Enigma of Stones :
Images of Avebury
Few things can be said about Avebury that would not be contested. As with the stone circle phenomenon more generally, Avebury is widely associated with the Neolithic revolution and the shift toward agriculture and more settled habitation. The expansion of agricultural activity in Britain from around 4500 BC, in particular the evidence of farming around Windmill Hill, near Avebury, give weight to this view. There can be little doubt that the monumental giants of this area arose in the general context of the agricultural way of life, where fertility and the cycle of the seasons took on a new significance for people.
Aubrey Burl, however, argues that a mainly pastoral economy, as distinct from fully fledged agriculture, could have freed the time required for a project on the scale of Avebury. Burl, in fact relates the construction of the monument to a decline in agricultural activity and even of population across southern England between 3250-2650 BC (Burl, 1979b, pp.113-4) In what he calls this “Dark Age”, Burl observes, grass encroached on previously cultivated land and there was a slow regeneration of the once cleared forest. Since Burl dates the beginning of work on what would evolve into the Avebury complex at around 2600 BC, the logic of his analysis is that it was associated with the revival of Neolithic activity, but within the space provided by a temporary pastoral phase within the broader Neolithic development.
A rather different picture emerges from Terence Meaden’s conjecture that construction actually began two centuries earlier, around 2800 BC. (Meaden, 1997, p.11) This would place the start of Avebury squarely in the “Dark Age” identified by Burl and would weaken the widely assumed connection between the monument and crop cultivation. Either way. If agriculture means progress, we are faced with the commencement of what would become among the most extraordinary constructions of prehistoric Europe in a period of decline.
In part it is the lack of carbon dated material from the circle area that makes so much uncertain, but Avebury is mysterious in less tangible ways. The character, relative scale and location of the stones are far from the everyday experience of most modern people. We inhabit a world of predominantly linear and (right) angular buildings and ways. Our normal inhabited environment and our expectations regarding it are challenged by Avebury and comparable places.
Avebury is self-evidently a human artifact. It was made by people comparable to ourselves and, at least in broad outline, we can retrace the steps they took in creating this remarkable site. We can approach their lives through archaeological research or, more intuitively, by playing musical instruments, perhaps dancing, in the surviving temples that they built. But equally, there is something not unlike an event horizon obscuring closer insight and understanding. One aspect of this is the time scale of Avebury’s construction. As with Stonehenge, the site was developed through a series of phases over centuries. While in that respect it can be compared with some of the great mosques, churches , synagogues and temples of more modern times, Avebury differs both in the obvious enormity of the project relative to contemporary population and the sheer scale, design, effort and audacity. We can only conjecture upon the motives and forms of association of the generations which produced Avebury. There are no obvious reasons for assuming that the significance of the great circle was continuous across the centuries of landscaping and stone manipulation. We do not know how its meaning may have varied among and between different social groups, or even for individuals.
The political and attitudinal context of Avebury can thus be visioned with quite differing emphases by equally credible interpreters. Meaden, emphasizing consensus and energizing engagement, writes of “the extraordinary efforts of the devoted men and women who built…(Avebury and Stonehenge)…as the focal site of their culture.” (Meaden, 1997, p.1) Burl, rather differently, sees in the emergence of monumental construction new patterns of hierarchical control over social labour as the exercise of political power: “Such a massive undertaking must have been directed by a powerful chieftain whose krall this was.” To underscore the point Burl adds: “”These sixty-ton slabs must have demanded the strength of every adult in the region.” (Burl, 1979, p.240) On this interpretation Avebury expresses alienation as least as much as free collective affirmation. From this point of view, why assume universal neolithic awe for the stones when it is also possible to view them with fear and contempt? Avebury simply is mysterious.
REEMERGING WORLDS OF WOOD AND STONE
Yet this should not rule out reasoned speculation on such places and their significance, even beyond the often sparce available facts. Our evolving understanding of Avebury's virtual neighbour, Stonehenge, is revealing. The familiar stone complex on Salisbury plain, with its associated ritual landscape, is almost universlly recognised as late neolithic/early bronze age in construction. We can be quite sure it predates Saxons, Romans, druids and others identified at different times as its creators. Like Avebury, it was begun by neolithic farmers. It was built through a sequence of stages, later to decline (along with the landscape itself) to its present state of decayed bleakness.
