The Rest Is History - 199. Stonehenge

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

On today's pod Tom and Dominic are joined by Stonehenge expert Mike Pitts to discuss all the big questions that surround Stonehenge: Who built it? How did they build it? What was it built for? Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Editor: James Hodgson Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people, the Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing, but their legacy remains, hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge. Stonehenge, where the demons dwell, where the banshees live and they do live well. Stonehenge, where a man's a man and the children dance to the pipes of Pan.

Tom Holland, that was Sp tap of course a reminder a reminder if any were needed that you should never mix up feet and inches as you will recall from the film uh so you big spinal tap fan tom i am um and i remember the first time i watched it obviously being a sorcery boy being incredibly proud that Stonehenge was on it. Even though, as you hinted, when the models of Stonehenge descend, they're not quite as large as they could be. They're not, are they? But there's so much good history there. Isn't there a race of people called the Druids who built Stonehenge?

No one knows what they were doing. Yeah, it's very, very accurate. Hundreds of years before the dawn of history. Well's true that's true enough um anyway well as you can probably imagine um stone henge is a topic that i've been wanting to do for ages um and dominic we've done almost 200 episodes now and finally you've allowed me to do it so that's we have yeah but i've been very keen to do stonehenge i'm a big fan of the subject, Tom, as you know. I'm very excited about it because actually I know nothing at all about Stonehenge. So I'm looking forward to being educated.

I'm going to educate myself, as the youngsters say. Well, we have the perfect person then to educate you because we have with us Mike Pitts, who is archaeologist, journalist, editor of British Archaeology, author of loads of fantastic books one of which um book called Digging Up Britain a new history and 10 extraordinary discoveries was my book of the year about three years ago was it Mike yes yeah I know as long as that um so it's a fabulous book because it um it takes 10 archaeological discoveries as the the subtitle suggests and it pushes you further and further back in time so that the Britain that he's bringing to life becomes stranger and stranger and stranger. It's a really, really brilliant book. But his most recent book is, and Spinal Tap would love this, How to Build Stonehenge. It just came out this year. And Mike, welcome to the show thanks so much for thank you for coming on

um and in in your book you you talk of the ambitious glorious futility of stonehenge um so is that how you see it as ambitious and glorious and but futile or well i mean part part of it is and i think there's there is something absolutely magnificent in that futility and i think um part of what i i hope to achieve with this book and it with in effect with the title of the book the theme of the book um is to focus on the stones themselves and on that if you like that futility, that magnificence, because we spend, particularly archaeologists, we spend so much time fussing about details of chronology and structure and history and context and environment and antiquities and so on and so on,

and we lose sight, I think, of the central focus of it all, which is this monument, and how utterly bizarre and extraordinary it is, not just now, but must have been at the time it was built as well. So that's what I was trying to conjure, really. Mike, before we go into the history of Stonehenge, can I just ask you about your own history with the site? So when did you first go, and what did you think when you first saw it? Well rather gloriously my first visit to Stonehenge was on the day England won the World Cup so I remember it quite clearly and at the time I have to say I was more interested in tanks than in megaliths and there was a military display

at Lark Hill the military base just immediately to the north of Stonehenge. And I remember sitting in the audience watching these guns trundle around the parade. And every so often there would be an announcement over the tannoy saying England had scored a goal. And then we went to Stonehenge. And to be honest, I don't remember that. But I bought a guidebook. And I used to, as a kid, I used to collect collect these guidebooks I had this thing about castles and monuments and cathedrals and stuff and I've still got that guidebook and it kind of when I got back to school and uh had this guidebook and read it carefully it drew me in that that's really where it began right so since 1966 presumably thinking about Stonehenge has changed quite a lot yeah and that is one of the the fascinations of the subject is that it's not something

that just stands still. So could you, but before we get into the question of how Stonehenge was built, why it was built, all those kinds of questions, could, could you give us your sense, both of your,

and, and the kind of the, the, the, the academic consensus at the moment as to to wet the various stages in which Stonehenge was built because it's not just one monument is it it's a whole kind of sequence of monuments built over over centuries yes and and there are quite a few misconceptions about that I think um and you're right of course a lot has changed about

the thinking of Stonehenge since 1966 and actually quite an interesting period between then and now there have been some fundamental changes because when I visited the monument there was presented to all of us a version of Stonehenge that occurred in three very distinct stages and each stage followed on from the one quite rapidly and so in effect the stage was a construction phase you know there would be a monument would be built and then the next generation they'd rebuild it and then the third they'd rebuild it again since then the excavations on which that model was based have been fully analysed and published, which they weren't in 1966. And there have been further excavations.

