Thanks to our excavations, not just by our own team but other teams over the last twenty years
we've now established that Stonehenge was built
in a series of different stages, first of all
shortly after 3000BC.
It begins with a bank and a ditch
but also upstanding features such as standing stones
and timber posts.
It's also at that moment
that people started to use it as a cemetary,
so this is somewhere around 3000 to
2920 BC
and it continued being used as a cemetary for at least two hundred years and
probably five hundred years.
It's then that the next stage of construction was put up
and that is these large sarsen stones, they're a type of sandstone, they come from
the Marlborough Downs about twenty miles away
whereas the smaller stones already in place
had come from the Preseli Hills in West Wales, a distance of a hundred and
eighty miles.
We started work about ten years ago
and our initial
emphasis was not on Stonehenge itself but actually on a nearby henge called
Durrington Walls,
in fact the largest henge in the whole of Britain -
it's about seventeen hectares in extent -
and what we established was that Stonehenge was just one part of this
much larger complex,
linked by avenues
to the River Avon.
What what we discovered at Durrington Walls
were the houses of
what must have been not just hundreds of people but thousands of people,
and it was there that we were able to work out that this was quite probably the worker's camp.
One of our other major advances
was to find out at what times of year people were actually inhabiting this village,
because although it's the largest known settlement from the Neolithic in
northwestern Europe,
it seems to have been occupied only seasonally; people coming in
for particular times of the year, and we can track that
by investigating the culling
of the animals
because thanks to the way that their teeth grow you can age them quite
precisely to within months,
so from spring birth
we were seeing that the majority were killed
around nine months later and then the rest of them some fifteen months from birth,
so this really fixed the occupation of
this large settlement to
the winter time and the summer time
and of course those are extremely important
points within the Neolithic calendar at Stonehenge,
because Stonehenge's main alignment is towards the midsummer sunrise
and in the opposite direction the mid winter sunset.
What we're seeing is at least
five constructional stages at Stongehenge, one shortly after 3000 BC,
one around 2500 BC,
two small phases of rearranging the smaller stones in the next 3-4 hundred years
and then a very last gasp
somewhere around 1500-1600BC,
they dig holes apparently to move stones but the stones are never moved;
whatever they planned never succeeded.
Those last stages of construction also coincide
with a fundamental social change in Britain,
and that's the arrival of what we call the Beaker people,
this is a continental style of ceramics and burial
but also an entirely new lifestyle.
These are people that have been using
metals, the wheel, and other innovations
which had been absolutely absent from Britain
for hundreds of years,
so Britain was basically cut off from the continent
up until the arrival of the Beaker people around 2400BC,
and i think it's their lifestyle, their politics, their social structure
that is so very different
to the host culture within Britain -
they are much more individualizing than the collective power structure
within Britain,
they also are not prepared to work
en masse
for just a few people,
so the great monument building that's going on in Britain at this time, and it's not
just Stonehenge but many other timber circles, stone circles,
earthen mounds of giant proportions like Silbury Hill,
these come to an end within two centuries of
Beaker arrival - they're coming from parts of Europe that don't have
these kinds of traditions at all,
they don't have
these great gathering centres,
it's a much more dispersed, decentralized
social structure,
and as it's adopted in Britain
so the whole rationale for these kinds of
mega constructions simply disappears.
We're starting to think of Stonehenge
not as a temple
where people come on pilgrimages and come to worship on a long-term basis;
all our evidence suggests that
it is used in a very punctuated form over time:
people come, they construct, they feast, they go away,
and this is really changing our notion of
Neolithic religious belief
that it's all in the building,
rather than the idea of building something in order to do something
with it,
which is very much our twentieth century take on the world.
What we have at Durrington Walls, if we're right that this is the work camp,
is that the houses show that we have
entire household groups,
so we're looking at men and women and children being involved in the whole thing,
and they're feasting on
cattle and on pig,
they're barbecuing them, they're boiling them,
and the huge concentration of resources
shows that this is a very sophisticated infrastructure to support them
and by examining the isotopes,
first trontium in the teeth of cattle,
and we're now doing this for the pigs as well, we're finding out that
the range that they're coming from
has exceeded all of our expectations. This isn't just some local construction event
for the people of
the chalklands of southern England - it's not even for the people of southern
England and Wales,
this is for people coming from
the width and breadth of the whole island of Britain.
So it's more than simply unnecessary food miles
to bring those animals from all over the country, it has to be part of a very
deliberate act of unifying
and bringing people together.