stonehenge - English Heritage
stonehenge - English Heritage
stonehenge - English Heritage
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015-046 section 1.qxd 6/21/05 4:15 PM Page 25<br />
The age of myth and legend<br />
Stonehenge is sometimes tentatively associated with the<br />
circular temple to Apollo in the land inhabited by the<br />
Hyperboreans that is referred to originally by Hecateus of<br />
Abders (c.300 BC) in a lost work that was later quoted by<br />
the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca<br />
historica (Book V). However, Atkinson (1979, 183) found<br />
insufficient justification for the link, and Burl (2000, 205)<br />
plausibly suggests that Hecateus’ temple was the great<br />
stone circles and avenues of Callanish on Lewis.<br />
The earliest explicit reference to Stonehenge is that by<br />
Henry of Huntingdon in his Historia Anglorum written about<br />
AD 1130. In describing the wonders of Britain, he said<br />
(quoting Atkinson 1979, 184):<br />
The second is at Stonehenge, where stones of an<br />
amazing size are set up in a manner of doorways, so that<br />
one door seems to be set upon another. Nor can anyone<br />
guess by what means so many stones were raised so<br />
high, or why they were built there.<br />
evolutionary narratives in which order, hierarchy, and<br />
progression are paramount, models of change are<br />
deterministic, and analysis is largely comparative. These<br />
attitudes can be traced from the classical revivals of the<br />
Renaissance in fourteenth-century Europe through the Age<br />
of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth<br />
centuries to Positivist science from the early nineteenth<br />
century, and, most recently, modernist and processualist<br />
views from the mid twentieth century onwards.<br />
The second trajectory is predominantly ‘romantic’ in its<br />
attitudes, with genealogical narratives focused on meaning,<br />
action, growth, and descent. The whole approach is grounded<br />
in contextualist and relativist modes of thinking to produce<br />
interpretations and ‘understandings’ rather than explanations.<br />
This line of approach starts with the Reformation in Europe in<br />
the 1520s and its concern for the roots of northern peoples. It<br />
develops through Romanticism in the eighteenth century,<br />
Nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,<br />
and, currently, post-modernism and its counterpart in postprocessual<br />
archaeology from the late 1980s onwards.<br />
While each of these trajectories unfolds in parallel, the<br />
dialectical element of Sherratt’s model emphasizes the<br />
periodic shifts in dominance between the two trajectories as<br />
phases of stability and contentment with one line of<br />
thinking eventually lead to revolt, disenchantment, and a<br />
consequent shift across to the other way of seeing the<br />
world. Thus although, at any one time, the dominant<br />
tradition is to be found on one trajectory, research within<br />
the traditions characteristic of the parallel trajectory take<br />
place albeit with a reduced significance and impact until the<br />
next shift in dominance. For Stonehenge, these changing<br />
approaches can be seen not only in the descriptive written<br />
discourses available, but also in the way the site and its<br />
surroundings are mapped and drawn. These themes are<br />
explored in the following sub-sections which are arranged to<br />
plot the course of the dominant attitudes to cultural history<br />
and intellectual position.<br />
About six years later, in AD 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth<br />
gave a more rounded account of Stonehenge in which he<br />
rehearsed a legend that became the principal account of the<br />
monument for centuries. This is the story of Aurelius<br />
Ambrosius, king of the Britons, who sought to<br />
commemorate his nobles slain in battle by Hengist the<br />
Saxon. Aurelius consults the wizard Merlin as to what a<br />
fitting memorial might be. Merlin advises acquiring a stone<br />
structure, known as the Giant’s Dance, from Ireland. Using<br />
his supernatural powers he then transports the structure<br />
across the water to Salisbury Plain.<br />
The tale of Aurelius and Merlin was widely repeated<br />
through the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries: in the<br />
Anglo-Norman translation of Geoffrey by Wace of about 1171,<br />
in the Topographia Hibernica by Giraldus Cambrensis of about<br />
1187, and in a work by Robert of Gloucester dating to about<br />
1278 (see Barclay 1895, 131–2 for a useful list of early sources,<br />
and Legg 1986 selected for transcriptions). Indeed, the story<br />
may embody a genuine folk-memory of the actual building of<br />
Stonehenge and the acquisition of stones from a distant<br />
source in the west of Britain (now known from scientific<br />
evidence to be west Wales) which survived as oral tradition<br />
down to the twelfth century AD (Piggott 1941; Atkinson 1979,<br />
185). The picture is complicated by the fact that interest in the<br />
site during medieval times seems to have focused on the great<br />
size of the stones and this has led Burl (1985) to suggest that<br />
perhaps Geoffrey misunderstood contemporary stories about<br />
large standing stones in County Kildare in Ireland.<br />
Two illustrations of Stonehenge are known from<br />
fourteenth-century manuscripts. One shows Merlin building<br />
the monument much to the amazement of mere mortal<br />
onlookers; the other depicts a rather squared-up<br />
perspective view of the monument (Chippindale 1983a<br />
figures 14 and 15). Here, as with the oral traditions,<br />
Stonehenge is the real-world incarnation of something<br />
created in a mythical world; a place where worlds collide.<br />
Renaissance revisionism<br />
The move away from the medieval world towards the modern<br />
order represented by the revival of learning and fresh<br />
interests in classical antiquity that characterized the<br />
Renaissance from around AD 1400 led to the first challenge<br />
Illustration 15<br />
Andrew Sherratt’s<br />
European dialectic model<br />
adapted to changing<br />
interpretative models<br />
of Stonehenge. [Based<br />
on Sherratt 1996, figure 1.]<br />
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