You're Dead to Me - Stonehenge (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Greg Jenner digs into the history and mystery of Stonehenge. Is it really the symbol of fertility and scene of sacrifice it’s portrayed to be, and what part of Stonehenge is the henge exactly? Featuring podcasting legend Richard Herring alongside archaeologist Susan Greaney from English Heritage.Produced by Dan Morelle Script by Greg Jenner Research by Emma Nagouse Radio edit by Cornelius MendezA Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history, and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You might have heard my other Radio 4 series, Homeschool History, although that one's mostly for the kids. In each episode of this show, I'm joined by an expert historian with years of accumulated knowledge and a top comedian who can hopefully try and keep up. And today we are donning our waterproofs and wellies and heading to Wiltshire to learn about the ancient majesty of Stonehenge.

Joining me in the studio are two people with very different skill sets when it comes to assessing a field full of stones. In History Corner, we've rustled up a proper expert. She's the Senior Properties Manager for English Heritage. She's a qualified archaeologist and is midway through her PhD at Cardiff University. It's Sue Greeny. Hi, Sue. Thanks for coming. Hi, thanks for having me. And in Comedy Corner, he's the king of podcasts. He's a brilliant stand-up. He is a writer, a broadcaster. He is a very funny, silly man. It's the fantastic Richard Herring. Hi, Richard. How are you? Hello. lovely to be here. Now it's good to have you in a room together because I know you're both obsessed with stones in fields.

In our own ways. In your own ways. Now people at home are thinking, what does he mean? Well, Sue is an archaeologist, you know, your job is Stonehenge, that makes sense. But Richard, yes, you've got a weird new podcast. I've moved to the countryside in Hertfordshire quite recently and I walked my dog around a field and it was very stony and I started just moving stones to the side for my walk and then I just thought I'd try and be productive with my time so I started clearing stones off the field and making little cairns and now I do a podcast in which you can follow me once a week

walking round the field, taking stones out of the field and explaining the history of stone clearing and also the encounters I have with genuine dog walkers on the way as I try to hide what I'm doing because I'm genuinely embarrassed. So what do you know? In pop culture, Stonehenge is the most iconic ancient monument in Britain. Indeed, one of the most famous in the world. It mysterious and magical druids claim it as a sacred site archaeologists puzzle over it tourists flock in their millions 1.5 million a year some people think it's built by aliens some people think it's magic in the hilariously terrible film transformers 5 it's the belly button to earth and earth is a robot

called unicron so that's great it's popped up in episodes of spongebob squarepants doctor who teenage mutant ninja turtles and of course in the comedy classic spinal tap stonehenge is where the Unicron. So that's great. It's popped up in episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, Doctor Who, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and of course, in the comedy classic Spinal Tap, Stonehenge is where the demons dwell. So that's what I reckon you know at home. But what actually is there to know about Stonehenge? How much fun can we have asking these weird, exciting questions about it? Sue, can we start with the absolute basics? What the hell is a henge? An earthwork enclosure, usually circular. And Stonehenge has one of those just around the outside. Not many people notice it because they're too busy looking at the stones. But there is a henge around Stonehenge. But I've been told the Stonehenge is actually not a henge.

Yeah, if you want to get nerdy and technical about it, you could class Stonehenge as a proto-henge, an early type of henge, because confusingly, it's ditches outside its bank and normally for henges it's the other way around is it made of stone though because if it's not made of stone then that's really that would be that's double wrong yeah there's nothing right in there there's this is there stone in there no no henge isn't earthwork so it's just earth yeah so the point of calling it stonehenge is that it's a henge with some stones nearby exactly good well we can all go home why did we call it a henge what's the i mean is it an old english word anglo-s it's a henge with some stones nearby. Exactly. Good. Well, we can all go home. Why did we call it a henge? I mean, is it an old English word, Anglo-Saxon? Yeah, henge. It comes from either hanging or hinge. So that's because the lintels, the horizontal stones, hang on top

