COUNTRY VIEWS
Ancient standing stones and epic earthworks still defy our attempts to understand them
Prehistoric monuments still defy our understanding, says Sara Maitland.
They are extraordinary, often beautiful, sometimes strangely haunting, scattered all over Britain (from the very west of Cornwall to the outer isles of the Shetlands) and still their purpose and meaning remain totally mysterious, though extensively researched and speculated upon.
“They” are the standing stones and earthworks constructed by our earliest prehistoric ancestors. Some – Stonehenge, the Ring of Brodgar, and Avebury Stone Circles – are famous, but some are just single stones standing in fields in an apparently casual manner, and it seems certain there were more of them before the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries, when fields were cleared and ploughed all over the country. This does, however, have the advantage that those remaining tend to be in wild and gloriously undeveloped places.
They are worth looking at and thinking about, not just because they’re ancient and lovely but because the logistics of their construction imply a far more sophisticated and knowledgeable civilisation than the ‘primitive’ model we tend to have in mind when we think of the Neolithic or Bronze and Iron Ages. Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is the largest artificial mound in Europe; it is as big, in height and volume, as an Egyptian pyramid and is approximately contemporary with them. It has been calculated that it took over a million working hours to construct and, unlike Egypt, so far as we know, there was no extensive slave culture. How was it managed? How were these workers fed and housed, let alone persuaded to give up their hunting to cart mud and chalk around? We do not know.
WEIGHTY QUESTIONS
Some of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge weigh over 22 tonnes. They come from South Wales. Even today, moving things of this size and weight from South Wales to the downs in Wiltshire would be a major undertaking. Someone must have chosen the stones and got them quarried and cut; they then had to be transported over 100 miles. There were no roads, no bridges, and, even individually, they are pretty heavy to move across the Bristol Channel by boat. This is not just a technical issue (though that in itself is impressive, and we still don’t know how they got those lintel stones up); it is a huge administrative triumph. Moreover, most of the larger remaining circles are exquisitely oriented to a variety of astronomical phenomena – many to the summer solstice – when, for example, the rising sun shines directly on a specific stone. Experts are convinced this is too frequent and too precise to be coincidental, but it is not simple: it requires a depth of knowledge observed and recorded (and there’s no suggestion these cultures had writing) over extended periods of time, and a remarkably high level of technical skill at construction point. Primitive it is not!
And the deepest mystery is that we have no understanding – beyond the idea these must have been religious and ritual sites – about what all this work was for: what meaning it had and why so much effort went into creating these magnificent places. We almost certainly have to accept we never will, despite all the advances in archaeology. They are messages from 5,000 years ago that we cannot decode. We can only try to imagine, appreciate the creative urge that drove people so very long ago, and just stand and stare.
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