The Stonehenge that we know, however, is anything but the real start of the story, and has its own more shadowy precursors. A glimpse into this truly archaic world was offered in the 1960's in the course of work on the Stonehenge car park. Digging revealed a previously unknown tree-hole along with three large postholes. Charcoal dating places one posthole at 8500-8200 BC. (English Heritage, p.5) The front-running interpretation views the posts as the remains of totem pole-type structures. So far there is no archaeological understanding of their possible relationship with other, perhaps as yet unknown, landscape features. Equally no one has the faintest idea what may have predated these tantalizing wooden posts Their discovery, nonetheless, suggests the startling longevity of what was to become "Stonehenge" as a site of special cultural, presumably spiritual, significance.
In this regard, Stonehenge exemplifies a wider pattern. Massive wooden structures from the early Neolithic period are being discovered throughout Britain, particularly in the south west. In addition, many Neolithic and bronze age stone circles were superimposed over sites of previous wooden post structures. At Arminhall in Norfolk a horseshoe shaped ditch has been found to enclose “eight massive wooden posts almost a meter each in diameter.” (Dyer, 1997, p.65) Dyer dates these giants at 3230BC, while others write of an “earthwork henge of about 3400BC.” (Service and Bradbery, 1979, p.228) Close to Godmanchester, near Cambridge, are traces of a more or less contemporary temple within a rectangular (with rounded corners) bank and ditch perimeter more than half a mile in diameter. Inside the earthwork 24 wooden obelisks were set so as to form alignments with key events within the annual solar cycle and the 19 year lunar cycle. Astronomical alignments associated with key prehistoric festivals like the first days of May and August were programmed into the structure of the temple. It seems that around 2000BC a further temple, linked with wells, arose on the same site. Curiously, later people of the area, into the Roman period, avoided farming and other economic activity within this space, though fields and even a granary were worked outside the boundary. (Keys, 1991)
Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the Hindwell Neolithic temple in mid-Wales. Here some 1,400 great oak obelisks were arranged in a flattened circle covering 85 acres. Built around 2700BC the site is virtually free of human debris until the Roman incursion of AD43. More striking yet is the suspicion that this vast sacred space was segregated from everyday economic activity at even earlier times, perhaps from 4,000BC. (Keys, 2,000)
What are we to make of the immense wooden structure from around 3,000BC that stood at the Somerset village of Stanton Drew? Dwarfing the celebrated later triple stone circle complex that still stands nearby, the timber structure comprised between 400 and 500 oak posts organized to form 9 concentric rings. Each of these monsters measured up to a metre in width, weighed perhaps five tons and is estimated to have towered up to eight metres above ground level. (Hawkes, 1997)
RETREAT OF THE ICE
Going back to the Stonehenge postholes, consider that date range: 8500-8200 BC. Around two millennia would pass before, as had happened previously in periods of falling temperature (Ashton, 2003), rising sea levels separated what was to become the British Isles from mainland Europe. This was part of a global process spanning many centuries, but around 8,500BC a quite sudden rise in temperatures took place. (Dyer, 1997, pp23-4) The onset of this still continuing inter-glacial phase profoundly influenced the plant and animal life of the landmass. It also influenced sea levels and, with them, the location of the land-sea boundary. Before that time "Britain" was basically a place of ice and tundra, with vegetation limited to a few, hardy plant types. These were mainly lichens, mosses and dwarf birches. Then in a very short space of time, what geologists term the pre-Boreal phase, distinguished by full grown birch forests, began. The timing is impeccable. When larger trees became locally available, the first of the Stonehenge post holes makes its appearance. There can be little doubt that its construction marks a major development in the relationship between humans and their environment. Substantial, semi-permanent human artefacts of more than utilitarian significance began to appear in the landscape.
Proto-Britain was occupied intermittently by small numbers of mobile humans for at least approaching half a million years, perhaps longer. From around 230,000 BC its inhabitants were Neanderthals, replacing the more archaic human types who preceded them. It appears that the land was occupied when climatic circumstances allowed. Much is uncertain as, compared with what was to come, these populations made only slight impression on the earth. Most dramatically large numbers of hand axes remain. More elusively, there are occasional traces of seasonal camps and of worked flint fragments. Whatever clearances these people may have hacked from the forest were mainly transient and quickly reabsorbed by regenerated growth.
