by Michael G. Lamoureux, March/April 2009
Introduction
Since most of Britain's past lies in the time of pre-history before the Romans conquered Britain in 43 AD and brought with them a system of writing and good record keeping, archaeologists must rely on artifacts to decipher daily life in Britain from the time Mesolithic peoples crossed the land bridge that connected Britain to Denmark, northern Germany, and southern Sweden (when the North Sea basin was dry land) in the early stages of the post-glacial era, circa 9000 BC, until the first century A.D.
Since the climate of Britain doesn't preserve archaeological evidence very well, most finds are limited to stone and bone artifacts, stone structures, and monuments that formed religious and cultural centers in early times. As such, early structures -- whether they be huts, burial mounds, public buildings, or monuments -- provide most of the clues modern archaeologists have about daily life in the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and early Iron Ages in the British Isles.
Monuments are important indicators in the development of civilization as they demonstrate that a society is organized, stable, centralized, and capable of undertaking communal work on a large scale and indicate the extent to which life is dominated by ritual and ceremony. A monument or physical structure not only controls movement around a site, but those used for ceremonial purposes physically divide people into those that are "in", such as those at the head of a procession, and those that are "out", such as their followers. Changes in architecture correspond to changes in daily life, ritual, and social organization and allow one to track the development of a society where no written record exists. Furthermore, in many societies, the rise of monumental architecture often coincides with the appearance of social inequality and economic intensification.
Causewayed Enclosures & Barrows
The earliest monuments in Britain appeared in the early Neolithic, circa 3900 BC, and took the form of causewayed enclosures and barrows. A causewayed, or interrupted ditch, enclosure is a roughly circular area delineated by ditches and embankments that are interrupted every few meters to form a large number of crossing places. While most of the known causewayed enclosures are in southern England, there are also known examples in Scotland and northern Ireland. The earliest known sites, that include Maiden Castle, Dorset, and Windmill Hill, date back to between 3900 and 3700 BC and were often used to "pen" domesticated animals and cultivate plants, although many sites, including Hambledon Hill, that dates to between 3800 and 3600 BC, appeared to be more ceremonial, and even funerary in nature.
A barrow is a mound of earth or rubble that contains one or several burials. The long barrow is a long rectangular mound of earth or rubble covering a burial place. Examples include Fussell's Lodge in Wiltshire, which contained 50 individual burials, and West Kennet (also in Wiltshire) that contained 46 individual burials. Barrows were likely associated with the veneration of ancestors and underlined a newfound importance of social continuity and the close links between human societies and occupied territories in the Neolithic.
Most barrows are between 30 and 105 meters and set on an east-west axis and the east end, of timber and stone construction, is generally broader and higher and usually contains a passage with chambers leading off of it.
The barrows evolved into chambered tombs, which split off a main passage, and which were often accompanied by henges, circular banked earthwork monuments which often contained circular timber structures in the early Neolithic (and then circular stone structures in the later Neolithic). Some of the chambered tombs, including the Cotsworld-Severn group of Western England and Wales and the graves at Maes Howe in Orkney and Newgrange in Country Meath, were quite elaborate and had numerous chambers leading off of the main passage. One of the best preserved henge monuments of the period is Avebury in southern England which was a dense Neolithic complex of surrounding monuments that dates from between 4000 and 3800 BC to the beginning of the British Bronze age in 2000 BC and included a dense concentration of long barrows, avenues of posts and stones, circular ceremonial buildings, enclosures, and henges. Other important groups of henges are found in Norfolk, the Vale of York, Eden Valley (in Cumbria), and Wessex.
Circular Barrows, Henges & Stonehenge
Over time, the long barrows were superseded by circular barrows which were smaller and generally associated with individual, rather than collective, graves and common to the Beaker Culture that ushered in the Bronze Age. These barrows were often clustered in groups (to form early cemeteries) and found in conjunction with henge monuments, which were now built from stone in place of the timber construction common to early henge monuments, the most famous example being the great circle of 30 massive uprights, joined by stone lintels, that was created during the third main construction phase of Stonehenge.
Stonehenge, located in the English county of Wiltshire, approximately 3.2 km west of Amesbury and 13 km north of Salisbury, dates back to approximately 3100 BC (when the surrounding circular earth bank and ditch was first dug) and is the largest and most famous henge in Europe and one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world. The best preserved and most celebrated megalithic monument of Europe -- and the first archaeological site to be photographed aerially in 1906, despite its true purpose being unknown to this day, Stonehenge gives us a wealth of information about the architectural advancements made by Neolithic and bronze age builders in Ancient Britain as excavations have determined it was built in four phases between 3100 BC and 1100 BC, when construction, and likely usage, ultimately ended.
In the first phase, which was completed over the two hundred year period between 3100 BC and 2900 BC, the circular ditch 110 meters in diameter and 1.5 meters deep was dug (and the excavated material used to build a circular embankment along the inside rim) along with 56 pits inside the interior edge (that may have once held wooden posts).
In the second phase, which took place over the next three hundred and fifty years (or so) from circa 2900 BC to 2550 BC, several timber structures were erected in the flat ground at the center of the ditch.
Then, in the third phase from approximately 2550 BC to 1600 BC, it was radically and repeatedly transformed. First, about 80 pillars of various type of igneous rock, called bluestone (which came from outcroppings in the Preseli Mountains of southwestern Wales approximately 220 km away), were erected near the center in two concentric circles. Then, the double circle was dismantled and great blocks of sarsen sandstone were brought from Malborough Downs, 40 km north, and thirty of these new, much larger, pillars (which stood approximately 4 meters above the ground), were erected in the Sarsen Circle, 33 m in diameter, and jointed by a continuous ring of sarsen crosspieces known as lintels which were matched together with tongue and groove joints and attached to the pillars with mortice and tenon joints. Of the 30 original pillars, 17 remain standing along with 6 of the lintels. Within the Sarsen Circle, a massive horseshoe-shaped structure, which opens to the northeast towards the structure entrance, was erected from five pairs of gigantic upright sarsen blocks (weighing 40 tons or more) which were formed into great trilithon archways (with the largest 7 meters above the ground) using stone lintels. Three of the five original trilithons, complete with lintels, remain standing. An altar stone (of greenish sandstone that sits at the base of the central trilithon) was added in the third phase along with sarsen stones at the entrance and four station stones inside the interior of the circular embankment. The station stones defined imaginary lines that intersected at the very center of the monument. In later years, near the end of the third phase, the bluestones were rearranged and some were used to erect a circle of pillars between the sarsen circle and the trilithon horseshoe and a horseshoe of bluestone pillars was erected inside the trilithon horseshoe.
In the fourth, and final phase, that started sometime after 1600 BC and was completed by 1100 BC, the ceremonial avenue leading up to the entrance was lengthened to a total of 2.5 km, in a direction that was quite different from the approach of the original construction.
Although the true purpose of Stonehenge, which is generally believed to be a sacred and special place of religious ritual and ceremony, especially since the axis is oriented broadly towards the direction of the midsummer sunrise (in contrast to Newgrange in Ireland, a henge monument built at approximately the same time that is oriented to the mid-winter sunrise), the sophisticated engineering displayed in the third phase demonstrates sophisticated advances in timber and stone construction and implies that society developed continually in Britain throughout its construction.