And of course, as you know, there have been huge developments in the science of investigating the past. And so radiocarbon dating has got more precise and so on and so on. And so we have a much better understanding of the chronology and the history of the monument. There are still huge gaps, I might might say that could well be partially resolved with further excavation which I'm very keen on but that's another issue but as we understand it at the moment things are really different from 1966 and the first thing is that the time over which that site was active as a monument as a focus of ritual and ceremony has vastly increased so in 1966 it was just a few

centuries um if that um now i think um the first visible evidence we have that people were doing something very odd at that location occurs over 5 000 years ago um and it was still active 4,000 years ago. So we've got a millennium, really, of focused activity on this site. It begins with a ring of stones, and these are blue stones. These are the stones that came from Wales, and they're small stones, so they're only two or three tonnes. They're not shaped or anything, and they're all sorts of different types of rock. But what's interesting about it is they're a perfect circle and that is an unusual thing

at this time. We get a few of these. Up until then there have been circular-ish monuments. And when you say circular-ish, is that because people couldn't draw circles? I'm sure they could. I mean, you know, the circle is, if you like, it's almost the simplest shape you can possibly draw if you want to actually control it. So why circular-ish? I mean, it seems kind of an odd thing to do. For whatever reason, at this moment, round about 3000, 3200 BC,

people thought there was something significant in a perfect circle right um and they hadn't before and so this perfect circle is drawn out at the location which became the stonehenge and more or less the same time we're getting similar perfect circles of similarish size across the uk there aren't that many but there's there's one down in dorchester um there are a few in wales there's one on orkney you know and and sometimes these are associated with megaliths sometimes they're rings of pits but they're but but what's distinctive particularly about them is this circularity this perfect circle can i jump in mike for a second so we're in 3200 bc yeah um and there's the ring of perfect stones.

You said they were blue stones, and they're brought from, you think, from Wales. Yes. So that implies right at the beginning that you've got some form of political organization, does it, to be able to transport these stones, what, I mean, hundreds of miles? I mean, this is an extraordinary thing to be doing, isn't it, at a time when political organizations must be very, very rudimentary, I suppose. Exactly. The point is, from the very beginning, there's something happening at this site that is quite unique, that is unmatched anywhere in Europe at the time. And that is this connection

with the distant geological sources, hundreds of miles away. And we don't see that at any other point anywhere, really, anything like it. So it happens right at the beginning. It bursts onto the scene from the start. At the same time as that circle of stones, there are 56 pits. And I have to say, there are a few archaeologists who actually don't think these stones were yet on the site. So we're still in a slightly controversial area, but I'm happy with the idea that we have these blue stones standing in these 56 pits which were there. And just outside that perfect circle is another ring

of sort of ditchy pits, irregular pits and ditch segments. It's not quite circular, but it's kind of following it around. And that later gets enlarged they connect all the pits together to make a more or less perfectly circular ditch and bank enclosing the whole thing and you can still see bits of that today when you visit the monument and you walk over bits of it the paved path crosses this this circular earthwork which is of course is now covered in neatly mown grass. There's another megalith, I think, on the site at the time, which is the stone we now call the heel stone, which is a really interesting stone. It's actually the largest megalith at Stonehenge, and it's made of a local rock, sarsen.

Which I learnt from your book may have derived from Saracen, the name sarsen. Yes, that's interesting. So Wiltshire pronunciation of Saracen, the name Saracen. Yes, that's interesting. So Wiltshire pronunciation of Saracen. Yes. I mean, Saracen as a word is unique in the English language for these particular rocks, and they're found across southeast England, but most commonly in Dorset, and in particular on the Moorwood Downs, about 20 miles north of Stonehenge, where they're really common and there's some really large ones. And we see some of the biggest now standing as megaliths in Avebury. The word

sarsen has no obvious historical origin. You know, we don't find a lot of it in early medieval documents where we can trace its etymology. But what's interesting is that there are a number of sort of theories that have been created, you know, to explain this. And one of them is that it derives from Saxon for hard stone, but there's no actual evidence for that. Another is that it's a local pronunciation of Saracen and Saracen being a kind of catch-all word for something that's foreign and alien. Kagan.

Yeah. And what's interesting is that um there's a chap called tim door who for a period worked as a custodian at stonehenge you know at stonehenge and he's very interested in stonehenge he's a local farmer up here on the morber downs and um and he he noted in a blog that his daughter pronounces Saracen, Sarsen. And recently I mentioned that on a tweet and somebody came in and said that they'd been in Northern Ireland during the troubles and that this six-wheeled military vehicle known as a Saracen was, in Belfast, was pronounced Sarsen. So I wonder actually if there is a truth in this idea that if they really

were um alien foreign stones given this name saracen which became saracen and um and because they are you know on on the wiltshire downs these stones are utterly bizarre and so when do they when are they going up the fame you know the iconic stones that everyone thinks of when they think of stonehenge we're jumping ahead a bit let's let's go up, the iconic stones that everyone thinks of when they think of Stonehenge? We're jumping ahead a bit. Let's go back to the blue stones, because we've got this blue stone circle, 56 stones, perfect circle. And then outside to the northeast, there's this single, very large sarsen, which I think actually may be more local. It could actually have been on the site more or less where we see it today but you're talking about stones being local and not being local so an obvious question about the

stones that are not local is yeah let's say the blue stones from wales for example yes um how on earth do they get there so are they dragged are they rolled uh slaves involved um i mean are these questions is it even remotely can, can we even make a feeble effort to answer these questions? Or is it all totally unknowable? I don't think it is. And I definitely think these are questions we should be asking. I think this is really the word you used earlier, politics. You know, it comes into this in a very big way, the type of society that makes this possible. And I think one of the things that we have to be careful with is, in our attempt, particularly as academic archaeologists,

