THE WORLD OF STONEHENGE
The British Museum’s exhibition concerns itself less with the archæology of Britain’s most famous Neolithic site and more with its wider context, says DAVID V BARRETT, who finds very human stories among the stones
You could easily spend hours exploring the more than
430 artefacts in the British Museum’s exhibition The World of Stonehenge. It’s so fascinating and beautiful, and oddly peaceful, that it takes a while to realise that something is missing from it: Stonehenge itself. There’s very little about the phases of its building, or where the different types of stone came from, and how, or new archæological work, or about its setting in the landscape. It’s almost as if these subjects are so thoroughly discussed elsewhere, the curators decided not to bother with them here.
There is a running timeline of Stonehenge’s history, but the emphasis is on the world in which it occurred: the context of Stonehenge, the times when it was built, and the society and the people of those times. Most of the objects, many of which have never been exhibited in Britain before, come from elsewhere: Scotland, Ireland, the Lake District, Germany. The exhibition is exploring the wider world in which people lived and, individually and collectively, sought meaning by interacting with their landscape.
Individually, there’s a pair of antlers and over 40 wild animal bones from Germany, buried with a young woman around 6,500 BC, with an image of how they may have looked as a head-dress and necklace. She’s known as the Bad Dürrenberg shaman; astonishingly, analysis of her skull suggests she had a rare condition that probably caused her to lose control of her body and enter trance
The Nebra Sky Disc looks for all the world like a winking smiley
states.
Collectively, a section on Skara Brae and the Ness of Brodgar in the Orkneys shows how the people there lived 5,500 years ago – actually before Stonehenge was constructed. Displayed in the centre of a room, in remarkable condition, is a wooden trackway, constructed in 3,80706 BC to cross a reed swamp in the Avalon Marshes, close to Glastonbury. It’s made of oak planks over crossed stakes of alder wood, which its creators must have known doesn’t rot when waterlogged.
There’s a host of jewellery and tools and weapons, and there are skeletons of the people who may have made them and worn them and used them. There are more stone axes than you’ll have seen anywhere – there’s a wall display simply of axe heads, beautiful in its simplicity – and a deeply scored boulder used for sharpening them. One axe, incredibly rarely with its wooden handle still preserved, was found in a Scottish peat bog. Axe heads came from many places; high quality axes made from green jadeitite from the Italian Alps were traded across Europe 6,000 years ago; closer to home, green-grey axe heads made of volcanic tuff stone came from an axe quarry in the fells at Great Langdale in the southern Lake District.
Throughout the exhibition there’s a concentration on man’s relationship with nature, and our focus on the life-giving power of the Sun, revealed in numerous objects, including beautiful shining collars made of beaten gold.
Three highlights in particular stand out. They may not have been able to bring Stonehenge itself into the museum – but a grouping of some of the 4,000-year-old wooden posts from Seahenge, discovered in Norfolk in 1998, is wonderfully atmospheric, even more so with a haunting recording of the music of the wind and the sea gently drawing you into them.
Discovered a year later in Germany, the Nebra Sky Disc – for all the world like a 12-inch (30 cm) winking smiley – is the oldest known representation of the cosmos, showing the Sun, Moon and stars, including the Pleiades, the group of seven stars used for millennia both to regulate the solar and lunar calendars and to determine times for planting crops. The disc, 3,600 years old, was made from Cornish gold and bronze from central Europe; it was altered over the years, with two gold strips added to mark the summer and winter solstices. And it’s stunning.
Most moving of all, but easily missed if you’re not looking out for it, is a small drum-shaped chalk object, elaborately decorated with patterns. Hailed
as “the most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years”, the drum has never been displayed before. It was found with a polished bone pin and a chalk ball near the village of Burton Agnes in East Yorkshire in 2015, in the grave of three children. The oldest, 10-12 years old, has its arm around the two younger ones, as if protecting them; 3-5 and 6-9, they are facing each other, and appear to be holding hands. The drum was placed above the oldest one’s head. Whatever the tragedy that took these children, their family, their community, buried them with love and care. The burial has been radiocarbon dated, from one of the children’s bones, to 3,005–2890 BC, the time of the first construction phase at Stonehenge. The drum is very similar to three other chalk drums found in a single child’s grave 15 miles away in Folkton, North Yorkshire, in 1889. The inhabitants of these islands 5,000 years ago weren’t the grunting primitives of bad movies; these were people, just like us, with feelings and emotions, with pain, and warmth.
With its wide scope and the astonishing age of the exhibits, this is not just a fascinating but an often very moving exhibition, perhaps for the very reason that it’s not focused on the stones of Stonehenge; it’s about people.
The catalogue, also titled
The World of Stonehenge (271pp, Hb £40, Pb £25), by Prof Duncan Garrow and Neil Wilkin, lead curator of the exhibition, is a work of art in itself. Large format and richly illustrated, its explanations of the exhibits and the background discussion are more detailed than is possible in the exhibition itself – and there is considerably more about Stonehenge itself.
The World of Stonehenge is at the British Museum, London, until July 17.