The Ancients - Stonehenge

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Stonehenge. The most iconic prehistoric monument in the world. And yet its story is still so enigmatic.In this episode, host Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Sue Greaney to shine a light on Stonehenge��s prehistoric story. Together they explore this monument's creation and early evolution during the Neolithic c.5,000 years ago, as well as the story behind the people who built it.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're talking about one of, if not the most iconic prehistoric monument in the world. We're talking all about Stonehenge, situated in southern Britain near the city of Salisbury. Well, it is an absolutely striking monument. Now, Stonehenge, it's not just one monument.

It experiences evolution over its long history. And there is so much to talk about regarding Stonehenge, from the materials to its construction to its evolution to its use by later peoples. So in this episode we're not going to try and cover everything. We're going to focus in on the Stonehenge monument that is created at the end of the Stone Age, the end of the Neolithic and also what came before. To highlight all of this I was delighted to go and interview Dr Sue Greeny from the University of Exeter.

Sue, she's fantastic and one of the leading lights when it comes to the archaeology of Stonehenge and how today we are still learning more about this prehistoric monument. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Sue. Sue, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me to be part of it. You're more than welcome, and it's great always to do these in person. And for a topic like this, Stonehenge, this is surely the most iconic prehistoric site in Britain. In the world maybe I would contend. I mean Stonehenge is one of those

places that is instantly recognisable to most people. Everyone can kind of conjure up what Stonehenge looks like in their mind and it's famous the world over. If you go to a museum in Japan you will sometimes find amongst the explanation of their own stone circles a model of Stonehenge because it's so famous and it's so well known and it's that icon of prehistory it's kind of the first one that comes to mind when people think about prehistoric monuments. It is that icon of prehistory but as with so many monuments of prehistory it also seems one that still we're still learning more about it even today. Yes definitely archaeology is one of those amazing disciplines where we're still learning more about it even today yes definitely archaeology is one of those

amazing disciplines where we're always learning more whether that's because we have new scientific techniques that are applied to Stonehenge and to the surrounding landscape or whether it's just re-analyzing material that was excavated many years ago or new excavations there's always new things that we're learning about the site and And that's what makes it exciting. And when we say the words Stonehenge, if we focus on the second part of that word, first of all, I know it's a more complicated question than it might first seem. But what is a henge? So the word Stonehenge, the name of Stonehenge was applied to the monument from the medieval period, at least onwards, probably from sort of hanging stones, stones that hang in the air. And the second part of that word, henge, is then used by archaeologists to apply to a particular part of the monument, which is the surrounding bank and

ditch. So around the outside of the stones, there's about 100 metre diameter circular enclosure, and it's defined by a ditch with a bank on either side and that bit is the henge, the earthwork itself. Now that term was then used to apply to lots of other similar monuments across Britain which were called henges and you will see that term used regularly by archaeologists and generally we define a henge as an area, often circular but not always, enclosed by a bank and a ditch, enclosed by an earthwork. And sometimes they can have stone circles in the middle of them, like Stonehenge, sometimes they can have timber circles, sometimes they're so big they have entire settlements in them.

So these are kind of enclosures of spaces that happen in the period that Stonehenge is built. The one at Stonehenge though is a bit unusual in that it has a bank and a ditch and then another bank outside it and if you're a nerdy archaeologist and you want to be technical about these kind of things that makes it a sort of odd henge compared to others and it's actually quite early as well compared to some other henges early in date and so it often gets termed a proto henge or a formative henge because it's an early type of henge and some archaeologists say oh it's not a henge at all it sort of is and when you get to that level you get kind of people start switching off and getting bored with it but basically that's what's happened is the term

has been developed from stonehenge but then has gone on a bit beyond it okay there you go and then there's your other words that would like stone circles as well and it's is is it the terminology therefore the archaeological terminology trying to identify exactly what Stonehenge is? I guess that's maybe what keeps us fascinated by it, is the fact that it is so unlike any of these other prehistoric monuments. You have almost this combination of elements all together in one place. Yeah, it is a completely unique site. And that makes it actually quite tricky to study, because most of the time with prehistoric monuments, we go, OK, it's a stone circle. Let's compare it to other stone circles.

Or, OK, it's a timber circle. Let's look at all the timber circles and see where it fits in. But Stonehenge, because of the lintels, because the horizontal stones, and because of the way that the stones are shaped and worked into the joints and sort of locked together, it's architecturally completely unique. There's no other stone circle like that, either in Britain or even in the world. So it makes it quite difficult for people to kind of, it gets put on this special unique pedestal compared to lots of other monuments. Actually, what we kind of are beginning to understand is that Stonehenge is a stone version of timber monuments that would have been present in the landscape and across Britain at that time. And so the techniques that they're using to create these joints, these mortise and tenon joints, which is how the stones are kind of locked together.