to avoid entering areas of fake druidry and aliens and bizarre explanations of the past, that we actually underestimate the, if you like, the quality and the color of reality um and stonehenge is a phenomenally bizarre and extraordinary monument and i don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that the society that created that was actually really quite complex um and there was an awful lot going on that we can never know about and also at the monument itself there was stuff going on we can never know about so we can't for example you know we can't know whether or not the stones were painted or decorated or things that were hung on them

what other structures were there that would have disappeared made out of timber and other materials that we have no evidence for and so on and so on, to say nothing of the beliefs and the politics and complicated arrangements. But we need to ask those questions, I think. And Mike, I mean, these are basically the questions that people have been asking right from the beginning. So the very earliest written mention of Stonehenge is by an abbot called Henry of Huntingdon, writing in 1129, and he says, No one has been able to discover by what mechanism such vast masses of stone were elevated,

nor for what purpose they were designed. So how and why? I mean, these are essentially other questions with which the first mention of Stonehenge enters the historical record. And we're still asking those questions. So just on the how, as I understand it, and the issue of how the bluestones are brought from Wales to Salisbury Plain, there are two main theories.

One, that they were transported by glaciers, which is now very much a minority position. And the other, obviously, that they were transported by human hand. And I know that you very much are a partisan of the second opinion. What would be your answer on how they are transported before we come to the why were they transported? Right. When it comes to all these sort of questions, I mean, there are two things that we can bring to the subject. One is the physical, the archaeological evidence. And the other is information, knowledge, understanding of human societies, and not just our own, but around the world,

and in particular, of course, relevant to people who have in the past or do today create megalithic monuments. Now, in both areas, Henry of Huntington, of course, had almost no knowledge at all. And so we're hugely advantaged in those respects. And if we think about how the stones are moved from Wales, the first point is that, as you say, I mean, I have no time for the idea that these stones were moved by glaciers.

I mean, the evidence just is not there. So the first thing is that we have, from the most recent geological research, we have identification of a handful of very precise locations for sources for the bluestones. And I should say that there are several different, in fact, many different locations for these. Most, if not all, are in the very far southwest of Wales, in the Braselia Hills and Pembrokeshire.

But up on those hills, there are lots of different types of rock that can be distinguished and many of which are found at Stonehenge. And so we have, in a handful of instances, we have precise locations where these stones came from. Of course, we know where they ended up. So we've got the two points of this journey to connect. And how they did that is a question partly of just our understanding of engineering. But also, I think it's really important here that we look at people with real knowledge of moving megaliths, because there's a mindset that you see when you engage with these people that is very different from that typically brought to the subject by archaeologists and especially uh people who focus on this issue which are often not archaeologists but very often retired engineers who are looking to you know looking looking to create a way of moving stones that uses as few people as possible as left effort

managing can be done as efficiently as possible and it you know with a bit of bonus if you can make something really clever an impressive looking you know some construction to do this and that's not how it works you know in in the real world and and the most important lesson i think from places like madagascar, Indonesia, to places where people are today creating megalithic monuments. And strangely, often very similar physically to megalithic monuments we see in Northwest Europe. The most important lesson is what's happening there is that these are not engineering events. They're social events, they're political events. And so actually, you want as many people as possible involved.

For them it's let's get as many people involved as possible. But it must have been a spectacle, right? It must have been a demonstration of power. I mean, at the very least, whatever the purpose for which Stonehenge was built, the very act of creation, so visible, so extraordinary in that landscape, whoever did it must have derived colossal amounts of prestige and status from it. Exactly, and whoever was involved in it.

I think it's interesting. You've got these two broad categories of rock. You've got the bluestones that come from Wales and you've got the sarsens, which are more local. But in both cases, these are exceptional journeys that were being undertaken. On the one hand, the bluestones, the distance is unmatched for anywhere. On the other hand, the sarsens, the scale of the size of these stones, you know, they're typically 20, 30 tonnes.

And you've got a sledge when they're first quarried and moved. They're heavier than they end up on site because the final dressing would have occurred on site and at least a tonne or two of stone would have then been removed on site and so on. So in both cases, these are exceptional journeys. And I think that in itself tells us that people are setting out to do something that was unusual. How do you think, first of all, the blue stones, how are they transported that enormous distance? And then the sarsen stones have these vast, vast stones. How are they carried? Yeah, I've not been avoiding that question. I know you've written a book about it.

I did. Yes. And OK, we'll take the blue stones because they're the if you like the easy ones um i think you you're mostly using sledges and these are small stones a small sledge uh a couple of decent ropes and a handful of people you don't need you know technically you don't need large numbers of people and as you come down off the hills of central wales then when the river usk starts to widen sufficiently then i think there is the opportunity to put these stones on a boat, on a canoe of some kind, which I think is very likely they took advantage of. They needn't have done. But, you know, you've got a good river there that opens up in the Severn Estuary.

