolithic Wessex (1973a; Illustration 81) lies at the centre of
the east Salisbury Plain region.
Still greater uncertainty attaches to what can be said
about the relationships of the area before about 4000 BC.
Roger Jacobi (1979) has mapped the regional variations in
tool type for the later Mesolithic to create a series of social
territories across northwest Europe. On this model, the
Stonehenge Landscape lies within an extensive territory
between areas characterized by Wealden type assemblages
to the east and the southwestern type to the west. No
distinctive type of assemblage is defined for what is
essentially Wessex; doing so remains a challenge for the
future and is important in setting the scene for the
development of the regionally distinct traditions and
territories already referred to.
STONEHENGE WORLDS
Beyond its region the archaeology of the Stonehenge
Landscape suggests much wider connections for the
communities who occupied it. Here there is no one
Stonehenge World but a whole series of spatially diverse
worlds. Focusing on the Age of Stonehenge, the fourth to
second millennia BC, it is clear that the groupings of
monuments at different periods within that period are
replicated in many other parts of the British Isles from
mainland Orkney (Ritchie 1990; Barclay 2000) to the Boyne
Valley of Ireland (Eogan 1997), and the Carnac area of
Brittany (Burl 2000a, 331–48). The range of monument
types represented at each of these centres varies, but the
age-span and essential mix of ceremonial enclosures, burial
monuments, stone settings, and residential sites
concentrated in an area of perhaps 20 square kilometres
remains constant. In this sense, what we see in the
Stonehenge Landscape and its surrounding region is
entirely consistent with the activities of other communities
in the Stonehenge World of the third and early second
millennia BC.
Movements and contacts within the Stonehenge World
have long been recognized. These are most obviously
visible in the range of raw materials used in the
construction of Stonehenge Phase 3, much of which must
ultimately have derived from outwith the Stonehenge
Landscape and probably from outwith the Stonehenge
Region. The sarsen stones, the biggest elements in the
construction, may have come from Salisbury Plain, but are
most likely to have come from the Marlborough Downs
some 40km to the north (Green 1997, 260–3; and see
Bowen and Smith 1977). No extraction pits or quarries have
yet been positively identified, although such may await
discovery. Variations in the petrology of the sarsens from
Stonehenge have been noted (Howard in Pitts 1982) and
other possible source areas such as the downs of Dorset
and eastern Kent also deserve to be more fully investigated.
It is possible that more than one source is represented.
Since the early 1920s, when H H Thomas confirmed by
petrological analysis earlier suggestions (Thomas 1923), it
has been known that the bluestones used in Stonehenge
Phase 3 ultimately derive from the Preseli Hills of southwest
Wales (Illustration 82), as too the rhyolite used for some
pillars and the sandstone used for the Altar Stone (Green
1997 with earlier references). Much debate has surrounded
the means by which these stones reached the Stonehenge
Landscape but the inescapable conclusion is that they were
brought there by human agency, whether rolled along on
logs, carried on sledges or stretchers, or loaded onto boats
and shipped by water. Stone axes and perforated stone
implements were also moved around the country in much
the same way. A recent reanalysis of the provenancing of
recorded bluestone axeheads confirmed a marked cluster of
imported items in central southern England (Williams-
Thorpe et al. 2004), further strengthening the evidence for
Illustration 82
Dolerite outcrops at Carn
Menyn in the Preseli
Hills, Pembrokeshire.
[Photograph: Timothy
Darvill. Copyright reserved.]
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