And these are woodworking techniques. And so what they're doing is building a very elaborate and very complex version in stone of monuments that they would have been familiar with in timber. So once you understand that, you realize that actually it is unique, but it's not as unique in the time as we might see it as today. It's unique for what has survived today and what we can see that monumentality in stone and we'll definitely get back to that as our chat continues. But there was something also really interesting that I think it's important to highlight at the start isn't it that Stonehenge it's not just one monument for all of prehistory this is a monument that undergoes significant evolution and change over hundreds if not thousands of years that's

right it's a place where people come back to again and again to alter the monument to adapt it to change it and so the henge part the earthwork that we were talking about that circular enclosure that's the very first part of Stonehenge. And that was built, the ditch was dug out using antler picks in around about 3000 BC, so about 5000 years ago. So that part was its own monument for probably nearly 500 years before the stones got put up in the middle. And there are various ideas about what that early henge had inside it but one thing that we do know is that there were 56 pits called which we now call the Albury holes after a guy called John Albury who noted them in he was an antiquarian and he

he said that there were these depressions around the outside of the monument and they were later excavated and found to be these large pits and there are 56 of these in a ring just inside the bank and the ditch and these pits it's been a bit debated about whether they held standing stones or whether they held timber posts or whether they were just pits the jury is still out a bit on that but certainly inside those pits and around them were deposited the remains cremated remains of many people so it was a funerary monument about 60 or so discrete cremations have been found so far and if you think that Stonehenge has been about 50% excavated there are obviously a lot more than that originally and a lot of those excavations took place in the 1920s and things when people were not terribly good at recovering

all of the cremated bone and things so So there's probably a minimum number that we're looking at there. So in that early phase, that Henge phase, around about 3000 BC, Stonehenge doesn't have any stones in the middle. It has this ring of pits, it has this bank and ditch, and it's a cremation cemetery. It's used for the burial of the dead. So that's the first stage, even before any of the stones arrive on site. And so you mentioned that the antler tools this is right at the heart of the Neolithic it was about 3000 BC do we therefore know much about

its construction about the undergoing that and I guess also any influences in the building of this type of funerary monument some 5,000 years ago? Yeah so the the techniques that they're using are very straightforward and simple they're using antler, so the red deer antler that are then trimmed and made into a very handy kind of pickaxe and very kind of strong and flexible tools. They would have had to be collected relatively recently, as in they go brittle quite quickly, so you have to collect them and use them straight away. And they're often then deposited and left on the bottom of the ditch. And they're perfect for archaeologists because if they've been used to dig the ditch if we can see that their antler tines have been worn we can see that that's been used to dig the ditch most likely and if we get a

radiocarbon date from that that gives us a really good estimate of when that ditch was dug so prize find for an archaeologist is a nice antler pick on the bottom of the ditch. They're using quite basic techniques probably baskets perhaps leather containers to move the chalk rubble it It's not a hugely deep ditch, it's only about a metre and a half deep, so it's not a big undertaking. It's a relatively quick project for them to actually construct. And this henge, this proto-henge or formative henge, does have parallels. There are other sites, one called Flagstones, for example, which is down in Dorchester in Dorset which is very similar very similar sized enclosure very similar circular shape similar activities burials and cremations and there are some up in North Wales as well but they're quite rare and we're only really just beginning to understand how these formative henges fit together and why people suddenly start

cremating that at least some of their dead and depositing them in these places. I'd like to ask one more question about the ditch itself. I mean, constructing a ditch to surround a funeral monument some 5,000 years ago, do we know what the purpose of this was? Do we think it was potentially a marker of a sacred space or something like that? Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty good summary, really. They're not defensive, they're not big enough, they can't keep a cow out you know some people have suggested that henges have got defensive purposes and and later on they get a lot bigger so there are monuments with enormously deep ditches where you can you can see that they would actually be potentially you know a useful barrier of some kind but these are yeah as you say demarcating a sacred space and enclosing an area off from the rest of the world

in effect so you're creating a space where it's now appropriate to do things or some people have suggested that the henge banks and ditches are actually about keeping things in so more about if you've got spirits or you've got beliefs about the dead or we obviously don't know what was going on in the minds of Neolithic people but they're creating a space where these kind of activities can occur safely and kind of appropriately in a special place. I guess also with that in mind so the people who constructed this first Stonehenge and let's say the people who are living in the surrounding area between 3000 and 2500 BC, we'll go into that next stage in a bit, but do we know much about the surrounding landscape of Stonehenge at that time,

at the heart of the Neolithic, what this world looks like for the people who would have been using Stonehenge? So the area around Stonehenge at this time is relatively open and free of trees and that's quite unusual. At this time in the Neolithic, not that much woodland has been cleared from across southern England. So in most places you have relatively dense forest. But in certain places, particularly on the chalk uplands of Wiltshire, of Dorset, those kind of areas, you get areas that are free of trees and they never really had a full post-glacial woodland and they've become places where people are grazing their animals, where they're living, where it's easy to kind of get together in large numbers, that kind of thing.