And I think you would then cross the estuary. I mean, traditionally, the route from Wales, the overland route from Wales, is taken further northeast up the Severn until you get to the point where it can be crossed very easily without having to use a boat. I think these are people who knew how to make and use boats. And after all, their ancestors crossed the English Channel with livestock. Although not with heavy stones, I suppose, to be fair. Yes, but I i mean a cow you see i mean you've got to yeah i suppose yeah yeah you know and these things are alive blue

stones just lie there so just look at you but but you know a pig is yeah it's gonna fight you know and and they were doing this on a large scale and they were crossing big seas you know the channel is it can often be quite a dangerous crossing the The Severn Estuary, if you know your water, can be very easy. And so I think they would have at some point probably taken to the River Usk, crossed the Severn Estuary, and then come inland along the Somerset Avon,

and at some point come back onto land with a little sledge and dragged it over the chalk. And I think they might well have actually rejoined the river the Wiltshire rivers and come down to just south of Salisbury and then go north up the Avon and that the the best point then for coming back to land is not the the route that you often read about which is along the Avenue Earthwork to the monument from Amesbury but a little further south where there's a dry valley that comes up to the south of Stonehenge that's very gentle and it's actually a really attractive walk today as a way of entering the World Heritage

Site and at the point where you get close to Stonehenge then there's a bit of a climb up to the top and interestingly as you crest the the little hill at that point where you reach stonehenge is the precise point where there is a gap in this earthwork um it's one of two entrances into the enclosure it's the smaller one the bigger one is at the northeast by the heel stone but there is this persistent entrance on the southern side okay and mike And then the sarsen stones, these vast, heavy stones. There's another thing I haven't mentioned, another possibility. They could have carried the stones, the blue stones, you know, really awkward.

So if you've got steep, loose ground or the small sort of narrow passages or something like that you need to get through where it's difficult to get a sledge and the ropes and everything like that, you can literally lift the stones. You can put them into a wooden frame and people do this, you know, and there's actually some extraordinary cine film of people doing this in North East India carrying megaliths similar size to bluestones. So very doable.

It's very doable, I think. And it would have taken a bit of time, you know, maybe a couple of months depending on how you're going to do it, but you could do it in a season. And the heavy ones, the heavy sarsen. The heavy ones, the journey isn't so long, but I think the scale of the stones makes these sarsen journeys the more remarkable.

And we've got some recent, really interesting geological works being done on the sarsens, a breakthrough, if you like, that is, for the first time a technology of identifying, potentially identifying, sarsen sources is on the table. And this has been done in particular with one stone, which happens to be one of the biggest sarsens at Stonehenge and one of the triathlon uprights.

So they're the kind of the three, like, wickets with a bale on the top. Yes, the cricket stumps, two of them with one on top and with a bale on top. And so there are five of these trilithons in a sort of horseshoe U shape in the centre of the final monument, which is enclosed by a perfect circle of sarsens. And one of these trilithon uprights, which are huge megaliths, has been traced quite precisely to a little valley called uh in west woods which is just up the road from where i'm sitting now on the morber downs so again we've got a we got it if you like we got the two end points of a journey

and it's a relatively easy journey it starts off with a gentle climb and then a massive drop down into the veil of pusey um and at that point, traditionally what happens is people then cross this vale and go up onto Salter Plain on the other side. Now, I think that's a step too far because that's a huge climb, quite a steep one. However, wherever you do it, it's a challenge for something that weighs 20, 30, maybe 40 tonnes. But they're still doing it on sledges, are they?

Yes, exactly. Well, particularly on sledges. I you think yes exactly well particularly i think it's the only way you can possibly move these stones you need to have a sledge because the sarsen boulders um even when they're finished and they're heavily dressed much more than we've realized as a result of a recent study we've learned this that um that they look quite irregular but actually even the irregularities are kind of smoothed off in most cases but they're still irregularly shaped and before they reached Stonehenge they would have been more irregular because some of that dressing undoubtedly took place on the site so you've got these massively

heavy stones that have great protrusions and hollows and lumps and things and there's just no way you could drag those over soft ground you you know, the turf and the chalk, without a sledge underneath it. And a sledge that's strong enough to take these weights is itself going to weigh several tonnes. And it's probably made out of oak or birch. And I think with that weight, with those weights, and you've got all together, you've got 75 of these stones coming from a fairly restricted area on the Moorby Downs to Stonehenge. You need a trackway so so basically you don't need flying saucers you don't need merlin using miraculous powers to move them um you don't need glaciers it's it's entirely doable but it's i mean it's an astonishing feat

but it is doable i think it's more you know it's more astonishing than merlin yeah so we've talked about when mike and we've talked about how they've moved it, but I think we should quickly take a break now. Okay. And then when we come back, it would be great to talk about the big question, which I know people want answered, which is why and what is it?

So we will see you for those key questions after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. But does no one know? That's the question that we are asking today about Stonehenge. and we have with us absolutely the man to do it

uh mike pitts who's been telling us when it was built and how the stones were physically moved to the site but mike the sort of six billion dollar question is why why did they bother and tom i know has a list of theories which i I'm hoping in Spinal Tap fashion, he will sing to us. But are you going to sing it? I'm not going to sing it. But Mike, I mean, basically, again, for as long as people have been writing about Stonehenge, they've been coming up with reasons for why it was built. So Geoffrey of Monmouth. Presumably longer than that.