Severe cold around 18,000 years ago (the Devensian glaciation) triggered an evacuation of humans, but they returned when conditions allowed, perhaps 5,000 years later. Moreover, they returned with new tools and probably an enlarged sense of cultural possibilities. But the climatic fluctuations were (and are) not yet over. Another, briefer depopulation was ended by the onset of the Holocene warming, starting around 10,000 years ago, when people yet again returned in larger numbers. (Shotton Project, 2004, pp5-6) Simultaneously the big game herds (mainly reindeer and horses) moved north in search of familiar plant supplies. The departure of this valued food source meant that people also had to adjust to the new conditions. Some followed the herds while others stayed. For the latter diet shifted toward smaller game combined with higher proportions of vegetable and fish. As the Stonehenge posts testify, these proto-Britons were already finding new ways to leave their mark on their physical environment.
AVEBURY AND HUMAN PREHISTORY
As for Avebury, it is known that the stones that we see are only part of the neolithic picture, which included other stone artifacts as well as wooden entities. In 1990 it was announced that the remains of a large wooden structure, 130 feet in diameter, possibly a roofed temple, had been detected buried beneath the great circle. (Keys, 1990) Sixty years earlier archaeologists unearthed six concentric posthole rings at the Sanctuary on nearby Overton Hill (which is linked to the Avebury circle by what remains of West Kennet Avenue). (Pitts, 2000) Until the eighteenth century the Sanctuary was the site of a concentric double stone circle inside which giant posts - towering up to 17 feet above ground level - once stood. (BBC, 31/08/99) And this is not all. Around a mile to the south of Avebury, alongside the river Kennet, quite possibly pre-dating the great circle, stood yet another vast wooden structure. (Keys, 1989) Surviving traces of this timber enclosure hint at a rich and complex ritual landscape in which the greater amount of buildings was wooden. (Fowles and Brukoff, 1980, p.17). All this rotted away long ago, but what remains in stone implies sophisticated skills in carpentry and carving. This, in any case, should be expected from accomplished carved wooden sculptures dating back as many as 30,000 years in Europe alone. Moreover, the cultural ground for these artistic developments was prepared in Africa. Not only was Africa the site of the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens (aka “anatomically modern humans”, i.e. you and I) at least 130,000 years ago. It was there also that cognitive sophistication and manipulation of symbols - key elements of what is called “the human revolution” - found their initial creative expression. (McBrearty, 2000) This is clearest from artifacts, over 70,000 years old, discovered in Blombos cave on the Cape coast of South Africa. Perforated shell beads and pieces of ochre decorated with geometric engravings were unearthed. These surfaced along with ground and polished bone tools and “bifacial points” - sophisticated stone artefacts previously associated with European occupants 50,000 years later. The beads and ochre stones are accepted as evidence of symbolic thinking and articulate speech, human competences again long identified with development in Europe.
The earliest evidence for art so far consists of crayon-like sticks of bright red ochre, a mineral used in rock surface painting and some prehistoric burial rites. These apparent artists’ materials, found in southern Africa and dated around 130,000 years ago, may have been used for painting the human body (Knight, 1997), perhaps the original canvass for symbolic (self-)expression.
The Neolithic stone heads are only one, relatively late element of the cultural residue of tens of thousands of years of human creativity. Other components include animal and human carvings, variously interpreted animal-human hybrids statues, representations of presumed goddesses and possible gods. There is in addition a range of often recurring marks that few doubt denote symbolic representation. Around the edges of official archaeology there is a perception of traditions of figurative carving spanning hundreds of thousands of years. Dogmatic assertions, either way, about these ambiguous stones seems unhelpful, but they seem less easy to dismiss in view of the craftwork revealed by the 300,000 year old Schoningen spears, discovered in Germany. Famously compared with modern javelins in terms of both design and sophistication of production, they are viewed by many archaeologists as the hunting tools of pre-Neanderthal humans. The creative transformation of various natural materials clearly has deep, and growing, human roots. It may be that the co-presence of materials of radically different durability (or perishability) as stone and wood was significant to the designers, builders and users of Avebury and other Neolithic temples. Such features of its origins and development simply exhaust current interpretation.