So we know that from environmental evidence, this is things like land snails and from evidence of vegetation, pollen, that kind of thing, that the area around Stonehenge is open grassland, grazed grassland. So it's kind of not dissimilar to how it looks today actually in terms of the immediate landscape but we also know that the Stonehenge area before they build the henge at Stonehenge is already a really important place for monument building so people earlier have already built some major monuments in that landscape two enormous great cursus monuments which are these great big rectangular earthworks enclosures there's two what we call causewayed enclosures which are these great big rectangular earthworks enclosures. There's two what we call causewayed enclosures, which are kind of circular segmented ditches surrounding areas both to the

north of Stonehenge. And there's a scatter of long barrows, so large burial mounds that have been used for the burial of the dead in an earlier period. So it's already a really significant monument complex. It's got attention on it. So the reason that Stonehenge is built where it is, is because of all this earlier activity. And the reason that that earlier activity might well be there is because it is this open and relatively kind of open grassland setting where that kind of thing is gathering people, grazing our animals, building monuments is quite easy to do. So we know that that's kind of what the landscape looks like. As for the people, they are farmers. They have been farming for a thousand years in Britain. So they are experienced farmers. They

have got crops. They have the ability to grow wheat, for example. But by this stage, they have an economy that's very much based on pastoral activity. So they have herds of cattle, and that seems to be the most important economic aspect of their lives. But also herds of cattle and that seems to be the the most important economic aspect of their lives but also herds of kind of sheep and goats and pigs so these are people who may well be moving around quite a lot we don't have a huge amount of evidence for settlement at this time in terms of nice houses that have been excavated and that kind of thing and that's probably because people are living in quite flimsy structures that they're moving around quite regularly so they might not be fully nomadic but they might be seasonally moving between different

locations and living in structures that are not surviving in the archaeological record as well as the monuments do. Now really interestingly in the last few years there's been some excavations at a place called Bullford which is just on the other side of the River Avon from Stonehenge and it's a series of pits which is generally what we have left over from a settlement you don't really get the structures or the houses you just get lots of pits with lots of stuff in from people living in that area and at this site at bullford they're living there exactly the same time as the first henge and those burials are taking place at stone henge and that's really interesting so those are people who are using an early type of pottery called grooved ware pottery which is found all across Britain and Ireland at that time and they

seem to be kind of well connected they've got kind of objects from the coast and lots of animal bones there's lots of kind of evidence for the settlement there and so it's quite likely that the people living there were responsible for those early phase or the burials that they're the people perhaps burying their dead at Stonehenge. And do we think at this time I'm sorry I'm just always going to go my mind sometimes drifts back to Orkney sometimes I must admit but having been there and seeing how certain sites there seems to be evidence you mentioned Groove Rare Pottery of people venturing to this place from far away and that the importance of a particular monument in the landscape do you think stonehenge has that importance at this time even early on of people venturing here from maybe let's say ireland or modern day scotland or

further afield than the surrounding landscape yeah potentially at that date the only evidence we have for this is the cremations themselves from Stonehenge. And some work has been done to look at the isotopes in the bones. And the isotopes can tell you about where the people were living in up to about 10 years before they died. And the results from the 25 cremations that have been sampled at Stonehenge is that 15 of those people were local. So that means that they were living on chalk landscape so they could be very close to Stonehenge or it could be a chalk landscape somewhere else but likely maybe local and 10 of them were what they class as non-local so people who come from further afield. Now that might be people who are moving to the Stonehenge

area and then dying and being buried there but it could also be that people are bringing their cremated dead from some quite long distances away and some of the values would match southwest Devon Cornwall areas some of the values would match Wales so potentially people are traveling to Stonehenge potentially to bury their dead and so yes it does seem to have quite a kind of fame at that time and people are traveling it's difficult the other aspect of it is that the early grudeware pottery that I was talking about, it's often called woodland style pottery after a site very close to Stonehenge called Woodlands.

It was a little house where they found some pits. And this very distinctive style of pottery is found in Ireland and in Orkney and in places in between. So these are people who are connected via networks to people living in quite distant places now those might not be people who are traveling necessarily between you know Orkney and Wiltshire at that time but it might be that they're linked via various other people and other

places in between and that style of grooved ware pottery spreads really really quickly in a kind of leapfrog way in that it spreads it's probably originating in northern scotland orkney and then it spreads very rapidly down through britain but not everywhere in kind of patches and so again we're sort of only just beginning to understand how this is all working but the people building the early phase of stonehenge are connected into those wider networks everyone's going to emphasizeise that interconnected nature of Britain and beyond some 5,000 years ago which is coming more and more to light in recent years and it's really fascinating research but let's move on if we get to roughly 2500 BC this is a big time for Stonehenge and the site isn't it toes some massive changes now

yeah there's a real step change in in what people are doing at the monument so this is the date that we think that the well we know that the sarsen stones are brought to the site and set up in the in the formation that we see them today okay so so let's focus into these various parts of the well-known Stonehenge today so the sarsen stones you see today. So the sarsen stones, you mentioned them. What are these sarsen stones? So the sarsen stones are the really large, light-coloured stones that you think of when you think of Stonehenge. So the horizontal lintels and the uprights

and the large trilithons, which are the three stones together. So two uprights and one horizontal stone. Those are all made of a stone called sarsen, which is a term applied to a type of stone that's basically kind of 99% silica. It's like sand. And that sarsen stone occurs naturally across different parts of southern England. And it's from a local area. So the sarsen stones are incredibly large. They're up to 35 tonnes.

