5,000 years before Stonehenge, the giant cow hunters who roamed over Salisbury Plain
As archaeologists uncover a treasure trove which rewrites British history, how a controversial road scheme could destroy the site
ASERIES of shady pools near an Iron Age hill fort have been identified as the birthplace of Stonehenge thanks to the dedication of a pioneering archaeologist. Fed by an ancient spring, they are linked to a time long before the world famous prehistoric monument was even dreamt of, a place where nomadic hunter-gatherers would feast on wild boar and huge wild cattle and consume hallucinogenic herbs to commune with their gods.
A new study by Professor David Jacques has disproved the belief of generations of archaeologists that there were no people in the Stonehenge landscape before work began around 3000BC to construct the monument.
Just a few miles away, on the outskirts of Amesbury in Wiltshire, sits Blick Mead, the field containing the old watering holes.
Jacques’ team has been able to prove the site was occupied 5,000 years earlier, from 8000 BC until around 3400 BC, right to the end of the Mesolithic era. By contrast, work on Stonehenge was much later, starting around 3000 BC and possibly lasting until 2000 BC.
Blick Mead has also produced the greatest concentration of flint tools of any site in Europe. Fewer than 50 Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) flint tools had been recorded from the whole of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. But excavations at Blick Mead have already recovered more than 100,000 – and archaeologists believe they have barely scratched the surface.
Gloves and plasters on the fingers of the 15 volunteers helping wash and catalogue finds last week attested to the fact that the scrapers, microliths (small flint tools), axes and other implements extracted from the glutinous mud are as sharp as the day they were struck.
But archeological treasures believed to be waiting to be excavated from Blick Mead could be lost for ever as the Department for Transport wrangles with the area’s acute traffic congestion. For it sits just a few yards from the A303, used by tens of thousands of motorists every day.
WHILE plans to construct a £1.6billion tunnel under Stonehenge are temporarily on hold, the current proposal under consideration includes an eight-metre high flyover directly alongside the Blick Mead site.
Prof Jacques, 55, fears the tunnel would reduce water table levels, causing much of the archaeology at Blick Mead to dry out, destroying any organic remains. When we spoke, he was packing samples of charcoal, wild boars’ teeth and hazelnuts for carbon dating by Uppsala university in Sweden.
“Hazelnuts are like gold for us because if you are lucky enough to find some hazelnut fragments you can nearly always get a date out of them,” he said. “If you take the water table down you will very quickly lose all of these things, like burnt hazelnuts and wild boars’ teeth. We’ll have a lot of stone tools but we won’t be able to get their stories.”
Either way, excavations at Blick Mead will come to an end in October to leave something for future generations of archaeologists to study. Mr Jacques said that five years ago researchers using the latest technology failed to find a single pollen sample.When it was tried again after last year’s dig, 65 types were identified partly thanks to better techniques.
He added: “We are at the point now where it goes from black and white to colour like in The Wizard of Oz.” Blick Mead is named on an old map of the area and probably means “the field owned by Blick”.
If you ignore the roar of traffic it is easy to imagine the pools have changed little since hunter-gatherers occupied what is now privately owned woodland. The springs are crystal clear with stones turned salmon pink by Hildenbrandia rivularis, a rare algae that grows only in certain conditions and gives these pools a magical character.
Prof Jacques first visited Blick Mead in 2005 as a student searching for sources of freshwater used by prehistoric people visiting Stonehenge. At Blick Mead, spring water bubbles up out of the chalk at a constant 11C. It would have flowed when everywhere else was frozen solid in the depths of the post-Ice Age winter.
The pools attracted beasts like the now extinct aurochs, a huge wild cow nearly 6ft tall which needed at least 45 gallons of water a day, and would have been an irresistible target for human hunters.
Prof Jacques, now senior research fellow in archaeology at the University of Buckingham, said: “There would have been very few accessible water sources on Salisbury Plain. After the Ice Age there was massive water run-off and the river Avon was 90 metres wide and very fast, not the sort of river wild cattle could bend over to drink from.