PEOPLE, STONES, PLANTS AND ANIMALS: THE NEOLITHIC BREW
People lived and, as bone deposition sites like the temple known as West Kennet long barrow powerfully remind us, died in the Avebury area long before the circles and stone avenues arose. Burl (1979, p.238) suggests four reasons why these environs would have been “an alluring region” for the early settlers. First, the light, chalky earth was easily tilled and, at least in the short term, agriculturally productive. In addition, accessible forests were a source of timber and pig fodder, while abundant streams and springs provided water for animals as well as people. Finally, valleys and negotiable hill ranges allowed easy communications with other communities across southern Britain and beyond.
In this promising landscape the causewayed enclosures at Windmill Hill, Knapp Hill and Rybury were created, to be followed by the Avebury/Silbury Hill complex. In his majestic study “Prehistoric Avebury”, Burl provides some comparative contextualisation of this development:
“Around…six thousand years ago, when Ur was an important town in Sumer, long before the pyramids, when across the Atlantic villages of hunters and food-gatherers were subsisting on shellfish in the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, farmers first settled in the forested wildernesses of Avebury. (Burl, 1979, p.77)
In the Atlantic borderlands of Orkney, people living in settled vuillages were growing barley and herding animals as early as 3,900BC. More widespread traces of agriculture in Britain appear around a millennium later, toward the end of its 3,000 year spread westward and northward across Europe. While much is still controversial, many historians now see migration of farmers as well as adoption of the new ways by indigeneous foragers as parts of the process. (Bogucki, 1997) But what was the tempo and sequence of change within this immense much discussed “revolution”? Whittle (1996) points out that in Britain and Ireland clear evidence of stable, settled farming only really appears in the Middle Bronze Age, around mid second millennium BC. Before then development seems limited to sporadic clearances alongside more traditional and more mobile residence patterns and forms of resource use. For generations people continued to forage and hunt, even when the sedentary option was understood and available. Julian Thomas (1998, p.150) writes: “episodic cropping rather than the sustained use of horticultural plots” was the norm well into the Neolithic. Thomas’ account is confirmed by bone protein analysis for 4,100-2,000BC suggesting a minor role for plants in the British Neolithic economy and diet, which rather centred on meat and other animal products. Grain, in particular, “did not form a significant part of the diet.” (Richards, 1996) In his illuminating study “Understanding the Neolithic” (1999, p.222) Thomas elaborates further on the diversity of Neolithic ways of life: “Neolithic communities in Britain practiced a variety of different economic regimes, ranging from hunting and gathering to herding and horticulture.”
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that cultural preferences were operating alongside environmental constraints. The initial cautiousness in handling agriculture is a serious challenge to influential traditional interpretations of the Neolithic Revolution as an unreserved boon. The story, as classically recounted by V. Gordon Childe (1973), is that by dramatically increasing food availability agriculture triggered a set of fundamental changes of general and lasting human benefit. Time, it is said, was freed up for other activities including specialized crafts. Larger settlements and eventually cities became possible as individuals and groups specialized on the basis of the food surplus that agriculture made possible. From this viewpoint agriculture was a powerful force for human progress, enabling people to escape the limitations of pre-settled life and - let’s be frank - become more like us. More recent research, including that of Whittle, allows us to glimpse a more complex and plausible situation in which foragers were resisting full subordination to the cycles and rigours of agriculture. Why should they have done this? It is helpful to consider the extent to which agriculture has been mystified in recent times. The global traumas of industrial capitalism and the horrors of its characteristic militarism encourage idealization of earlier arrangements. Agriculture, in retrospect, can be mentally reconstituted as a simpler, more attractive way of life, “on the land” and therefore closer to nature. But together with the apparent benefits of personal property in land, agriculture imposed new disciplines and intensities of work that people would seek to minimize if not avoid. “By the sweat of thy brow” indeed.
And before the arrival of this new world of agriculture? Meaden (1999, p.10) reports that the earliest evidence for settlement within the Avebury district is to be found at Golden Ball Hill, where several house floors containing post holes and hearths were excavated in the late 1990’s. Dated at around 4,500BC, they were in use toward the end of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer period. By then forest clearing and herding - immediate precursors of agriculture - were intensifying, signaling a move toward transformed conditions and ways of life, though, as foragers resisted full subordination, these would sustain echoes of the old. For generations people continued to forage and hunt, even when the sedentary option was understood and available.