But they were brought round about 20 miles or something like that to Stonehenge. The other type of stone at Stonehenge is called the blue stones. It's not a technical geological term, but we nickname them the blue stones. And that's all the other types of stone on the site. And they're the much smaller stones. You may not have seen them necessarily in images, but if you look at an aerial view of Stonehenge, for example, you'll see them. There are much smaller stones in amongst the large stones. And those smaller stones, those pillar-likelike stones are from the Preseli Hills in South West Wales in Pembrokeshire and it's been known for 100 years or so in fact exactly 100 years it was 1923 that the first

paper was published saying that these were probably Welsh Preseli Hill stones in the last 10-15 years or so geologists have been able to pinpoint exactly which outcrops in the Preseli Hills and in the surrounding area that these stones are from. So those ones were brought 250 kilometres or so by methods and routes currently debated but probably in my mind at least most likely by sea routes and by river routes to Stonehenge. So those are the two main types of stones that make up the monument. Well, let's start outside and work our way in, therefore. Let's focus a bit more on the Sarsens.

You mentioned the Sarsens are more local, but do we know, first of all, where these great stones came from? Well, for many, many years, everyone has said they are local and the most likely place is the Marlborough Downs, which is some upland chalk landscapes about 20 miles to the north of Stonehenge. years everyone has said they are local and the most likely place is the Marlborough Downs which is some upland chalk landscapes about 20 miles to the north of Stonehenge pretty much where Avebury is which is the other kind of famous major stone circle of the same similar date but it wasn't until about three years ago that we've been able to pinpoint exactly where the sarsens are from

and this is thanks to some work by a brilliant geologist called David Nash at Brighton University, who is an expert on sarsens. And he came up with a method of kind of like a geochemical fingerprint of identifying sarsen stones. And what he did was take samples from a number of naturally outcropping sarsen all across southern England and try and find the best match for the Stonehenge stones. And that was made possible by the fact that a few years ago, a core, a large, about a metre long cylindrical piece of Stonehenge, which had been extracted from one of the stones in 1958, and had been through a very long story, ended up in America, had been returned to English Heritage, who then were able to give a very small piece of that stone to David Nash to analyse, do some destructive analysis on.

So he used a number of different techniques to basically match to an area called Westwoods, which is a beautiful ancient bluebell wood on the Marlborough Downs, where there are a number of large Sarsen stones still there, and where we know there's a major 19th century sarsen industry it was used for paving bits of swindon and that kind of thing and that was the best match in terms of the chemical signature of the stones so we think that the majority of the sarsen stones come from the westwards area of the marlborough downs which is really exciting and this is a this is recent discovery almost which is really really exciting i think it really epitomises, doesn't it, how thanks to new scientific advancements

and more and more work being done at this, the iconic prehistoric site in the world, that we are slowly starting to learn even more about it. And epitomised recently by the origins of the massive Sarsen stones. Yeah, it's great to be able to, I i mean stonehenge is a place where people tend to test out new ideas and new techniques which means that's great because if you're a scientist and you're a geologist where you know where's the most famous or stonehenge you know so often new aerial survey techniques new geophysical survey techniques new geological techniques are tested out at stonehenge because it's the most obvious place to start so it means we end up

learning a lot more and it's kind of at the forefront of scientific advances. And I also could ask because the sarsen stones are absolutely massive do we have any theories or any idea about how they would have transported those stones that quarried them out from the Marlborough Downs and then brought them to the site of Stonehenge and then erected them and arranged them in the shape that they were ultimately erected in. For many, many years, people have always depicted the stones being moved with rollers. So the stone being struck onto a kind of wooden sledge of some sort, and then, you know, the kind of idea that you'd have rollers and people would frantically move rollers from the back to the front and it would be transported across the landscape like that.

