stonehenge - English Heritage

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The age of myth and legend
Stonehenge is sometimes tentatively associated with the
circular temple to Apollo in the land inhabited by the
Hyperboreans that is referred to originally by Hecateus of
Abders (c.300 BC) in a lost work that was later quoted by
the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca
historica (Book V). However, Atkinson (1979, 183) found
insufficient justification for the link, and Burl (2000, 205)
plausibly suggests that Hecateus’ temple was the great
stone circles and avenues of Callanish on Lewis.
The earliest explicit reference to Stonehenge is that by
Henry of Huntingdon in his Historia Anglorum written about
AD 1130. In describing the wonders of Britain, he said
(quoting Atkinson 1979, 184):
The second is at Stonehenge, where stones of an
amazing size are set up in a manner of doorways, so that
one door seems to be set upon another. Nor can anyone
guess by what means so many stones were raised so
high, or why they were built there.
evolutionary narratives in which order, hierarchy, and
progression are paramount, models of change are
deterministic, and analysis is largely comparative. These
attitudes can be traced from the classical revivals of the
Renaissance in fourteenth-century Europe through the Age
of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to Positivist science from the early nineteenth
century, and, most recently, modernist and processualist
views from the mid twentieth century onwards.
The second trajectory is predominantly ‘romantic’ in its
attitudes, with genealogical narratives focused on meaning,
action, growth, and descent. The whole approach is grounded
in contextualist and relativist modes of thinking to produce
interpretations and ‘understandings’ rather than explanations.
This line of approach starts with the Reformation in Europe in
the 1520s and its concern for the roots of northern peoples. It
develops through Romanticism in the eighteenth century,
Nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
and, currently, post-modernism and its counterpart in postprocessual
archaeology from the late 1980s onwards.
While each of these trajectories unfolds in parallel, the
dialectical element of Sherratt’s model emphasizes the
periodic shifts in dominance between the two trajectories as
phases of stability and contentment with one line of
thinking eventually lead to revolt, disenchantment, and a
consequent shift across to the other way of seeing the
world. Thus although, at any one time, the dominant
tradition is to be found on one trajectory, research within
the traditions characteristic of the parallel trajectory take
place albeit with a reduced significance and impact until the
next shift in dominance. For Stonehenge, these changing
approaches can be seen not only in the descriptive written
discourses available, but also in the way the site and its
surroundings are mapped and drawn. These themes are
explored in the following sub-sections which are arranged to
plot the course of the dominant attitudes to cultural history
and intellectual position.
About six years later, in AD 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth
gave a more rounded account of Stonehenge in which he
rehearsed a legend that became the principal account of the
monument for centuries. This is the story of Aurelius
Ambrosius, king of the Britons, who sought to
commemorate his nobles slain in battle by Hengist the
Saxon. Aurelius consults the wizard Merlin as to what a
fitting memorial might be. Merlin advises acquiring a stone
structure, known as the Giant’s Dance, from Ireland. Using
his supernatural powers he then transports the structure
across the water to Salisbury Plain.
The tale of Aurelius and Merlin was widely repeated
through the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries: in the
Anglo-Norman translation of Geoffrey by Wace of about 1171,
in the Topographia Hibernica by Giraldus Cambrensis of about
1187, and in a work by Robert of Gloucester dating to about
1278 (see Barclay 1895, 131–2 for a useful list of early sources,
and Legg 1986 selected for transcriptions). Indeed, the story
may embody a genuine folk-memory of the actual building of
Stonehenge and the acquisition of stones from a distant
source in the west of Britain (now known from scientific
evidence to be west Wales) which survived as oral tradition
down to the twelfth century AD (Piggott 1941; Atkinson 1979,
185). The picture is complicated by the fact that interest in the
site during medieval times seems to have focused on the great
size of the stones and this has led Burl (1985) to suggest that
perhaps Geoffrey misunderstood contemporary stories about
large standing stones in County Kildare in Ireland.
Two illustrations of Stonehenge are known from
fourteenth-century manuscripts. One shows Merlin building
the monument much to the amazement of mere mortal
onlookers; the other depicts a rather squared-up
perspective view of the monument (Chippindale 1983a
figures 14 and 15). Here, as with the oral traditions,
Stonehenge is the real-world incarnation of something
created in a mythical world; a place where worlds collide.
Renaissance revisionism
The move away from the medieval world towards the modern
order represented by the revival of learning and fresh
interests in classical antiquity that characterized the
Renaissance from around AD 1400 led to the first challenge
Illustration 15
Andrew Sherratt’s
European dialectic model
adapted to changing
interpretative models
of Stonehenge. [Based
on Sherratt 1996, figure 1.]
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