of the other one. So the lintel goes on top of the two sort of, like the goalposts almost. Yeah, the uprights. So there's an idea that it's from hanging, as in they're hanging stones, but there's also an idea that it was a place in Anglo-Saxon times of execution. an idea that it's from hanging as in their hanging stones but there's also an idea that it was a place in anglo-saxon times of execution the idea that these were hanging stones they would actually hang people at the site and actually one person was decapitated and buried in the middle of Stonehenge in the anglo-saxon period so that's possible as well how many henges are there in Britain probably about 500 at least I would say I think you you were going to say five. Almost five. There's a lot there's a lot and it's a really amorphous category so you get really big henges which are the whole field size and then you get really tiny mini henges and everything in between so there are a lot of henges. Why is this

one important then? Stonehenge is unique because the stone circle in the middle of the henge which is the bit we know as a stonehenge is the only one in the world that is lint, as in it's got these horizontal stones on top of the vertical upright stones. And it's also the only one that's been worked and shaped. So the actual stones are connected together with joints. So there are mortise and tenon joints, which are kind of woodworking joints, which connect the stones together. And there are tongue and groove joints, which connect the lintels together. So it's pretty unique. There's no other stone circle like it. So the joints, it sounds like carpentry almost. It is, yeah. So they're carpentry techniques.

And we actually think that at the time that they were building Stonehenge, they'd have been doing this in wood as well. But we don't have those surviving, obviously. So is there a Woodhenge, is there a Strawhenge, Woodhenge, Stonehenge? Yeah, sort of. And then a big bad wolf came. Richard, I believe you did a little bit of archaeology at university. I did, yeah. Well, before university, my year off.

How good are you on the neolithic bronze age switchover not very good i did work on a neolithic site but i didn't find anything on that one really it was i was a bit confused about what was archaeological and just what was bits of stone so that's why i'm that's why i'm just happy just to throw stones away regardless of whether of any value do you know roughly when stonehenge is first built do you can have a guess? I would say, before Christ I'm going to go 3000 BC. That's pretty good. Really good. Spot on. Yeah? I must have

had that somewhere in the back of my mind. You must have lodged in there. 3000 BC is when the henge was dug, so the earthwork bit. The stones went up about 500 years later. 2500 BC. So 4,500 years ago is when the stones appear. Yeah, that's when the famous ones that we think of went up in the middle.

The Neolithic is what we call the New Stone Age. So it's right at the end of the Stone Age. So the Stone Age goes a million years, but then you get right up to four and a half thousand years ago, five thousand years ago, and then people kind of go, oh, bronze. So copper and gold and bronze arrive in the British Isles and they had a new type of pottery and they started burying their dead in individual graves, which they hadn't been doing before. And we now know through ancient DNA studies that lots of new people arrived in the British Isles at that time. And the new people are probably bringing this new metal stuff and bringing the

new ideas. So it's the immigrants turning up with their new stuff. Yeah, potentially. But this is just after Stonehenge has been built. So it's a time of great transition but it's also a time of warfare. I mean are these people welcome? The ancient DNA does not tell us but the fact that the DNA basically was replaced in the British Isles pretty quickly shows that it was much more love than war. And we call these new people the Beaker People? Yeah, they tend to get called the Beaker People. The term went out of fashion because there's this idea that maybe it wasn't new people and it was just new ideas, new things coming across the channel. But actually now with the DNA, we do know it's new people.

So yeah, the Beaker People is what they tend to get called. And why are they called Beaker People? So they have a new type of pottery. It's called a beaker, little pots, made of kind of fine pottery, new decoration. And it's a type that comes across from Europe. In a thousand years' time, Richard, what's our civilisation going to be known as if archaeologists find our stuff?

Well, the iPod and iPhone generation. I think coffee cups as well, before they became biodegradable. Will be the Starbucks people. Those are the changes. If you think in the last 10, 20 years, if you went back 15 years, bins wouldn't be full of coffee cups. You mentioned bins. Is archaeology rubbish? Are we talking about stuff that's chucked away?

