The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 92 • Mike Parker Pearson
Bronze Age, very few have been properly investigated and closely dated. Some of those whose
construction can be dated with certainty to the Early Bronze Age are two adjacent circles on
Machrie Moor, Isle of Arran, which replaced timber circles, the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire
and, of course, Stonehenge (Richards 1991; Cleal et al. 1995). These and other monuments have
formed the basis for a bewildering range of theories of ley lines, cosmic energy paths, dowsed
underwater stream crossings, crop circles, earth mysteries, ancient computers, astronomical markers
of star constellations, megalithic units of measurement, and more archaeologically acceptable
notions of solar and lunar markers, territorial markers, and legitimation statements. Many
archaeologists of the present generation are less virulent in their dismissal of the ‘fringe’ alternatives
than Professors Glyn Daniel and Stuart Piggott were with Alexander Thom’s notions of megalithic
astronomers (Thom 1971). Nonetheless, a distinction can probably be drawn between the fringe
who believe that the ley lines and energy paths actually exist, and the archaeologists who would
be prepared to accept that similar beliefs and notions may have been in the heads of prehistoric
peoples but that these ideas have no external reality.
Many of these monuments encode solar and lunar observations, indicating not only that the
passage of cyclical and presumably linear time (i.e. seasonal time and time counted in years from
an origin) was carefully marked but also that these two heavenly bodies were central to a complex
cosmology that integrated them with the layout of the land and with the activities of people. This
is best illustrated by Stonehenge, which has many sightlines, albeit broadly defined, for movements
of the sun and moon (Burl 1983; 1987) besides that of the summer solstice sunrise. Of course,
the linking of Druids to Bronze Age Stonehenge is a fallacy. However, there may well have been
a group, caste or class of ritual specialists at that time. The question of whether Stonehenge was
inspired or engineered by Myceneans can now be rejected; although the evidence currently points
in favour of indigenous development, there is the likelihood of indirect links across Europe with
the east Mediterranean, so that we cannot view developments in Britain as entirely independent
from Europe. In any case, the astronomical sophistication embodied by Stonehenge was not new.
Accurate calendrical calculations based on the sun and moon had probably been performed in
Britain for over a thousand years prior to the building of Stonehenge. Whilst it seems to have
come to embody an axis mundi, or centre of the world, Stonehenge may have been not so much
an experiment as a memorial, a referential monument to the absolute and unquestionable
universality of time and the ancestors in ordering the sacred and mundane routines of people’s
lives. Whilst its large stones are sarsens, brought probably from the Marlborough Downs of
north Wiltshire, the earliest stone circle seems to have been of bluestones from the Prescelly
Mountains of Dyfed. There is still a debate amongst geologists as to whether these bluestones
were brought to the area by human agency or by earlier glaciers; if the former, and this seems
increasingly likely, then the mountains also fit into this elaborate cosmology, perhaps embodying
ancestral links with Wales.
CHANGE
Profound changes can be identified by the end of the Earlier Bronze Age, indicating new
conceptions of territory, land, domesticity and identity. The axe, that powerful symbol and tool
of Neolithic societies, had been eclipsed by the dagger; by the Middle Bronze Age, this form had
become elaborated into long bronze rapiers, which were effective weapons, along with bronze
spearheads. As landscapes changed from zones of movement around sacred monuments and
burial mounds to fixed places of occupation and unchangeable blocks of agricultural land, so
people became rooted at the centres of their increasingly bounded domains (Barrett 1994).