Yeah, well, yes. Yes. Well, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. But shortly after Henry of Huntingdon writes about it, we get Geoffrey of Monmouth, very much a friend of the show. We've talked about him in reference to King Arthur and Merlin and all kinds of things. And he proposes that it's a memorial built to Britons killed treacherously by Saxons, doesn't he? And I'm guessing that that is not now widely held to be.

Well, well, I think I think like like all the ideas that have been put forward to explain why Stonehenge is there, there's an element of reality in this one. And it may well be completely coincidental, but something we haven't yet mentioned is a key part of the location right from the beginning is that it was a cemetery, it was a burial site. And over the years after the erection of that original bluestone circle, it became the largest cremation cemetery of the time in the British Isles. And so these bluestones became associated, this ring of stones became associated with burial and death so in that respect there's something in that that original medieval story that is on the nail you know this association with burials okay so so then indigo jones the great set designer for james first and and charles the first um he

suggests it's a roman temple so that's a no right yeah that was slightly trickier then uh then john aubrey um very much a friend of stonehenge uh his holes are all over it aren't they um and he came from the village that i grew up in broad chalk so very very fond of him um he suggests that it was built by the druids so that's the theory that spinal tap yeah pick up on yeah and i mean of course it it you know from our perspective it wasn't built by the druids but from his perspective again that was actually a brilliant insight because people have been talking about stonehenge as if it was something that happened within known history and so this is where inigo jones got roman because he couldn't fit it in as a Norman monument or a Georgian structure.

So he put it into the Roman era. Now, what Aubrey did was he looked at it and he thought about it and he thought, this isn't even Roman. It's older than that. And so then he thought, well, what's our conception of what happened before Rome? Well, the only actual evidence as opposed to mythology that he could draw on for this was what he found in classical writers and

where he came across descriptions of a priesthood called druids druidry and so it made complete sense that he was then creating a prehistoric context for Stonehenge. And the only information he could bring to that prehistoric story came from these classical writers who came into Britain before or around the time of the Roman invasion. So he was right in that sense. That's been the most enduring, wouldn't you say? So in other words, the man, woman in the street, you go into the street of Northampton and say,

who built Stonehenge? I would guess a pretty significant number of people would say, oh, it's something to do with Druids. Do you not think that's been very hard to kill, that idea? I think you're quite right. In the middle of the last century, archaeologists tried desperately hard to use the word kill it, which I think is quite appropriate. They were really, really worried about this idea of druids,

and they tried also to stop modern druids getting access to Stonehenge at midsummer and so on. It doesn't bother me. I think it still has an element of appropriateness about it in that druidry is, you know, when people say druids and headline writers in newspapers often use druid in this sense, they literally just use it to mean in a very vague sense something that happened before Rome, you know,

without any more sophisticated understanding of what that means. Exactly. There's a suspicion of a beard, a robe and wild ideas, but apart from that, also but also human sacrifice yeah yes yes okay i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of baggage that comes with jury jury that's not necessarily appropriate but it's a good starting point you know you're starting from a position of imagining that the people who who built stonehenge were not like us and i don't think that's a bad place to start but mike the idea of human sacrifice has has i mean that's also been incredibly popular so when wordsworth writes about

stonehenge it's all hot you know carnage and slaughter and sacrifice and so on i mean is that is there any is is there any archaeological evidence for human sacrifice at stonehenge or is that something that is bred entirely of um people's fantasies and drawing on kind of traditions of Druids and so on? It does. It comes from people's imaginations. I think the origin of it is partly embedded in colonial history and in particular in discoveries and voyages in the Pacific where ideas of cannibalism and sacrifice um developed uh in the 18th century

in particular and there was evidence you know there was concrete evidence of this happening there's no getting away from that cannibalism and sacrifice were occasionally practiced in very particular circumstances and i think people again a bit like aubrey you know looking for a kind of world that they could imagine might have been the world of stonehenge but not the world we live in then ideas from there were transported stonehenge because they were they were rather nice because they were dramatic and yeah but but also i mean it's it's inevitable because essentially with stonehenge we have the hardware but we don't have the software. The software has been kind of wiped. And so I guess it's inevitable that cultural mores and trends will influence how people understand what the purpose. So in the 60s, when you're going there, people become very keen on it.

The idea that Stonehenge was a computer, right? William Stukely, who is my favourite Stonehenge antiquarian, who was an absolute genius of landscape study and perception, he was really the first to notice that the whole monument was aligned on the solstice axis, so the midsummer sunrise in one direction and the midwinter sunset in the other. And that has survived. Nobody really disputes that. And we see it not just at Stonehenge, but we see it

in other smaller monuments in the Stonehenge landscape as well. So that's definitely that. So right from the beginning, we can see that there is this kind of this solar, this sky relationship of the monument, the stuff going on there. Now, what Gerald Hawkins, who wrote this book called Stonehenge Decoding, which was published in the 60s. What he did was he brilliantly, for the time, he was an astronomer. He used an IBM computer, which then was really cutting-edge technology and was something that was sort of several multiples the size of Stonehenge, to feed in, he fed into this computer all the coordinates of every hole and megalith at Stonehenge and came up with this extraordinarily complicated pattern of astronomy and mathematics and argued that Stonehenge itself

was a computer, and this definitely caught the public imagination and is something that hasn't quite gone away again. I think, again, as with all these explanations, there's definitely an element of reality in this. There are, as I mentioned, Stonehenge does have this solstice alignment, but I think there are other things going on there. I mean, you've got perfect circles. You've got some numbers going on.