Or is Stonehenge very much a site where things are very lovingly, carefully buried and left? A lot of archaeology is rubbish. It's what people leave behind. But at Stonehenge, it's really interesting because it actually seems to have been kept really clean. And when archaeologists dig in the middle of Stonehenge, they don't really find a huge amount. That's why there tends to be all these kind of mysteries about what it's for but nearby is a site called Durrington Walls and that's where we think that the builders of Stonehenge were living and that place is absolutely stocked full of rubbish. So that's sort of the work camp that's where people live and then they go out and do a day's labour on Stonehenge? Yeah

that's what we think. Is it a national monument where people are coming from miles and miles away to build is it sort of the Wembley arena of the neolithic or is it being built by locals we think that it's probably being built by people from all over because there's been some recent research on the animal bones from this site at durrington walls and the animal bones have been shown to come from all over the british isles they're coming from places as far away as northern britain maybe even scotland there is certainly people traveling over long distances to either take part in building stonehenge or potentially to go and take part in big feasts and celebrations and parties at the same time when we talk about stonehenge we're talking about very big stones but there are two types of very big stones there's the sarsens

massive how much do they weigh roughly um the biggest one is about 36 tons and the tallest one is about just over seven meters tall but the smaller ones ones are called bluestones and they're not local. Yeah, we tend to call them the smaller ones, but actually if you stand next to one, they're taller than six, seven foot. So they're quite high. Those are the ones from Wales. We think they were brought from the Preseli Hills and we know the exact outcrops now that those bluestones were quarried from. And there's been some excavations there recently that have been finding the quarries. And they brought them somehow. We don't really know exactly which route and how they transported them but they brought them all the way to soulsbury plain and they put them up in amongst these larger stones richard how would you transport

a stone from wales flying saucer get the aliens to bring them in a flying saucer that's the only real way to do it yeah i guess i think that's probably how they did it but if there were no aliens around that were you meant to roll them along aren't you on logs potentially stick them on a raft or a boat it's much easier than bringing it over land have there been any experiments where people have tried rolling a big lots and lots of experiments and actually the roller hypothesis has just been dismissed slightly yeah yeah because actually the easiest way to do it is to build a kind of permanent trackway a bit like a railway and then just slide the stone all the way along it and and if you've got to bring you know 50 stones you're

probably going to build a trackway of some kind to move them we're talking as long as it's downhill all the way yeah but what if there's a hill in the way or a river yeah you might have to plot your route carefully but whales are miles from stonehenge yeah 250 kilometers and the preselis are quite far into way yeah they're right in pembrokeshire on the way. And the Preselis are quite far into Wales, aren't they? Yeah, they're right in Pembrokeshire on the west, south side of the island. So you're not talking just down the road from, it's not Cardiff, big hilly Wales, and they are moving 36 tonne stones. No, they're a bit smaller than that. Sorry, smaller ones. How much are the smaller ones?

About seven or eight tonnes. Oh, that's fine. That's no worry. It's easy. There was a really funny project called the Millennium Project, and they tried to recreate bringing a blue stone from the Preselis, but one of the major difficulties they had was getting enough volunteers together to actually pull the stone but if you have enough people moving a stone is actually pretty easy. Is there a sense that Stone Henge is built and then they start to tinker with it they're like actually those two stones they need to swap over do they feng shui it? Yeah they do the Earthwork Henge gets built 3000 BC

gets used for a few years as a burial monument. Then the stones get put up. But then a couple of hundred years later, the blue stones, they do move around and rearrange. And we don't really know why. It's the time we're now sort of into the Bronze Age. So there's maybe slightly different people coming and putting their own stamp on it. But would they have already got their joints there, have they? And so would they fit on the next one along? Are they all the same size exactly?

So the blue stones get rearranged into just a circle. But before that, they were their own little lintels, their own little trilithons, so two uprights and a horizontal. So if you look carefully at some of the blue stones that are on site, they've got holes in where they were originally joined together. Was it originally just a real circle all the way around and then some of them have fallen down? Yes. Archaeologists, they argue about this.

So they like to entertain themselves by suggesting that potentially it wasn't completed. There's kind of of a really complete side which is the kind of famous view that we we think of when we think of stonehenge but the back the stones are a lot more irregular and there's a lot of missing stones i'm in the camp that says that it was completed and that we've just got a lot of loss of stone so we don't have any records avebury for example has records from the medieval period saying that they were knocking the stones down and breaking them up Stonehenge we don't have any records like that but we do know there's a lot of stone missing from the site

so it probably got broken up to use as roadstone and that kind of thing How many stones are in it now and how many do you think might be missing? There's over 100 stones Of the outer circle there were originally 30 uprights and 30 lintels and we've probably got less than half of those remaining Alright so there's a big loss there. Yeah, a lot of them. Because they had like a thousand years to get this right.

