stonehenge - English Heritage

047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:18 PM Page 54
Illustration 33
The Amesbury Archer.
Reconstruction drawing by
Jane Brayne. [Reproduced
courtesy of Jayne Brayne
and Wessex Archaeology.]
isotope studies of the Stonehenge Archer’s teeth suggest that
he spent at least some of his life in or around the Alps,
reopening the possibility of long-distance contacts between
communities living in the Stonehenge Landscape and groups
elsewhere in central and southern Europe. Jackie McKinley’s
study of the skeletal remains suggest that for much of his life
he had been disabled as a result of a traumatic injury to his left
knee which would have caused him to limp. Many of the
artefacts were probably locally made, but the metal used in
one of the copper knives/daggers is Spanish, the gold could
well be continental, and many of the stone objects come from
sources at least 50km distant.
About 5m away from this burial was another, a
companion perhaps, also contained in a rock-cut pit and
perhaps sealed below a ditchless barrow (Fitzpatrick 2003a,
150). This was also a male, younger at about 20–25 years of
age, and perhaps related to the first because they share
minor abnormalities in their foot-bones. Radiocarbon
determinations suggest that this burial is very slightly later
than the first so they could be siblings or father and son.
The younger man’s contained rather fewer grave goods: a
single boar’s tusk and a pair of gold earrings or hair tresses.
Together, these burials raise many questions about the
extended trade networks and long-distance social ties of the
period, as well as emphasizing the need for vigilance in
monitoring development activity throughout the
Stonehenge Landscape.
Further investigations about 700m away in May 2003,
during the course of monitoring the laying of a pipeline at
Boscombe Down, revealed a rather different kind of burial of
the late third millennium BC (Fitzpatrick 2003b; 2004;
Fitzpatrick et al. 2004). Here a large rectangular pit contained
the partly disarticulated remains of three adult males, a
teenage male, and three children, together with eight Beakers,
flint tools, five barbed and tanged flint arrowheads, a boar’s
tusk, and a bone toggle used as a clothes fastener. The burials
had been inserted on several occasions over a period of time.
A man aged between 30 and 45 had been buried on his left
side with his legs tucked up and with his head to the north.
Close to his head were the remains of three children (one
cremated). The teenager, aged about 15–18, and the other two
men, both aged 25–30 at death, were placed around the body
of the older man. Scientific studies of these burials, dubbed
‘The Boscombe Bowmen’, suggest that the teenager and
adults at least were all from the same family and isotope
analysis of samples of tooth enamel suggests that they may
have spent some time in southwest Wales, the area known to
have been the source of stones used in the construction of
Stonehenge Phases 3i to 3v (Fitzpatrick 2004a).
Other burials accompanied by Beaker pottery under
round barrows include: Amesbury G51 and G54 (Annable
and Simpson 1964, 39); Durrington G36 and G67 (Annable
and Simpson 1964, 39–40); Wilsford G1, G2b, and G62
(Annable and Simpson 1964, 40 and 43); Winterbourne
Stoke G10, G43, and G54 (Annable and Simpson 1964, 38
and 40; Ozanne 1972).
Oval barrows were considered in the discussion of fourthmillennium
BC monuments but given that some are undated
and several unexcavated it is probable that some at least of
the examples noted above belong to the third millennium BC.
Wilsford 34, excavated by Thurnam in 1865–6, is interesting in
this connection as he found five contracted burials, one
accompanied by a Beaker pot (Cunnington 1914, 405–6).
Excavated examples elsewhere in southern England suggest
that single inhumations and multi-phase construction should
be expected (Drewett 1986; Bradley 1992).
Flat graves containing inhumation burials associated with
later Neolithic or Beaker pottery are well represented in the
Stonehenge Landscape. These include examples within
monuments such as Stonehenge (Evans 1984), Woodhenge
(Cunnington 1929, 52), and Durrington Walls (Wainwright and
Longworth 1971, 4). Seemingly isolated inhumation burials in
flat graves or pit graves of the same period include those near
Durrington Walls (RCHM 1979, 7), at Larkhill Camp (Short
1946), and at Totterdown Clump (Wainwright and Longworth
1971, 5). It may be noted, however, that many of these lastmentioned
sites were chance discoveries and were mainly
recorded with little attention to establishing context or
associations. The reinvestigation of some sites might yield
valuable information. Some other undated flat graves may
also be related to this period.
Cremation burials of the third millennium BC are also well
represented, and include the group of about 52 deposits/
burials from Stonehenge Phases 1 and 2 (Cleal et al. 1995,
451), the Durrington Down W57 barrow (Richards 1990, 176),
and a pit grave with a cremation and three sherds of Grooved
Ware in Circle 2 south of Woodhenge (Wainwright and
Longworth 1971, 3).
Enclosures of many forms are known to date to the third
millennium BC. In addition to the henges already mentioned in
this section, and the possibility that the Stonehenge Cursus
also dates to the later Neolithic as discussed in the previous
section, there are two other sites in the Stonehenge
Landscape that deserve attention. First is the so-called
‘Palisade Ditch’ or ‘Gate Ditch’ immediately west and north of
Stonehenge, known through relatively small-scale excavations
in 1953, 1967, and 1978 (Cleal et al. 1995, 155–61) and traced
through aerial photography and geophysical survey for a
distance of over 1km (David and Payne 1997, 87). Each of the
excavated sections differs in detail, but most show a V-profile
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