So you've got five trilithons. You've got 30 stones in the outer circle. There are obvious potential connections there with got 30 stones in the outer circle there are obvious potential connections there with months days in the month you know so we can see these guys are counting we know they're aligning the monument and so on and so there's stuff going on with maths and astronomy but i think it's going to be not computers not scientific white coated if you like in the way that gerald hawkins yeah it's not ibm it's not ibm again like the whole construction and the whole vision of stonehenge it's about society and politics and engaging with

the world around the i guess the kind of the contemporary theory that that a bit like the computing theory has kind of caught the popular imagination is the one put forward by mike parker pearson um and his argument essentially is that Stonehenge is a landscape of death. And this great complex called Durrington Walls, which lies by Woodhenge, is a complex of life. And they're joined by the River Avon. And you go on journeys from the dimension of life at Durrington Walls down the River Avon, basically to Stonehenge, which is the dimension of death. Is that theory one that is now widely held by archaeologists, or is it still very much a minority position? Or what is the standing of that theory at the moment? I wouldn't say it's a minority position, but neither would I say that it's universally followed by archaeologists. I

think like all of these things, I think there's definitely an element of reality in it. It's an element of truth. And it's, I think, quite a significant one. But it's far from the whole picture. So I mentioned that Stonehenge, the location was this really big cemetery. We don't know how many burials there were. About half the monument, the area has been excavated most of that in the 1920s when the burials of the type that they were finding which are just cremation burials with very few if any artifacts associated with them and just small little heaps of cremated burnt bone and ash you know very difficult to do anything with and there wasn't a great interest in them. The way they were digging, they would have undoubtedly missed quite a few and they weren't saved very well and so on and so on.

So the figures you see for the number of burrows at Stonehenge vary widely. My calculation 20 years ago was that there were something in the order perhaps of 240, but I think there might well have been more than that. But that's over 1, thousand years, is it? Well, no, this is the point. This is over five centuries, maybe. So presumably that must mean that something is allowing people to be buried there, because it's obviously not just everybody.

So is this a kind of pharaonic equivalent, a Wessex equivalent of these royal families or priests or what? There's two points to make. On the one hand, this is unusually large for a cremation cemetery at this time in Britain in the Neolithic. On the other hand, of course, as you rightly say, it's not enough people to represent over that period anything like the entire community.

And one of the things that's interesting is the recent isotope study of some of these cremation remains, and they were reburied in 1935 at the site in an Albury hole, and in 2008 we re-excavated them so we could analyse them. And out of that came the information that quite a significant number of these people had not grown up or spent a significant part of their lives in central southern England and could have come, Mike Parker Pearson made a big thing of them coming from Wales,

where the Blues stay as well. But actually they could have come from other parts of Britain or even the other side of the Channel. So it's quite an open question. As what, though? As what? As high status people? As captives? As slaves? I certainly wouldn't say slaves. I mean, I think these are people who, in one way or another,

have special access to this site and have a special reason to be there and it's interesting that the nature of these burials it's quite possible that what's being buried is a package of cremated remains that was collected from a pyre uh years possibly decades before they were buried. And it looks as if they were actually buried in little containers and baskets or little boxes. They could have been cremated in other parts of the British Isles and brought to the site at any later date. So a kind of Neolithic Westminster Abbey?

Yes, I think that's not, in some ways, not an inappropriate analogy. Okay, so this is happening, right? And you've got this very strong association between this unusual burial practice that's occurring and these bluestones. Now, the bluestones over the four or five centuries that this is happening, bluestones are moved about. So they're brought in closer into the centre of the site,

rearranged, and then possibly rearranged again. It's an area that we're not very clear about exactly what's happening there, because it's complicated and the excavations are not brilliantly recorded. But round about 2500 BC, four and a half thousand years ago, things changed dramatically. And all the blue stones are removed from the site. And then the big sarsens are brought in at this point.

And then the sarsens are erected as we were saying in an arrangement of a of a horseshoe of trilithons in the middle surrounded by a perfect circle which is topped with a perfectly circular ring of lintels and then the blue stones are brought back in and erected in holes in the ground that match the sarsens on the inside so there's a there's a horseshoe of blue stones inside the sarsen on the inside. So there's a horseshoe of bluestones inside the sarsen bluestone, and there's a ring of bluestones inside the circle of bluestones. And from that point, there are no more burials. So Mike, in your opinion, what is going on? First of all, why are they bringing the bluestones from Wales? And secondly,

the various stages of Stonehenge, what in in your opinion, and I, of course, entirely accept that we will never know the answer. This has to be kind of slightly sketchy. But what do you think is going on? What is happening here? I think at the beginning, and I think it's very important to recognise that there's going to be no single explanation for this. We're talking of many generations and different things are happening. So we would expect, I think, the meanings and the whys to change as well. So at the beginning, there's something going on that is bringing people together from different parts of the country, different parts of the landscape. And this is a time when I think the population is really quite thinly scattered you know there