And before that? Little other evidence of Mesolithic presence has yet been found, but this may be only a question of time. Avebury is now well established as a stop on the tourist trail. It is possible that as its popularity grows, work to extend car park facilities will uncover Stonehenge-like post holes which double or triple the known span of sanctity of the site overnight. Meanwhile, the Stonehenge posts tell us forcefully that pre-agricultural people were quite capable of identifying and significantly modifying special places. It seems likely that the hunter-gatherers would return to these locations, probably seasonally, perhaps to gather and/or plant valued flora. They might even have settled temporarily, since we know that even today foragers can move in and out of cultivation and herding. The gatherer-hunter lifestyle entails mobility but is not indifferent to place. Long before formal permanent settlement people practiced what is sometimes called “proto-farming”. This certainly happened with selected plants, probably first of all the special psychoactive or medicinally beneficial ones. (Rudgley, 1999, pp.137-141) The people who could produce stunning artistic representations of animals on inaccessible cave walls would surely notice something as astonishing as a sprouting seed and grasp its connection with both lunch and the availability of further seeds the following year and beyond. Once the link is made plants can be managed within a low cost regime with no requirement of staying near them through the whole growing cycle. Across wider landscapes deliberate burning of vegetation would enrich soil, while animals would be corralled. It is clear that degrees of environmental manipulation were present at least many thousands of years before formal, settled agriculture (Tudge, 2003, pp.55-7) and that pre-neolithic people did more than drift from meal to meal, wherever they might find it.
While practicing elements of proto-farming they were simultaneously imposing other environmental modifications of core cultural significance. Some traces are haunting precisely because they are so difficult to contextualise. An example is the so far unique cemetery discovered, at Aveline’s Hole in the Somerset Mendip Hills. Scores of skeletons were laid side by side over a period of two centuries beginning some 10,200 years ago. Why there? Why the continuity? Archaeological minds were equally blown in 1998 with the identification of a 7,400 year old tomb, surrounded by concentric circles of stone, in the Carrowmore cemetery, County Sligo. (David Keys, 1998) In 5,400BC, centuries before agriculture, gatherer-hunters were creating such ancestral shrines. Special places, moreover, could well retain their specialness across the Neolithic transition to more settled agriculture and monumental building, even if their specific significance changed as humans increasingly asserted control over other species and each other.
NEOLITHIC NIGHTMARE
It is possible that Burl and Meaden glimpsed different aspects of a contradictory, transitional set of developments when they speculated on the social and motivational preconditions of Avebury’s creation. This would imply that archaic, relatively egalitarian collectivism on the one hand and the emerging social hierarchies of class society were influencing each other within the Avebury project through activities that were humanizing the earth in unprecedented ways. It may be that the surreally imposing structures of the Neolithic were part of a cultural programme to incite or inspire recalcitrant foragers to abandon the relatively free ranging lifestyle of their ancestors. To this day the monuments evoke the sense of ritual and therefore repetitive activity. It is tempting to interpret this as the spiritual counterpart to the agriculturalists’ unavoidable cycle of ploughing, planting and harvesting. This almost effortlessly implies preoccupation with solar and lunar cycles and reminds us of the alignment of many Neolithic monuments with significant recurring events within them (solstices, equinoxes). Perhaps the grandeur of the great wooden and stone structures were intended as testimonials to the unchallengeable superiority of the new ways - a kind of stone age equivalent to urban skyscrapers and theme parks as the icons of capitalist superiority in our time. Hey, buy into our vision and just look at what we could do together! Clearly many among the foragers needed to be convinced.
The Neolithic circles need not be approached uncritically or in a spirit of naïve identification. Nostalgia, in particular can easily distort our response to the monuments of the Neolithic. It is an attitude that views the past, or certain moments of it, in an idealized light. Real or perceived positive features (peacefulness, a culture of nurturing, environmental wisdom) are ascribed to the past and contrasted with the inferior character of the perceived present. (Trubshaw, 2001) This ideal, or at least optimal, imagined past is less challenging to the status quo than may appear at first sight. It is the mental product of the search for an authentic “home” in what is imagined as a once actually existing past. As such it offers a retrospective imaginary solution to our actually existing estrangement within the present. The people of the Neolithic (or whenever) are defined within this mental manoevre as fundamentally different from ourselves. Not least, it is not considered that THEY may have experienced nostalgia. The assumption is that THEY were living more fully and authentically in the(ir) present and felt no need to project THEIR notions backward in time.