See, the idea of it not being finished seems very lazy. I can't think that they did. I mean, the back side might not have been quite so nice as the front side, but yeah, I'm pretty sure they finished it. When we look at the famous Stonehenge photograph, it's Stonehenge's bum. No, no, that's the good bit. Oh, that's the good bit. When we look at the really nice complete bits, that's the front. that's that's a good bit so when we look at the

really nice complete bits that's the front that's okay that's the kind of where people would have approached up the avenue but the back side of it is a bit a bit more dodgy well that's that's not great is it same for me richard the curious thing about stonehenge is that in terms of global history the united kingdom britain or whatever we want to call this landmass is a bit behind the rest of the world because we get the Bronze Age really quite late. But while we're building Stonehenge here in Britain, which for us is very shiny and sophisticated, the Egyptians are building the Great Pyramid of Giza. 2.3 million stone blocks. I mean, it's a huge number of bits of rock, beautifully hewn into sort of mathematical perfection,

and we've got to go on some stones in the fields. Why are we so behind in Western Europe? So Stonehenge is the same date as the Great Pyramid, but you're right in that the Bronze Age does come quite late to the British Isles. And there's a period of time, if you've heard of Oertze, who's the Iceman, he was found in the Alps. He's got a copper axe with him, but he dates from about a thousand years before copper arrives in the British Isles. It's embarrassing, isn't it?

It's embarrassing for us. He's an early adopter. Oh, dirty. He's just a bloke walking around in a house. He's already got metal. So people on the continent have got metal a long time before. The channel is only 30 miles across. There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't have brought it across. They had boats.

They didn't like us. They didn't want us to have it. It's clear. No, we haven't got any metal. No, still stones over here. Yeah, just lumped together. No, we can't make any, no, still stones over here. Yeah, just lumped together, no, we can't make them into any interesting shapes or anything, nothing. Meanwhile, bronze. Can we sort of move on to the kind of legacy and the beginnings of trying to understand what the hell this thing is? Who do you think builds Stonehenge, according to medieval historians?

They would have thought King Arthur had built it. Oh, he's close. Merlin. Merlin, he's right. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, do you want to tell Oh, he's close. Merlin. Merlin, he's right. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah. Do you want to tell us, Sue, about the Merlin story? The kind of legendary history of it is that Uther Pendragon,

who's the king of Britain at the time, has a big battle on the Salisbury Plain and decides to build a memorial to his fallen soldiers. And he sends Merlin to go and fetch a stone circle known as the Giant's Ring from Ireland and bring it to Salisbury Plain to put it up as a memorial. And Merlin, I think the term is something like uses machines and contraptions to bring these stones from Ireland,

aliens, and put them up on Salisbury Plain. And what's really interesting about it is that actually we then found out thousands of years later that they did actually bring stones from the West. OK, not Ireland, but the West know, the West bit of Wales. We scroll forward a bit more into the sort of early reign of the Stuarts, the King James, so the time of Shakespeare. The theory has changed.

The most sort of notable early archaeologist there is a guy called Aubrey, John Aubrey. What's his theory? So John Aubrey comes and visits Stonehenge and he draws one of the first surveys. He draws a plan of it. And he thinks that it's a Druid monument. So he thinks that it is built pre the Romans. So the Druids were sort of judges and magicians and priests of the Iron Age tribes that lived here.

And so he, quite logically in some ways, decided that it was the Druids that built it. Had there been anyone saying it was Romans who built it? Yes. Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones, that's a good name, isn't it? Inigo Jones, who was an architect. So he saw columns and arches and he thought that was an early built it? Yes. Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones. That's a good name, isn't it? Inigo Jones, who was an architect. So he saw columns and arches and he thought that was

an early version of Roman architecture. There was also a guy called Walter Charlton who thought it was built by the Danes, so by the Vikings. Oh, lovely.

So that's quite a good theory. And then somebody pointed out that there were stone circles in parts of the British Isles where the Vikings had never reached. So that was a bit quash. Did anyone think

it just happened naturally by natural erosion? Yeah, they did. There was an early idea that they were just natural stones. Did anyone think it just happened naturally by natural erosion? Oh, yeah, they did. There was an early idea that they were just natural stones. Some think that glaciers brought the blue stones all the way to Salisbury Plain. However, most geologists don't think that the glaciers came this far south.