are small communities we might call them villages or we could just call them a cluster of a few families and households and people are moving about they've got herds of cattle and pigs and they're growing cereals and vegetables and other plants. So they have this kind of attachment to land. But there's also indications that they're moving about. So they have what we think of as communal foci in the landscape where people gather at particular times of the year from quite wide distances to mix and socialise, to conduct religious rituals and ceremonies, quite often to bury the dead, to feast and trade and so on. So this is a landscape in which people are moving about

and aware of different communities. And I think given the scale of the population, which is quite small, and the distance involved, we're likely to see people who look different. So if you bring people across together at the location of Stonehenge in 3000, 3200 BC from across the British Isles, you're going to have people who sound different,

who are wearing slightly different clothes, who know very different landscapes and different worlds do they speak the same language and well it's a really good question i mean i think it depends on what you mean by language of course but i think we definitely would would imagine different you know if you like dialects and accents and right um and and as to a certain extent you know there's elements of language tied to locations where you have particular types of practices and topographies and so on that have their own unique words. Isn't there evidence that pigs from Scotland were slaughtered at Durrington Walls and livestock from all over the country and things like that? There is, yes. I mean, there's definitely a case of saying pigs were being brought from very far north of Britain, and they were a feasting animal at Durrington Walls.

I think the first, the latter bit, I think I'm quite convinced by. I think there's an awful lot of pork being consumed at Durrington Walls. And there are an awful lot of people living there. And it is more or less the time the big Stonehenge is built. So I think it's reasonable to imagine that this is actually where the people who built the big stonehenge... The builders' camp, basically. And they were feeding and stuff going on. I'm not entirely convinced about this argument that pigs came

from the north of Scotland, but, you know... But we're kind of talking Westminster Abbey crossed with the United Nations. It'd be very simplistic. I mean, we know, you know, we know before the Sarsens came to sight, we know the blue stones came from Wales. We also know that people who did this had been quarrying stone from all over the British Isles for their stone axe blades, which are an absolutely key, key tool.

And I think every self-respecting man would have had at least one axe, you know, in the way that people have. iPhones and things. Yeah. Exactly. And the best stones for that were if you're in wessex the best stones are always somewhere else so either you go to the southeast for flint from um norfolk or sussex or you would go up into the northwest into the lake district into wales and then far north of scotland or even ire Ireland. And so people were aware of geology, if you like. They understood geology and they understood different, that things could come from different places and there were connections

and there were trade and so on that covered the whole of the British Isles. And interestingly, some of the sources that were used for quarried for axe blades before Stonehenge was even thought of, were, are up in the mountains of southwest Wales. You know, so we've got the stones coming from Wales, but you might well have other stuff coming from other parts of Britain that we can't see. And Mike, when you say everybody, I mean, essentially what you're saying is people from across southern Britain, the whole of Britain, people coming from far and wide to this kind of great complex but i think yes i think at least over you know people from across southern central

britain i mean not everybody but you know individually so just one one thing that occurs to me therefore is that when there are all these controversies in the newspapers about you know it's the solstice and loads of kind of new agey people pitch up and have a party at stonehenge that they're not actually as out of kilter with the original meaning of the site as their critics would have us believe that in some ways they are being true to the original spirit aren't they they're coming from all over the country they're having a party they're not bothered about the kind of sledges um no they're not you know it isn't i mean it's very rare on this podcast that i'm the voice of kind of new age druidism but um but but but isn't there something to be said for that well again you know as i've been

saying you know always whenever something happens at stonehenge you can look at it and think well somewhere in there there's something that's actually not irrelevant to what might have happened in the past. And I think you're absolutely right. I think a picture of Stonehen's put it this way, to what was happening there 4,000 or 5,000 years ago than what we see when we visit as a tourist at the time. Right, and it's a kind of heritage site. This very carefully curated main grass, little signs and so on, and this deep sort of silent respect that you're supposed to have and so on, know i think that the

yeah i think that's less relevant so in that sense i think yes i think right the issue though there are other big issues of course is whether um the monument itself might have been had some kind of taboo thing about and i think that's quite possible because when you picture the original monument with all the stones in position you have on the one hand you've got a big space in the middle which is very theatrical and i realized this when we built a full scale replica in modeled in very carefully designed polystyrene painted and it felt really quite real for a channel 5 broadcaster 20 years ago and when you remove all the fallen stones in the centre of the site that you have to climb over today you suddenly find there's this huge theatrical space in the middle

and you also find when you put all the standing stones back that you've got this great wall of megaliths around around that space that make it almost impenetrable and there's this very strong sense that there's something about that inner space that is sacred this sacrosanct is taboo you know using modern words but broadly i think the notion of partying of celebration of having large numbers people come together and again people you know coming from all parts not just the country but in this case and today the world really midsummer it's not at all irrelevant and so there was a festival there and that tradition of kind of great summer festivals glastonbury and so on i mean that's perhaps gives as good a sense of what was going on as as anything that's that's happening at the moment do you think yeah i do and i and i