Recent research suggests that the Neolithic temples were designed in part so as to generate light and sound effects associated with altered states of consciousness. These would only reinforce a broader sense of the specialness of such places, providing cave-like withdrawal from the normal world of obvious growth and decay, into a simulation of womb or death tunnel experience. It may not be far fetched to imagine this as a reinvocation of the great painted cave shrines created 10-20,000 years before. The neolithic monuments may have been part of an attempt to recapture something remembered from before sedentary life. They may have been linked with mythical memories of living in rather than struggling to transform and discipline nature.
The self-gratifying assumption of progress seems to foster yearning for a lost Golden Age as a psychic counterbalance. But might both be contrived at someone’s expense? At Woodhenge, close to its stone namesake, six concentric ovals of wooden posts stood inside an irregular ditch around two metres in depth. Beyond the ditch was a low surrounding bank. Dyer writes: “At the center of the structure was the grave of an infant about three years old, who had died from a blow on the skull.” (Dyer, 1973. p.360) Reflecting on a series of anomalous burials along the Beckhampton Avenue at Avebury, Burl observes: “…it may have been the place where Late Neolithic natives, intent on making their fantastic monument even more potent, dedicated the reluctant bodies of visitors to each new stretch of stones.” (Burl. 1979b, p.190) The scale and frequency of human sacrifice in pre-christian Europe and elsewhere has almost certainly been exaggerated for largely political reasons. Even so, decisions were being made, it seems, to ritualize violent human deaths. The rationale, as Burl implies, most likely included enhancement of general well-being within the community. In Avebury, at least, “outsiders” seem to have been the preferred sacrifice. Perhaps it was hearts that were turning to stone.
The society may have been stratified, with an elite or single leader in overall control. Jon Conescu (1995, p.296) sketches a likely corollary to this apparently unprecedented situation:
“With the passage of time and population increases, Neolithic settlements blossomed into city-states complete with distinct social classes. The creation and management of a food surplus by a ruling elite soon became a social reality; a ruling class who ministered to the spiritual as well as physical needs of its urban populace.”
In the early stages of this process, as people focused on manipulating the productivity of particular species in specific places, fertility took on a peculiar significance for the apostles of agriculture. Avebury, accordingly, is widely viewed as a place of ritual involving fertility and its cultural recognition. It also seems that at least at some neolithic sites, at some times, the dominant groups practiced or sanctioned unquestionably violent rituals within a dramatic monumental and ceremonial context. Embryonic possession of private property in land, in other words, came together with the imposition of ultimate dispossession - the sanctified killing of humans.
SHAMANS HAVE THEIR SORROW
Perhaps some powerful shaman, directing the procession, glimpsed a sequence of servitudes unfolding across the ages, intensifying around a crescendo of strange walled work camps and terrible, glowing mushroom-demons in the sky. This “specialist in ecstasy” saw drilled ranks direct exploding long bones that could kill at a distance, sometimes in great numbers. As the drums grew louder the flames of the temple fire revealed something new: billowing eruptions gave way to panoramas of vast human hives, fantastic structures of interdependence among unfamiliar, uncountable people. Stellar displays were enacted before limitless crowds. In other sequences wave-like surges swelled against whatever mythical or earthly power could engender such a spectacle. The shaman saw all this mediated by god-like metal beings by whom the humans seemed enslaved. Wonder fused with foreboding at the ominous grandeur of the vision as everything became brighter. Soon there was only consciousness of light, then somehow only light itself within a space where there was no then. The music tapered off, the dancers became subdued, as the trembling began and a hush arose. The mist-tinted full moon only further darkened the scattered oaks and thorn-bushes.