Cats could have brought them. Yes, cats. They could have all just carried them. OK, if you get enough cats. How many cats are we talking about? I mean, it would have to be, you're talking about 1,500 cats all working together.

Cats don't work together. Maybe they did in those days. They've evolved because they've been domesticated, but before they were domesticated they were wild cats and they used to move big stones around. For what purpose, Richard? Big scratching posts it could be.

There's all sorts of things it could be. Inigo Jones says Romans. John Aubrey says Druids. Then we get William Stukeley. He's quite the character. He's very cool. And he spends basically every summer visiting Stonehenge and drawing it and discovering a huge number of monuments in the surrounding area.

So he finds the Cursus, which is this big early Neolithic rectangular monument that no one had seen before. So the Cursus, I mean, that sounds like circus. Yeah, so he decides that it's a Roman chariot racing course. Now we know that they are Neolithic monuments. He also found the avenue, which is the kind of approach to Stonehenge, and he also was the first person to notice that it was aligned on the Midsummer Sunrise. This is in the 1700s?

Yeah, 1723-ish. So, I mean, he's pretty advanced, and he is also an amateur druid. He is. Not that advanced. He follows John Albury. He also thinks that druids built Stonehenge and he gets so into druidism that he pretends that he is one. Oh yeah, we know what he's up to.

He's quite easy as a primitive version of Christianity. Is he the guy who kind of sort of invents the idea of druidism as a religion? Yeah, he does. So he writes a big book which he puts all these ideas out and it becomes very, very popular. It's kind of the best-selling book on Stonehenge for a couple of hundred years. But actually, he kind of nicked his ideas from John Albrey.

Albrey was the one that really came up with the idea, but then Stukely was the one that made it popular. And basically, until the beginning of the 20th century, people, and still now, actually, people still think that druids built Stonehenge. So he was responsible for that. I still think it. Even after listening to all that, I still think that druids built Stonehenge, so he was responsible for that. I still think it. Even after listening to all that, I still think it was druids.

When did the alien conspiracies start? I'd say 1970s, 1980s is when you get a proliferation. When the SD kicks in. Yeah, so you get a lot of ideas at that time about mysticism and aliens and spirits and energies and all of these things. Ley lines particularly, quite a popular thing to try and find and draw maps and look at them. So yeah, I'd say it was probably the 60s, 70s time

when people were expanding their minds in various ways and coming up with new theories. Who protects Stonehenge now then? It is your job essentially, isn't it? English Heritage, who are the charity that I work for, have responsibility for looking after the stones. All the land around it is owned by the National Trust. So together with the National Trust, we kind of manage the whole landscape.

Richard, do you know the story of how it ended up in the nation's hands? It's always belonged to the nation. No. It's ours. Well, I mean, you can think that, but no. So in 1915, a man went to an auction with the intention of buying, apparently, some dining chairs for his wife and ended up buying Stonehenge.

That happens at auctions. He was scratching his nose, wasn't he? His name was Cecil Chubb, which is a great name. It's my wrestling name, Cecil Chubb. Apparently he went along and went, oh, I've accidentally bid on an ancient monument and now I own it. And he gave it to his wife and she was like,

thanks very much, but I prefer the dining chairs. So they ended up sort of giving it to the nation. That's right, yeah. How much did it cost? £6,600. Bargain. Yeah, quite a lot of money in those days. What's the stop Elon Musk trying to buy it?

It's in state guardianship. So it basically belongs to the government and the state and you'd have to argue with them about buying it. And the British Army is nearby, so if anyone does try and steal it. The Salisbury plane training area is just over the horizon. What if the aliens come back to take it away again? Yeah, I think we'd probably just let them. OK.

