stonehenge - English Heritage

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047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:17 PM Page 39 is widely regarded as a period of supreme interest and importance because it embraces the transition from essentially hunter-gathering lifestyles to agricultural subsistence systems. The early part of the period is characterized by small and obliquely blunted microliths and core tools, although insufficient assemblages from central southern England are known to allow accurate characterization. On present evidence the Stonehenge Landscape lies in a border region between two of Jacobi’s putative technologically based social territories: the South Western technology to the west and the Wealden technologies to the east (Jacobi 1979, 68). By the very end of the period, around the start of the fourth millennium BC, there is the first appearance of novel implements such as leaf-shaped arrowheads and polished axes, ceramics, the construction of earth and stone monuments, and the deliberate opening up of the environment (Phase A in Whittle’s (1993, 35) scheme for the Avebury area). Most authorities believe that in southern England at least the change between these conditions was fairly gradual rather than abrupt, that elements of the patterns that appear in the fourth millennium BC can be traced back in the fifth and sixth millennia BC. Of the 30 or so findspots of Mesolithic material in the Stonehenge Landscape listed by Wymer (1977) most can tentatively be assigned to the later Mesolithic, although a full examination of the material in its wider context is long overdue (cf. Roe and Radley 1969, 20; Coady 2004). The distribution of finds (Map F) shows an interesting concentration on the Avon–Till interfluve. At least five tranchet axes/adzes have been found (Illustration 22), mainly on the downland, including a possible example from the Stonehenge car-park (Cleal et al. 1995, figure 203) and one from ‘a field near Stonehenge’ which also yielded a flake of Portland chert imported to the region from Illustration 22 Tranchet axes from the Stonehenge Landscape. A: Starveall Plantation. B: Tumulus 22. C: Holders Road, Amesbury. D: King Barrow Ridge. E: near Stonehenge. [Drawings by Vanessa Constant of implements in Devizes Museum (A, B, D, and E) and Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum (C).] 39
047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:18 PM Page 40 outcrops on the south coast (Wymer 1977, 333; and cf. Palmer 1970). Another possible import is the perforated dolerite pebble hammer, probably from the Welsh marches, found inside Durrington Walls (Crawford 1929, 49–50; but cf. Roe 1979, 36). Rankine (1956, 159–60) lists two additional hour-glass perforated pebbles from within the Stonehenge Landscape – from Bulford and Winterbourne Stoke – but little is known about the findspots. Structures and deposits securely dated to the sixth and fifth millennia BC are scarce within the Stonehenge Landscape, as across southern England generally. At Stonehenge itself an animal bone from the packing of Stonehole 27 in the sarsen circle has been dated to 4340–3980 BC (OxA-4902: 5350±80 BP) and may be regarded as residual and indicative of pre-henge activity that is otherwise invisible (Cleal et al. 1995, 188–90 and 529). Excavations at Boscombe Down Sports Field revealed possible Mesolithic pits, but further details must await publication of the work. EARLY AND MIDDLE NEOLITHIC (4000–3000 BC) From about 4000 BC the quantity and range of archaeological evidence in the Stonehenge Landscape increases considerably. The fourth millennium BC, conventionally the early and middle Neolithic (Phases B–D in Whittle’s (1993, 35) sequence for the Avebury area), sees the construction of numerous earth, stone, and timber monuments. It was probably at this time that substantial clearings were opened in the Wildwood, with pasture and secondary woodland developing (Allen 1997, 126–7). Archaeologically, this period is well represented in the Stonehenge Landscape, with many of the main classes of evidence present. Investigations of these have, in one case, been used to define a nationally recognized class of monument, the oval barrow, while the Stonehenge Cursus is widely accepted as the first example of its kind to be Illustration 23 The Coneybury ‘Anomaly’. [After Richards 1990, figure 24.] 40
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