AH, LOOK AT ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
It may be that only massive stone monuments and processual ways could really express the physical and social burden of agriculture and the embryo of suffering that it contained. Support for this proposition comes from analysis of secondary mortuary rituals involving removal and reburial of bones and in particular skulls. Writing of the south-central Levant, for example, Kuijt (1996, pp313-4) suggests that such “…powerful communal acts…symbolically and physically linked and limited the perception or reality of social differentiation.” These organized and probably by now exclusively managed acts were attempts to formalize and further enforce a set of progressively more differentiated social roles, including gender roles, but also involving more fully developed male-on-male authority. The broad trajectory was away from more egalitarian (cooperative) patterns toward the management of hierarchies (control) within both kin relations and the rapidly evolving wider social and economic division of labour. This fundamental shift would accelerate through the bronze and iron ages. Nonetheless, from the outset the epoch-defining problematisation of consensus by hierarchy was permanently threatening to tear the society apart. In short, modernity was within view, while chieftains and monarchs already existed as potential. What remains unclear is only the extent to which the circle builders were already operating within the better-attested hierarchies of the bronze age and beyond.
New developments within the relations of ritualisation, then, were central to the subordination of society to agricultural discipline and may at least partly have preceded and anticipated that subordination. Later the new controls were the precondition for a contradictory expansion of the forces of human production. Output rose and with it population while mounting evidence indicates that at least in some places quality of life - as reflected in diet, health and longevity - declined. Simultaneously the emerging economic surplus permitted or at least helped consolidate the ascendancy of a ruling elite which must have experienced as well as imposed fear.
Increasingly the sacrifices look like basically magical strivings to normalise the new arrangements and standardize their effectiveness. Visions of the goddess, meanwhile, may have offered some consolation, at least for some people, for some of the time. Such adjustment could be effected through rituals associated with ideologies that emphasized the unavoidability of work-related cycles themselves eternalized through linkage with timeless celestial patterns. How could the monumental crystallization of human labour that is Avebury not have evoked very different if not polarized responses, even in the same individual? Such monuments embodied thinking as a practical aspect of people’s mode of being within the world. In turn, they shaped the thinking (and feeling) of those who participated in associated ritual enactments, but not necessarily in a single way. Why presume that there were no imagined or actual revolts against the new megalithic reality and those who controlled it? Why assume that such structures were viewed within a shared meaning framework when we know this was never true for, say, the Berlin Wall, Buckingham Palace, the Twin Towers?
Thus it is that these old stones can still evoke both a sense of creative synergy and feelings of profound loss. Collectivism itself was being appropriated by the new elite, whIch at the communal level, had apparently seized control of the conditions of life - initially as control of ritual, later through developing social forms of private productive property.
There is good reason to assume that a memory persisted of the “spontaneously arising counter-dominant coalitions of lower status individuals” (Charlton, p.5) that had limited proliferation of state and class hierarchy in earlier times. Perhaps such community alliances could draw strength from the objectified collectivism of the stones, their construction and their use. They would also potentially threaten the more exclusive political aspirations of the emergent economic and ritual overlords. By persisting, the memory would be renewed - even if, for reasons not yet fully clear, it was experienced largely as a sense of loss and grievance rather than a stimulus to open revolt. That would become a more feasible dream as the division of labour became more and more the hallmark of social reality.
The more closely we scrutinise this primary appropriation and its offspring, the deeper into our own history and potentials we seem to penetrate.
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Pitts, M., 2000. “Return to the Sanctuary”, British Archaeology, 51, Feb. 2000.
Richards, M., 1996. “First Farmers with no taste for grain”, British Archaeology, 12, March 1996.
Rudgley, R., 1999. Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, Arrow Books, London.
Shotton Project, University of Birmingham, 2004. The Ice Age in the Midlands and the Ancient Human occupation of Britain, August 2004 update. Available at: www.arch-ant.bham.ac.uk/shottonproject/iceage.htm
Service, A. and Bradbery, J., 1979. Megaliths and their Mysteries: The Standing Stones of Old Europe, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Thomas, J., 1998. “Grand Narratives of Prehistoric Europe”, New Left Review, 232, Nov/Dec 1998.
Thomas, J., 1999. Understanding the Neolithic, Routledge, London.
Trubshaw, B., 2001. “Monuments as Ideas”, At The Edge archive, Aug. 2001 version. Available at: www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/monument.htm
Tudge, C., 2003. So Shall We Reap, Allen Lane/Penguin, London.
Whittle, A., 1996. “When did Neolithic farmers settle down?”, British Archaeology, 16, July 1996
All articles published in British Archaeology can be found at: www.britarch.ac.uk
David Binns
August-October 2004