“At Blick Mead there is a spring line, which would have made it an incredibly valuable site for big herbivores.Aurochs would have been trudging along the river valley relying on water sources like that.”
His team has discovered dozens of well-preserved aurochs’ hoof prints beneath a stone pavement laid beside the water’s edge by the first human residents of the site.
The hunter-gatherers’ camp would have consisted of temporary shelters. One des-res has been identified as the pit left by a huge fallen tree. The upturned roots formed one wall.They may have stayed days or weeks, returning every year, but unlike the Neolithic farmers who arrived from the continent with their own crops
and domesticated animals, would have left to follow the herds of wild animals that provided their food.
Mr Jacques believes the Blick Mead site is unique as it was in use long after Neolithic farmers settled in Britain around 6,000 years ago.
Hunter-gatherers are believed to have built the first monuments in the Stonehenge landscape as a series of huge post holes dated to 10,000 years ago were discovered in 1966 during construction of the visitor centre car park.
He said: “Blick Mead was a ‘persistent place’ as the hunter-gatherers would have kept returning to it but the key thing is that it is the only site in England that has an overlap with the first farmers.” Mr Jacques carried on digging despite lack of funding and scepticism from the archaeological establishment, which is reluctant to accept any link between his discoveries and the construction of Stonehenge.
New research published in scientific journal Plos One, by researchers from the universities of Southampton, Buckingham, Tromso in Norway and Salzburg, Austria, shared evidence that Blick Mead was occupied for at least four millennia. The article says: “Little is known about the scale of preNeolithic activity and the extent to which the later monumental complex occupied an ‘empty’ landscape. There has been a long-running debate as to whether the monumental archaeology of Stonehenge was created in an uninhabited forested landscape or whether it was constructed in an already partly-open area of pre-existing significance to late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.
“Here we show that Blick Mead existed in a clearing in deciduous woodland, exploited by aurochs, deer and hunter-gatherers for approximately 4,000 years.
“Given its rich archaeology and longevity this strongly supports the arguments of continuity between the Late Mesolithic huntergatherers’ activity and Neolithic monument builders, and more specifically that this was a partially open environment important to both groups.”
Yet Mike Pitts, editor of British Archaeology, believes there is a gap of at least 1,000 years in the archaeological record between Blick Mead and the construction of the Stonehenge landscape.
There is no evidence that the Neolithic immigrants and the indigenous population ever shared a shelter but they did enjoy at least one feast together.
The site where hunter-gatherers and farmers mingled is the socalled Coneybury Anomaly, 1,500 metres south-east of Stonehenge. A pit discovered in 1980 appears to have been used to dispose of the remains of a feast attended by two distinct groups of people: Neolithic farmers who contributed pigs and cattle and hunter-gatherers who brought deer. Different stone tools confirmed people from two distinct cultures had come face-to-face.
As the academic debate continues, residents of nearby Amesbury have taken Blick Mead to their hearts. In recent local elections they voted to increase the precept to the town council to pay for a new local history centre, now under construction, where finds can be exhibited.
Dozens of locals, and those from further afield, volunteer to help with the digs, including Mick Smith, a retired police officer, and his wife Chris from Soham, Cambs, who is the dig’s finds expert, recording every flake of flint and logging where it was found.
MR SMITH, 63, said: “There are a lot of similarities between the work we are doing here and meticulously recording evidence at the scene of a crime.”
Annual digs have recorded evidence of human activity at Blick Mead dating to 8000BC. The only other site in Britain with such significant activity in the Mesolithic period is Star Carr, North Yorkshire.
Prof Jacques believes the site on the edge of Salisbury Plain had more than geographic significance. The most recent dig found evidence that significant quantities of henbane, a naturally hallucinogenic plant related to deadly nightshade, was growing there.
There are signs trees had been cleared, but not for growing crops. He adds: “We have so far found 15 stone axes. One theory is that the trees were felled to make it easier for aurochs to get to the water where they could be picked off.”
Whether its secrets will finally be answered, only time will tell.