Can we talk a little bit about some of the theories as to why it was built? I'm going to go through the list. So as well as Druids and Romans and Vikings and all that, it's a healing sanctuary. It's a cemetery. It's a celestial clock. Aliens, obviously. It's acoustically engineered,

so it's like something to do with the sound is brilliant. And it's a national party place for weddings and gatherings. What's the evidence for a healing sanctuary, for example? So the idea that it's a healing place is a professor called Tim Darville who came up with this idea. And he looked at the blue stones and he went to Wales where the blue stones are in the Preseli Hills. And there's a tradition there that the blue stones have healing qualities. And if you pour spring water over them and then drink that water or bathe in it, then you will be healed of various ailments. So he suggested that Stonehenge was a bit like a prehistoric Lourdes,

that you would bring these special stones all the way from Wales and set them up there and people could come and be healed. It's not a completely balmy idea, but it's just one theory that an archaeologist has come up with. Cemetery feels a little bit more... Yeah, that's good. Cemetery I would sign up to myself. So in the first sort of 500 years of the monument being in existence,

about 150 people were buried there as cremations and quite a few of them have been excavated. So we know that people definitely were buried there, men, women and children. So yeah, it was one of the biggest cemeteries that we know of in that period at the time. That solved it. Sure, we've ruined the mystery of the Stone Age.

So the idea, some people have said the stones are there in memory of the ancestors, so the people who are being buried there, it's their kind of marker or gravestone. Richard, do you like celestial clock as a theory? Well, if it's a clock, you know, it's a long way to go, isn't it, if you're in Leicester, go, what's the time? Hold on. I've just got to go down to Salisbury

and check the henge. They might have a local henge that's based on the... Well, the wooden ones, they're not going to be as good as the stone ones. I wouldn't know. The monument is aligned on the movements of the sun. So it's not really a clock, more of a calendar. So it lines up with midsummer solstice and it lines up with midwinter solstice.

So the longest day and the shortest day. So the stones in particular, as I said before, there's hardly any finds from the site. There's no kind of evidence of feasting or pottery or fires or anything going on. So we only have the stones to tell us really what the monument is about. And the fact that it lines up with the solstice suggests that people are gathering there at those particular times of year and that the sun was an important part of their religious beliefs.

Aliens, I think we can probably discredit. People gathering, congregating for some religious ritual. Yes. Sounds sensible. So maybe it's all of those theories together. It could be all of those and none of those. But not the aliens. Not the aliens. Okay. And at what point are we talking about Stonehenge becoming a tourist site? I mean, when do people start going there and having picnics and buying key rings? People have always been visiting Stonehenge. So there were records back right to the medieval period of it being kind of a wonder of the world. But it's really the invention of the motor car that brings people en masse to Stonehenge. And so from that date onwards, really, the numbers have gone up and up and up until the present day.

What's the earliest tourist memento that you've discovered on site? In two places on the stones, Christopher Wren put his name. Wow. So that's what, 1660s, 1770s? Yeah. He was born locally, but he wasn't living there at the time. But it was the time he was building St Paul's. Maybe Christopher Wren built Stonehenge and signed it.

I quite like to think that he was a bit inspired by it, maybe. The one person we haven't mentioned is quite a famous burialist, the Amesbury Archer. So he was excavated in 2001. Just near Stonehenge, there's a small town called Amesbury, and they were building lots of new houses. So archaeology was taking place and he's somebody that was buried in a grave with seven beaker pots these new types of pots that come in just after Stonehenge is being built and with some of the earliest metal objects that we find in the British Isles he's got gold earrings and he's got a copper

axe and he's got various other metal working tools with him. There's an idea that he's probably one of the earliest tourists to Stonehenge. Maybe he comes across from the continent. We know from studies of his teeth that he was brought up in the Central Alps. So Austria? Potentially. The oxygen isotopes that you use are not that specific. Because Erzi's from Austria.

Erzi sort of dies in Austria, Italy, doesn't he? Yeah, he's from the Italian Alps. It's in a very similar area. Ames B. Archer is travelling across. Could have been the bloke who shot Erzi with of dies in Italy, doesn't he? Yeah, he's from the Italian Alps. It's in a very similar area. Amesbury Archer is travelling across. Could have been the bloke who shot Erzi with his arrow. He's doing a runner. It's a fugitive. But he's one of the first beaker burials that we have.

Is there a sense that he might have been quite important, quite powerful? It's a very, very rich grave in terms of number of objects and he's also a metal worker, which at that time was a new skill. People would never have seen metal before. People would have not known how metal was worked. So it's magic i mean it's taking stone and making metal out of it yeah i mean to create bronze you have to superheat copper don't you yeah so um one idea is that he's coming looking for tin sources from southwest britain can we call him the king of stonehenge um no because stonehenge was built before he got there

i could call him the first tourist if you like all right i'm fine i mean he's fugitive of Stonehenge was built before he got there. Ah, dammit. I mean... I could go on as the first tourist, if you like. All right, fine. I mean, he's... Fugitive of Stonehenge is much sexier. That's a sort of true crime podcast. It could have been a prison. What if Stonehenge was a quite bad prison? Really bad.