More recently, there's been some work done kind of questioning that and suggesting that actually much more efficient and based on other historical ethnographic records of people moving large megaliths in places like Indonesia and India that the better way to do it would be to actually construct a trackway, construct a complete trackway all the way from Westwoods or wherever the Sarsons potentially in that area are from all the way to Stonehenge and then you could use that trackway for a number of the different stones and so the idea now is that yes wooden sledges would probably have been used but probably on some kind of trackway that was laid and we don't have any evidence for this a trackway laid on the surface of the ground is really not going to leave very many traces behind

for archaeologists to find unfortunately but that's our best guess and then in terms of raising the stones again there's a number of different methods that could be used people suggest perhaps using kind of a-frames great big kind of structures to be able to pull the stones upright the stone holes were dug with one side sloping and so the stones could be slid in on on a kind of one side of the stone and then raised upwards against the vertical side. And there actually is archaeological evidence for wooden vertical stakes that were put in the ground at that backside, so when it was raised it didn't carry on going over. But actually recently an archaeologist called Mike Pitts has written

a book about how he thinks perhaps there were other simpler techniques used based on some knowledge of how the Easter Island statues were erected when they just constructed quite large mounds of rock and rubble and used that to actually ease up the stones into position rather than these kind of complicated wooden contraptions. So again no evidence really apart from the stone holes themselves to tell us exactly how they did it. But the methods are quite possible. They're not using anything. They have no metal, we have no wheels. You know, it's all very basic technology,

but it's perfectly possible to do with quite a lot of people and some know-how. Hello, host of Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast here. History isn't just dates and facts. It's about the incredible stories that shape our world. Three times a week on my podcast, my expert guests and I bring you extraordinary stories of heroism, discovery, mystery, and power. Expect tales of lost tombs, daring escapes,

power-hungry rulers, and those determined to bring them all down. If you're a history lover or just looking for a good tale, you'll want to check out Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. and that's the importance isn't it it's just having manpower available to oversee this massive monumental project in a statement of power by those overseeing it i guess one last thing on those assassins i'd like to focus on the trilithons a bit and the whole arrangement of it. Now, when we picture Stonehenge and look into the details, we all have an idea of Stonehenge, but maybe, at least for me, thinking of the actual arrangement of the trilithons in that circle

and how it originally looked, I hope you can clarify a bit. The lintel stone at the top, the horizontal stone at the top and the two vertical stones, did the horizontal stone at the top and the two vertical stones did the horizontal stone cover the entirety of the two vertical stones i mean how are they arranged so that it was almost a continuous circle around so the outer sarsen circle at stonehenge is made up of 30 uprights and 30 lintels so each upright stone has two little knobs on the top and over that slot, one end each of two lintels. And those lintels actually then are jointed together as well. So there are both vertical joints, which we tend to call mortise and chenon joints after the terms that we use in woodworking.

But there are also horizontal joints, which are kind of tongue and groove joints. So the ends of the lintels actually slot together. The whole thing is completely over engineered and in fact the the sarsen circle is also completely or would have been completely level all the way around which the ground is not level and they engineered it to be completely level which is quite a miraculous feat so that's the outer circle the inner circle or the horseshoe to be more correct, is made up of five trilithons. So these three stones together, two uprights and a horizontal stone, and they're just two uprights with one lintel that spans like a doorway in effect. And those five lintels, those five trilithons are arranged in a horseshoe and they're graded in height. So there's two small-ish ones,

there's two medium ones, and there's one very tall one at the top of the horseshoe unfortunately that one has fallen so one of the stones has fallen the lintel has fallen so we don't see the effect of it today but that would have been the tallest trilithon at the head of the horseshoe and the entire stone's setting is arranged around the solstice axis so in some ways one the amazing, sort of more astonishing feats is not only that they build it, but they built it so precisely to align with the solstice. And that is, you know, moving large stones around is a major feat in itself, but to get them so precisely aligned, that's quite an amazing skill. So the way that it is aligned is that the inner horseshoe is on that axis. If you can imagine a line drawn through the middle of a horseshoe so that if you stand in the middle of Stonehenge on midwinter's

day so the shortest day of the year 21st of December or thereabouts and you look through the gap created by the tallest trilithon that's where you see the sunset of midwinter and conversely if you turned around 180 degrees and you were there on the longest day of the year in midsummer and looked out through the stone circle so sort of through the open end of the horseshoe and through a gap in the stone circle and towards a stone called the heel stone which is on the outer edge of the monument that's where you see the sunrise at midsummer really emphasizes doesn't it's how these first farmers that are living in the late Neolithic you know they were farmers but they were incredible builders too. Do we have any idea why

we seem to see this repetition whether it's at Mace Howell in Orkney or elsewhere or at Stonehenge that repeated interest in the solstice and aligning with either the sunrise or the sunset? Yeah it's actually quite unusual to have precise alignments like the one at Stonehenge and like the one at Mays Howe. There are a number of monuments that are built around about 3000 BC, so when the early bits of Stonehenge was constructed, in Ireland and in Scotland, particularly Orkney, that have these precise alignments.

