stonehenge - English Heritage

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SECTION 2 – RESOURCE ASSESSMENT
‘We speak from facts, not theory’
(Richard Colt Hoare 1812, 7)
SCOPING THE RESOURCE
Good preservation, intriguing antiquities, and the
prevalence in the region of scholars and antiquaries meant
that the archaeology of Salisbury Plain attained a
prominent place in documenting the ancient history of
Britain at an early date. Reference has already been made
to the use of Stonehenge by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his
History of the Kings of Britain, written in AD 1139, and the
precocious excavations carried out for the Duke of
Buckingham in AD 1620. Overviews, general summaries,
and listings of the archaeological resource have been a
feature of antiquarian and archaeological studies for nearly
two centuries, and prior to the development of county sites
and monuments records it was these works that made
essential data about the resource widely accessible to
scholars and the public alike. One of the first was Richard
Colt Hoare’s Ancient history of Wiltshire issued in five parts
for binding in two volumes between 1812 and 1821, the
Stonehenge area being covered under the Amesbury
Station in the first volume (Colt Hoare 1812, 112–222).
Colt Hoare’s synthesis came at the end of a long
antiquarian tradition of writing county histories, but stands
on the watershed of such endeavours as one of the first
to draw on extensive archaeological investigations in a
sophisticated way, exemplified by his motto cited at the
head of the section.
More than a century later the Victoria History of the
Counties of England published the archaeological sections
of the History of Wiltshire, this time in two parts issued in
1957 and 1973. The first part provides a detailed summary
of the physical geography and geology of Wiltshire and,
building on earlier work by E H Goddard (1913), an extensive
gazetteer of the recorded archaeological resource prepared
by Leslie Grinsell using published sources and original
fieldwork between 1949 and 1952 (Pugh and Crittall 1957;
Grinsell 1989, 22–5). The second part is a very valuable
series of essays by Stuart Piggott, Barry Cunliffe, and
Desmond Bonney summarizing the state of knowledge from
the beginnings of human settlement through to the later
first millennium AD (Crittall 1973). Wiltshire was not
extensively covered by the county inventories prepared by
the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of
England, although a review of the field monuments in a
select area of about 13 square miles around Stonehenge
was carried out in the mid 1970s and published as an
occasional paper (RCHM 1979). This usefully updates the
earlier inventories of Colt Hoare, Goddard, and Grinsell. Two
still more recent synthetic overviews of Wessex archaeology
(Cunliffe 1993; Bettey 1986) bring the interpretation of the
Wiltshire evidence up to date and usefully set it within its
wider regional context.
Together, these overviews define and scope what, in
broad terms, may be considered the archaeological resource
of the Stonehenge region. At the centre of this are the in
situ monuments and deposits relating to the period from
the earliest human occupation of the region down to
modern times. The upper end of this chronological spectrum
is, however, problematic. Colt Hoare was not much
interested in archaeological remains later than Romano-
British times, Grinsell ended with the Pagan Saxon period,
while the Royal Commission dealt mainly with prehistoric
monuments although they included some consideration of
medieval and later structures under the heading of landuse.
Wiltshire County Council’s Sites and Monuments
Record initially used a cut-off date of AD 1500 for the items
it recorded, but during the later 1990s this was extended to
cover all periods up to the twentieth century. The scope of
what is considered archaeological has also changed
markedly over the last two decades. Historic buildings are
now often considered within the scope of archaeological
remains even though they may be still inhabited, as are
military remains of the twentieth century and before.
Ancient boundary features have long been part of the
record, some still in use in the landscape such as
hedgerows, banks, and fences. Tracks, paths, roads, street
furniture (milestones, signposts etc.), boundaries and
associated structures (stiles, gateposts etc.), ponds,
agricultural installations, and woodland features are now
equally well established as part of the overall
archaeological resource. The Valletta Convention on the
protection of the archaeological heritage (CoE 1992, Article
1.2–3) usefully defines the archaeological heritage as:
All remains and objects and any other traces of mankind
from past epochs:
• the preservation and study of which help to retrace the
history of mankind and its relation with the natural
environment;
• for which excavations or discoveries and other methods
of research into mankind and the related environment
are the main sources of information.
The archaeological heritage shall include structures,
constructions, groups of buildings, developed sites,
movable objects, monuments of other kinds as well as
their context, whether situated on land or under water.
Thus the archaeological resource should not be seen as
limited to in situ physical remains. Also of importance are
the ex situ remains now curated in museums and stores;
archives and records of earlier events (descriptions, plans,
maps, photographs, drawings, digital data sets etc.); the
cumulative body of knowledge and understanding that has
built up over the centuries and which is mainly now
recorded in books and papers; and the human resource
represented in the skills, knowledge, experience, insights,
and memories of those visiting, living, and working in the
Stonehenge Landscape.
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