Lots of holes. There is another guy who gets buried in the ditch at Stonehenge. We call him the Stonehenge Archer, confusingly. And he has got three flint arrowheads in his back. The nuance window! call him the Stonehenge Archer, confusingly, and he has got three flint arrowheads in his back. The Nuance Window! We've come to the point which is known as the Nuance Window, where we allow our expert to rant for three minutes and we're going to let you, Sue, tell us what your pet theory

is the thing that you want people to hear. So without much further ado, would you like to launch into the Nuance Window? OK, so I would like to argue that we shouldn't really be calling prehistory, prehistory anymore. So we've been using a lot of terms, Neolithic and Bronze Age and Iron Age, and these are period names that have been around for ages, but archaeologists find them really confusing and people do as well. And they basically refer to the tools that people are using at that time. And that doesn't really tell you much about what's actually going on at the time. And the term prehistory is

obviously before written record. We tend to use that as a time for describing all of the human past before we start to write things down. But actually, it's not that useful a term because prehistory just becomes this massive, amorphous mass of thousands of years. But in archaeology now, we've had radiocarbon dating for about 50 years. And radiocarbon dating allows us to date objects like antler and bone and charcoal, anything that was living, and allows us to date that quite accurately. And in the last 10 years or so in archaeology, we've developed new techniques, which means that we can combine radiocarbon dates with statistical methods, which basically means we can get down to about 20 to 25 years for when an event happened.

So for Stonehenge, for example, we know exactly when the stones were put up. And we know that maybe it was the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those people who then moved the stones around. So we can talk about things in terms of generations, in terms of lifetimes, and we've got really precise dates. So we actually have more information about the Neolithic now than maybe some other bits of history like maybe the early medieval period when we don't really know what's going on. Calling it prehistory I'd like to call it history because actually we know events we know that people were doing things at particular times and we can date those events. For example there's a long barrow near Avebury called West Kennet Long Barrow and they've dated the human remains that were put into that it's a funerary monument. People were only buried in it for about 50 years. That's a really short window

of time. And so now we know that that's a really specific amount of time. It shows that people were making specific decisions. People were having conflicts, people were sometimes at peace and sometimes at war, there were times of boredom and sometimes times of chaos. But this nuance and getting back to an idea of history in the deep past gets us much closer to what was actually going on in people's lives at that time. Thank you so much. Richard, have you got any follow-up on that interesting nuance window? What would you call the time before that bit that you do know now? Deep history.

Okay, good. Well, we've had a fantastic chat there I've really enjoyed that A huge thanks to my two guests Sue Greeny in History Corner and Richard Herring in Comedy Corner Thank you to both of you If you've enjoyed the show

please do share it with your friends leave a review online make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me so you never miss an episode on BBC Sounds and actually the episodes there are longer so you get more of the joy But for now now let me say a huge thank you to my guests in history corner sue greenie or rather archaeology corner i suppose

and in comedy corner the fantastic richard herring thank you very much i hope you enjoyed it i'm off to go and build myself a stonehenge i'm sure it can't take that long bye Part 3 of the Lovecraft Investigations. The cult drama podcast from BBC Radio 4. This is the shadow of Rinsmouth. An unusual symbol had been carved into the stone wall beside the door. had been carved into the stone wall beside the door. It looked like a man holding a trident with the tail of a fish where his legs should be. She has to get out of Innsmouth.

However you do it, you need to get word to Kennedy to get out of there right now. Let me through. I'm so sorry. We locked the door at ten o'clock and I'd quite forgotten. It's a force of habit, I'm afraid. Is there someone out there? Is there... I think someone was following afraid. Is there someone out there? Is there...

I think someone was following me. I can make out some shapes. People moving around the fire. Hear the shadow over Innsmouth or listen to the story from the very beginning. Subscribe to the Lovecraft Investigations on BBC Sounds. Hello? Can anyone hear me?

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