So Mays Howe is one of them. Newgrange is another one in Ireland. And there's a kind of a horizon around about 3000 BC when these big passage tombs, as we call them, are built with this alignment, sometimes on the midsummer, sometimes midwinter, and sometimes a few of them in Ireland on the equinoxes. And that's kind of a little... Stonehenge is a bit of an outlier in that it's about 500 years later, and they're building a very precise precise alignment but it's not a passage tomb necessarily it's a completely different type of monument there just seems to be a kind of revived interest in the sun in particular at that time and we can only imagine

that the sun was a major part of the religious beliefs of the people at the time maybe the sun had a relation particularly when they're building those passage tombs with ideas about death and the afterlife and what happens to people after they die because of course it's the sun had a relation, particularly when they're building those passage tombs, with ideas about death and the afterlife and what happens to people after they die, because of course it's the sun shining along the passage into the tomb where the people are being buried that is the crucial part of that arrangement. In a way Stonehenge is a bit of a late flourishing and a kind of return to earlier ideas about having a monument with a precise alignment. Not many other stone circles have similarly precise alignments. So it may be a kind of revival of an earlier idea. Well, let's move further inwards then. You also mentioned, of course, that the monument includes these blue stones. First of all,

why do we call them blue stones? They kind of look a bit blue. Not that much, to be fair. They have a dark grey colour, actually. And sometimes if you see it freshly polished or wet, it can look a bit like dark blue. So that's the name. I think they, we probably wouldn't call them blue stones unless they were stood next to the kind of bright white grey of the sarsens. And of course, we have to remember that when the monument was first built, Stonehenge was carefully dressed. So people were taking off the weathered surface of these stones to expose the kind of fresh stone underneath so the contrast between the kind of white grey sarsen and the

really dark grey blue stones would have been much greater than it is today today all looks a bit grey because it's been there for thousands of years but yeah so we call them the blue stones but they are in fact a number of different geologies there's volcanic tufts and there's rhyolites and there's unspotted rhyolite and spotted dolerite and all kinds of different geologies. There's volcanic tufts and there's rhyolites and there's unspotted rhyolite and spotted dolerite and all kinds of different terminologies for this group of similar types of volcanic stone from the Preseli Hills. The most distinctive ones which make up the, we should have said the bluestone stand in two formations, they stand in a circle. So just inside the Sarsen circle is a bluestone circle. And then inside the

sarsen horseshoe, there's a bluestone horseshoe. And in that inner horseshoe, most of the stones are of a type wood-spotted dolerite, which is this dark bluestone flecked with pieces of quartz, which is really distinctive. It's like a spotty stone. Looks like the night sky. It's quite a distinctive rock. And we can only presume that the Preseli hills that those outcrops in Pembrokeshire that the distinctive look of these stones meant in some way that they were important for people whether they were you know the ancestral home of the people who built Stonehenge you know that's where they came from whether these mountains are seen as particularly important you know we don't really know why exactly, but they brought them all at

White Stonehenge. And if, as you mentioned, there are these textural differences between some of the blue stones, does that highlight how at the Preseli Hills, they're not all being quarried out from one particular quarry, they're being quarried out from a number of different quarries around these hills exactly yeah so geologists have now identified about four or five different places from where these have come all within a 10 mile radius say of the hills some of them actually on the hills others are down into the valleys themselves and these stones are naturally form in kind of pillar-like shapes so they don't actually have to kind of quarry them too much all they have to do is kind of wedge and break off the stones because they already look quite pillar-like

and they're already roughly in the shape that they want to be and they're used for monuments in the local area as well and there's been an idea that some listeners may have heard of which is that the blue stones at Stonehenge were originally in a stone circle in the Preseli Hills so an archaeologist called Mike Parker Pearson has been excavating a site called Wine Mourne, which he has speculated is where some of the stones stood before they were moved to Stonehenge. It's not an idea that's necessarily accepted by everybody. It's slightly, the evidence is not quite 100% there.

The stone circle at Wine Mourne was dismantled, but it's a slightly different type of stone that actually got used at Stonehenge. So it's a little bit unknown as to whether that's a correct idea or not that's still so interesting though you see similarities let's say with the ring of brogher don't you and you see all these different quarries that the rocks are brought from and the monoliths are brought from and i'm guessing when they're being quarried out should we be imagining you mentioned wedges there but should we also imagine hammer stones maybe a trestle or something like that those kind of stone age methods to extract these massive stones yeah i mean they're using kind of

wedges mostly to kind of prise the rocks out where they're actually using the tools more kind of consistently is actually in shaping the stones to make them fit together so the sarsen stones are jointed but also the blue stones are worked and shaped too. And in 2011, a laser survey was done of the stones at Stonehenge and analysed. That project showed that there's lots of different types of working on the stones. So you can actually see it as kind of pecked. If you go to Stonehenge and you're lucky enough to stand up close to one of the stones, it looks a bit like orange peel. It sort of has this pecked. It's where they've been hit multiple times with hammerstones. These are also sarsen. Confusingly, the hammerstones they're using, some of them are flint but most of them are sarsen, a different type of sarsen which is a bit harder called