definitely think that music is something that we don't often talk about in the past because you know there's not no easy way of plugging into it. But I definitely think music would have been part of the scene. Right. So, Mike, we're coming to the end. There is the obvious question, how does Stonehenge come to an end? And this is an example of how opinions are changing quite rapidly, isn't it? Because weren't there kind of DNA tests came in in 2019 suggesting that there was a kind of near genocidal invasion around the end of Stonehenge but I know that this is kind of intensely controversial and debated so what is what again what what is the latest thinking on how Stonehenge ends and

how that ties in with ideas of invasion and immigration there is a lot of a lot of very new data and thinking and and it's really, really exciting stuff. The genocide does not come from the DNA. That comes from press headlines. It doesn't come from the scientific research. What does, though, is a really substantial population change. And the people who had crossed the channel, and again, DNA evidence supports very strongly the notion that farming was actually introduced by migrants into this country rather than developed or discovered by native hunter-gatherers. 6 000 years ago it was their descendants who as far as we can tell with the the the level of precision we have with the chronology who built stonehenge it's only them who created it uh and

the big stonehenge with assassins that was made around 2500 bc was almost certainly made by them and i think what's interesting is that that almost that precise moment, we start to see just a few decades, maybe probably less than a century after that, we start to see this sudden dramatic change in population. And this is caused by a migration of people. They bring with them very different culture. They bring metallurgy, completely new technology. They bring a very different way of burying the dead, which implies different notions about the afterlife and religion. They have new styles of pottery, probably different types of clothing,

almost certainly speaking a different language, and so on and so on. And that change occurs quite rapidly. And within a few generations, in the DNA picture, the native farmers, if you like, who've been there for centuries, for millennia, have all but disappeared. Their descendants are gone. So what's happened to them? So, well, definitely not genocide. That's the the first point the second point is that i think we need to imagine as i mentioned before the population at this time is really quite small it's quite thin and so part of what's happening is they just the people who are there almost become invisible and they might still be there and there is a suggestion in the dna there's some quite

clever analyses that have been done that a few centuries later, we start to see evidence come back into the British genome of these native farmers. And part of the reason they were previously invisible is that their burial traditions didn't give us the samples we need to discover them, to see them. So they don't totally disappear, but they've certainly become less important in the landscape. And there's very little genome in us today. And how does this impact on Stonehenge? Well, the interesting point is this occurs so close to the time when the big Stonehenge we see was specifically built to protect and honour the bluestones. And physically, that's very much how it looks, you know, that the Sarsens are enclosed and they're putting their arms around these old bluestones.

And the bluestones are strongly associated with burial. And here we get into Mike Parker Pearson's notion of ancestors so the blue stones if you like are the ancestors at this point and they're being protected and honoured and or or possibly both there are there's an individual or a group of people who want to show in a kind of Boris Johnson way that that's what they're doing you know that they are honouring the ancestors with this grand display, even if they don't necessarily believe in it themselves. They want to show the world that's what they're doing. And this is occurring at a time when people are not yet seeing these migrants. They haven't yet started coming, but they're aware that change is afoot.

A kind of rumour coming in from the continent there's stories coming in you know there might be an odd individual who's crossed the channel and brought a metal um metal jewelry and some gold and copper and stuff and stories are circulating but there's strange things going on and so one of the responses to that happening is people will kind of buckle down on tradition and at stonehenge we're seeing that manifest itself in the monumentalization of these ancestors and so a backward looking in effect although they're creating this unique monument it's looking back rather than forward and within a generation or so I think it starts to come down and that and by then we've got these migrants are settled in the landscape and one of the most dramatic and best known is just across the river from Stonehenge at Ainsbury, the Ainsbury Archer, who is one of the earliest of the identified of these migrants. He came, the individual himself was born in Central Europe.

And in his grave, he's got this massive collection of artifacts, several of which have some of which probably themselves came from Central or from different parts of Europe, but all of which have the marks of these migrants. None of them are things that we saw in Britain before. The end of Stonehenge, how it ends. Yes. And what happens is almost immediately at this time, the Stonehenge starts to come apart. So I think we see a couple of megaliths fall over in the Saracen Circle. And the landscape around Stonehenge and Stonehenge itself is covered

with small debris from breaking up bluestones in particular, which are easy stones to break up. And I think the sanctity, the importance of the site continues but in a very different reinvented form and part of that includes opening the site up to access by removing megalis and then if you like sharing democratizing the monument but with bits of rock that are taken from it but it's partly a destructive element but it's also got an element of celebration and personalization and acceptance of this thing. And so it continues. And then other structures have dug the monument,

about which we know very little. So it continues as an active location long after the change in population and religion. Brilliant, Mike. Thanks so much. Absolute tour de force. So we now know when, how, perhaps why. Spinal tap have been put in their place, Tom. Yeah, they really have. They really have. Mike, you've we've spinal tap have been put in their place Tom yeah they really have

they really have Mike you've really shown spinal tap so uh your book how to build Stonehenge is uh is out there now a fantastic read um tells you vastly more than we've been able to to fit in this hour but um what we have been able to fit in Mike can't thank you enough for it so thanks very much everyone for listening uh and we will uh see you again soon bye-bye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. And I'm Richard Osman, and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.