stonehenge - English Heritage

047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:20 PM Page 104
links between Saisbury Plain and southwest Wales. Perhaps
the most impressive thing about the bluestones, however, is
not the simple fact that they moved but rather the scale of
the achievement. As with the sarsens, there is still much
work to be done in exploring the exact sources of the
stones, especially in the application of archaeological
fieldwork to unpick the cultural landscape, rather than the
purely geological landscape, of the Preseli Hills and
surrounding areas. Preliminary work along these lines is
already yielding interesting results (Darvill and Wainwright
2002) including the close connections between Stonehenge
and southwest Wales visible in the form and construction of
oval stone settings (Darvill and Wainwright 2003).
The novelty of Stonehenge and the richness and variety
of objects deposited as grave goods in the surrounding
barrows has long attracted attention in terms of the wider
social, cultural, and trading links represented. In 1938,
Stuart Piggott made a very strong case for links between his
Wessex Culture of southern England and the early Bronze
Age of northern France, especially Brittany (Piggott 1938).
These proposed links were investigated further by Sabine
Gerloff (1975) in a study of early British daggers which
essentially reinforced Piggott’s views. More recently, Stuart
Needham (2000) has suggested that there is little evidence
for the migration of more than a few individuals between
the two areas and that similarities between them were
driven by the procurement of exotic materials and goods
through what he calls ‘cosmological acquisition’. Humphrey
Case (2003) has argued that the Breton links can be seen as
far back as the later third millennium BC and that the
Illustration 83
Hilversum and Wessex
biconical style urns from
burials in the Stonehenge
Landscape. A: Bulford 47.
B: Amesbury 71. C: Bulford
40. D: Bulford 47.
E: Winterbourne Monkton
2. [After Piggott 1973e,
figure 23a, e–g and j.]
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