quartzite sarsen. And they're basically just whacking the rocks to kind of chip away at these stones in order to make them as kind of regular and rectangular as they could but also to create these joints and interestingly some of the blue stones have those joints too so some of the blue stones have got originally had tenons on the top so the little kind of joints and two of the blue stones on the site are lintels so they've got holes in them they're not standing as trilithons today but originally they would have been little mini trilithons and we know that the blue stones have been moved around a number of times the setting that we see the ruin of today is that just the final place that they stood in so previous to that we know that they had at least two of these little mini bluestone trilithons very similar to the sarsen ones and some of the

bluestones also had grooves all the way down the long side of them and they must have been slotted together you can try and kind of fit the bl stones with the archaeological holes and pits that have been found but it's actually quite difficult to know exactly how it was laid out but certainly several different formations within the stones it's such an incredible site and so much to it as well you can go in so much detail about the various parts of it what do we think was at the center of this late neolithic monument? So at the middle is something we call the altar stone, which, as you might guess,

is a kind of flat stone at one end of the horseshoe in a very kind of altar-like position. It's an unusual stone because it's not a blue stone from Wales. It's not a sarsen from Wiltshire. It is a different type of stone, a sandstone. And there's work going on at the moment to try and point point where exactly that old stone is from because it's not from the other areas I can't

really say much about that but there will be some more news I think coming in the next couple of years about where that stone is from the work is still ongoing but it's it's not necessarily either of the places that we have stones from at the moment so that's really interesting so what was actually going on in the middle there you know was that an old what was it used for how were rituals conducted we have no idea stonehenge is a pretty much a clean site so when it's been excavated archaeologists have found lots of evidence for this the working and the shaping of the stones hammerstone down the picks but hardly any evidence for what actually took place in the middle of stonehenge so there's you know, lots of animal bones or pottery or signs of burning, fires, you know, things that would give you a clue as to what's going on in the middle. There's just

not much to go on. It seems to have been a site that people kept deliberately clean and not full of debris and rubbish and that kind of thing. And then, so really the clues that we have about what happened in the middle and what went on there is the layout of the stones themselves and so the space in the middle of the stone is actually quite small so that suggests that it's not a place where everybody gets to pitch in and gather and see stuff it's a select few perhaps that are allowed to go into the middle and it's from that middle position that you can observe those solstice alignments and so we can only imagine that there were ceremonies and rituals at those particular times of year that

certain people would have been involved in and would have been in the middle but exactly what went on we don't really have any clue right it's so interesting isn't it and something that just came to mind is i remember interviewing professor jane downs at the ring of broggan she mentioned how when you had the original 60 stones and if you stood in the center of the circle which i must stress you cannot do now you're not allowed to do now if you were in that center that massive stone circle and you spoke out it kind of reflected back to you and there was kind of that vocal part that audio part and purpose of this stone age monument given that stonehenge is much smaller, that part in the middle,

do you think that when you stand there today, can you get a sense that your voice is being projected and bouncing back? Is there a similar kind of feeling there? It feels like a very enclosed space, even today, despite kind of half of the stones being missing. And this is an idea that people have come up with, you know, what are the acoustic properties of Stonehenge? Acoustics, that's the word. And if it was a complete monument, as best we can imagine it, when it was first constructed, what would be the acoustic properties? And work has been done to create models of Stonehenge scale models. People have done tests. There's a replica of Stonehenge in Maryland built of concrete, you know, done lots of acoustic tests. Unfortunately, actually, it doesn't have that many acoustic properties.

tests. Unfortunately, actually, it doesn't have that many acoustic properties. It's not the kind of place where somebody could stand in the middle of the monument and lots of people standing around the edge of the area could have heard perfectly. It's not because there's so many stones. And because it's open air, it doesn't really have that effect. So that suggests that whatever was going on in the middle is for the people in the middle only. And you're not necessarily it's not a monument where you project out and people can hear you a long distance away so that's kind of an interesting idea there's there's some work been done on certain reverberations and drumming beats and things that would make particularly kind of powerful sounds and no doubt whatever went on there i'm sure that there was instruments and singing and speech but there's actually not that many specific acoustic properties to the monument

even though that might seem like something that would have been the case absolutely fair enough i mean i still have so many questions but i know we're running out of time but we have talked a lot about the monument and hopefully we'll get a bit to the bronze age too but before that i want to ask you about the people who made particularly the stonehenge in the late neolithic do we know much about the community or communities who built this monumental stonehenge in the late Neolithic, do we know much about the community or communities who built this monumental Stonehenge at the end of the Neolithic? Up until about 15, 20 years ago, we knew nothing about the people who did this.

