One of the theses of this book is that various astronomically guided rituals were in use by the time of the very earliest farming communities in Britain. This does not mean that such rituals necessarily followed the same routes as agricultural practices, or that either remained constant over long periods of time. There was a slow evolution in both, with many local variations in tradition. Problems of diffusion of influence are among the most difficult to solve, and once again, a movement of ideas does not necessarily mean a significant movement of populations. While it would be unwise to hazard many general conclusions on astronomical grounds alone, the evidence from this quarter is that the exchange of ideas between adjacent peoples was much greater than is usually recognized.

Alignments and Orientations

The overall aim of this book is to discover certain patterns of intellectual and religious behaviour through a study of archaeological remains that seem to have been deliberately directed in some way towards phenomena in the heavens. Much use will be made of a handful of words and ideas that are certainly not a part of everyday discourse but that are, even so, essentially simple. One of these, the notion of an astronomical alignment, is easily explained by reference first to the stars and then to the Sun and Moon (see also Glossary).

Each day, from a given place, if I can see an identifiable star rising, it will always seem to rise over the same point on the distant horizon. (This will be on its eastern half. It will culminate due south of the pole for anyone living in the northern hemisphere. And in view of the context, this qualification need not be repeated.) If it can be seen setting, the star will similarly always seem to set over a fixed point on the western horizon. If the star is sufficiently important to me, I might choose to remind myself of those points of rising and setting, perhaps by such irregularities as hill-tops or isolated trees; or I might choose to mark the directions in which they lie by setting up pairs of posts or other markers relatively near at hand. I should not have to revise the alignments of such markers materially during my lifetime, unless I wanted extreme accuracy of a sort that need not be considered here. (The word ‘alignment’ will usually be used here to refer to two or more terrestrial objects lined up on a celestial object, and not exclusively to sets of three or more terrestrial objects in line, which is an unnecessarily narrow archaeological usage.)

I might choose to direct my buildings—say the main axis of my church—in the same way. Reversing the order of discussion, however, is a hazardous undertaking: the fact that the orientation of someone else’s church happens to produce an alignment with an astronomically interesting event does not necessarily imply that the orientation was deliberate. Deciding between deliberate and accidental alignments is one of the central problems of this book.

Just as with the stars, I may notice the Sun rising at a recognizable place on the horizon, but in this case, as the days go by, that place will seem to change. In midsummer, the Sun in the eastern half of the sky will rise over its most northerly point of the horizon. It will attain its most northerly point of setting on the horizon’s western half at the same season. I could mark these directions as I did those of the rising and setting star; and as the year progressed and the days shortened, I should notice that those distant points of the Sun’s rising and setting move southwards, and that in midwinter they reach to their furthest points south. Again I could mark those southern extremes in one way or another. The markers (both near at hand, or one near and one distant) would then be aligned on four critical phenomena, namely midsummer and midwinter risings and settings of the Sun.

FIG. 1. The directions of the rising and setting Sun at Stonehenge, around 2000 BC, at the times of summer and winter solstice. The directions for the equinoxes are also marked, but are barely distinguishable from the (broken) east–west line. In all cases it is supposed that the upper limb of the Sun (first or last glint of the Sun) is seen on the distant natural horizon.

Approximately halfway between the directions of sunrise at precise midsummer and midwinter (that is, at the solstices), is the true direction of east; and true west is similarly more or less mid-way between the extreme directions of setting. The actual sizes of the angles depend on various factors, and in particular on the geographical place (or more precisely the geographical latitude) and on the irregularities of the actual horizon. In Fig. 1 the angles are drawn for Stonehenge at a nominal date of 2000 BC. The angles are not precisely divided into equal parts by the east–west line, for reasons explained more fully in Appendix 2.