Then the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is a major archaeological project, did some excavations at a site called Durrington Walls, which is about a mile and a half away from Stonehenge to the northeast on the banks of the River Avon, and uncovered evidence for a settlement which dates from exactly the same time that the Sarsen stones are being put up at Stonehenge. So it's probably where the builders of Stonehenge, or perhaps the people who were coming to Stonehenge for solstice events and rituals, were living, which is great, because we finally have a settlement with lots of evidence for who these people were. And not only do we have kind of the typical kind of pits and things like that, that we might typically find on prehistoric sites, but we have actually got the houses,

and miraculously they have been preserved there because it's a dry valley, and it hasn't been ploughed very much in recent times. So there are little kind of five metre by five metre houses, chalk floors, hearths in the middle surrounded by stake holes quite simple structures and anywhere else quite easily damaged and destroyed so just luckily surviving there and about six or seven of these houses have been excavated but there are probably hundreds more and there's chock full of evidence so lots of grooveware pottery tons of animal bones lots of things like bone pins, little kind of objects that tell us a bit more about how the people were dressing and what they looked like and things like that.

So that's really exciting. So we have a settlement that's at the same date as Stonehenge. So we've got kind of a sense of who the people are. Now, there's been some really interesting work done on the material from that excavation site, which tells us a little bit more about where those people are coming from. Unfortunately, for this particular point in prehistory, they've stopped by this point cremating some of their dead, and we don't know what they're doing with their dead. Whatever they're doing with their dead, it doesn't turn up archaeologically. The best guess is they're sticking them in rivers, cremating them and sticking them in rivers, and it's getting washed out to sea and we never see it again. So we can't do kind of isotope data on people who are buried

at this time, but we can do that on the animals that they are herding and eating and feasting on in large quantities at Durrington. And that work has shown that those animals come from a variety of different locations across Britain. Now, initially, when that work was published, they suggested some might have come from Scotland. That has been slightly revised. Potentially there is still some that come from Northern England but there are now perhaps more likely places across Dartmoor, across the South West, the Malverns, Wales, but still incredibly long distances. So still a place where people are bringing animals and coming to major events, feasts, ceremonies, helping to build

Stonehenge, whatever it it was from quite long distance away and that's that suggests that you know Stonehenge is is got a kind of catchment a kind of fame that that means that people come and take part in these ceremonies and activities and they're living at Durrington Walls while they're doing that it's it's so fascinating when you learn more about that and try to get more of a a context into who was building this late neolithic monument i guess i must also go there for ask do we have any ideas about how these societies were structured do we have any monumental tombs or anything like that which can kind of give us a sense of who these people were that were ordering the construction of something like Stone

Henge yeah we have absolutely no evidence for hierarchy wow so there's no rich burial we don't have any burials so we're having rich burials it's not like we have really large houses and then lots of small houses there's no evidence for kind of personal items particularly there's one or two things that might might be kind of these mace headstone, mace heads and things. But generally, it looks very egalitarian. But that might be because we haven't got the evidence rather than, you know, it just doesn't turn up. So it's really difficult to say how society was organised. There must have been some organisation involved. Building Stonehenge is a major logistical project. You've got to get all the people together at the right time of year, you've got to feed all the people, you've got to bring all the stones, the equipment.

You know, it's a big thing. So it's hard to imagine that that would be done entirely by an egalitarian society without somebody being the architect or the ideas person or the project manager. But we just don't know how that was done. And interestingly, in the slightly earlier period when we have got some burials, when they're doing the cremations, there is roughly equal numbers of men and women buried at Stonehenge. And at some other similar cremation sites, there's more women than men. So we shouldn't really put our assumptions on that period and say, well, obviously men were in charge, or obviously there was an architect or somebody controlling everything, because we just don't know. And we just don't have that level of information so we shouldn't kind of jump to conclusions about how society

was organized well not absolutely fair enough i mean it has been so interesting to interview all about this and just really focus on the neolithic stonehenge i think the story of how it evolves in the bronze age and in more recent history that's for another episode on the legacy but what is so fascinating is the fact that even today this Stone Age monument we are now starting to learn more not just about the construction of the monument itself potentially the purpose the material and now as well the people who made this structure and hopefully well more information will be unveiled in in the years to come yeah one of the really exciting things about being involved in archaeology generally but also just you know having a specialist knowledge of the neolithic and the bronze age this stuff is changing all the time we're getting things from ancient dna

for example which are telling us new things isotopes new things kind of looking at the residues inside pottery new things it's it's always it's kind of the speed of it's hard to keep up often so um it's really exciting to be at the forefront and to be kind of in a time when we're learning so much new material well see this has been absolutely fantastic and it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you well there you go there was dr sue greeny talking all the things stonehenge and what the archaeology is still continuing to reveal about this mysterious iconic prehistoric monument now we have focused in on stonehenge during the stone age during the Neolithic in today's episode but don't you worry we will do a future episode in time exploring the next chapter of Stonehenge's story as we reach the end of the Stone Age we get to the Bronze Age and go on from there to explore

the continued importance of Stonehenge for different peoples living in this area of the world I hope you have enjoyed today's episode if you want to help us out on the ancients well you know of Stonehenge for different peoples living in this area of the world. I hope you have enjoyed today's episode. If you want to help us out on the ancients, well, you know what you can do. You can leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue our infinite mission to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. Long may that

continue. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.