As early as Neanderthal man—say thirty or forty millennia ago—there were burials aligned accurately east–west, which suggests that some or other celestial body was in the thoughts of those responsible for organizing the rituals of death. A grave excavated at L’Anse Amour, in Labrador, incorporated what were evidently ritual fires arranged to the north and south of the body, which was laid in an east–west direction. The east–west and north–south lines seem to have been key directions in the placement of later burials in many parts of the globe, but—religion apart—how is this tendency to be interpreted? East and west are the directions of the rising and setting Sun at the equinoxes, but they are not easily established, and the positions of the fires might rather be thought to suggest that in the Labrador case the critical directions were north and south, the line having perhaps been decided by the Sun’s midday position. A body with head to the north might have been regarded as lying towards the pole, the region where stars do not move. Granted more sophistication, east and west might have been regarded as midway between the Sun’s extremes of rising and of setting. Alternatively, the four cardinal points of the compass might have been settled not by reference to the Sun but to the daily rotation of the stars: a star culminates (reaches its highest point) on the meridian, just as does the Sun, and the meridian also bisects the directions of a star’s rising and setting. Culminations are not easy to settle precisely, since the altitude of the Sun or star is changing least rapidly then; but this does not mean that culmination was not uppermost in the thoughts of those who chose these directions for burials. Then again, at various periods of history certain bright stars have risen and set due east and west, so that alignment might have been on them. Skeleton directions that have so often been interpreted in solar terms can all too easily be reinterpreted in numerous ways, without our presupposing any particularly sophisticated techniques of observation. Which of these alternatives should one favour?

FIG. 2. The absolute extreme directions of the rising and setting Moon at Stonehenge, around 2000 BC, assuming that the Moon is fully visible, and just touching the natural horizon.

The evidence, based not on skeleton positions (which are often dubious) but on the forms of tombs and other structures, is that all of these ways of considering the cardinal points of the horizon, east and west, north and south, are likely to have been familiar in late Neolithic Europe. It is all too easy to become hypnotized by the idea of observation of the Sun and to forget the stars, but there is strong evidence from the period before the first phase of Stonehenge that observation of the stars was then important, perhaps even more important. In some early cultures from which written records survive—in Egypt, for instance—the direction of north was significant, and was found from observations of the stars circling the pole, or of a particular star near the pole at that time. (This was not the star that now serves us as the Pole Star, which in the remote past was well removed from its present position.)

The directions of the Moon’s places of rising on the eastern horizon and setting on the western also change with time, but the pattern of change is much more complicated than in the case of the Sun. The details are put aside for the time being (they are treated more fully in Chapter V and in some detail in Appendix 2), but again there are four absolute extremes of direction, just as with the Sun. The angle separating the northern and southern extremes of the Moon’s rising and setting is greater than in the case of the Sun. The angles in question, which depend as before on several factors, actually fluctuate in the course of time in a way that at first seems erratic. Alexander Thom and others have suggested, however, that the pattern of change lent itself to an analysis of quite extraordinary penetration by the people of the Bronze Age, or even earlier. For the time being, Fig. 2 will suffice to give an idea of the absolute extremes of lunar direction at the latitude of Stonehenge.

The earliest written astronomical records—notably the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek—reveal a preoccupation with risings and settings and periods of visibility generally. They show a concern with what was to be observed at the horizon, and with intervals of time between special events in the heavens, and their recurrences. This is not to say that there was necessarily a concern with directions towards points of rising and setting, for there are other ways of using horizon observations. Consider, however, a passage from a Mesopotamian astronomical text compiled early in the first millennium BC and known as MUL.APIN:

The Sun which rose towards the north with the head of the Lion turns and keeps moving down towards the south at a rate of 40 NINDA per day. The days become shorter, the nights longer. … The Sun which rose towards the south with the head of the Great One then turns and keeps coming up towards the north at a rate of 40 NINDA per day. The days become longer, the nights become shorter …

The MUL.APIN text is famous for its catalogue of stars and planets. Although distant in time and place from the Neolithic monuments of northern Europe, the quoted passage provides written testimony to observations of a sort that could well have been made there at a much earlier date. The shifting of the Sun’s place of rising over the horizon was in Mesopotamia related to the rising of stars, or to constellations, distinguished in turn as staging posts along the monthly path of the Moon round the sky. The people concerned worshipped the Sun in various ways, and took the entrance to the land of the dead to be where the Sun descends over the horizon. Many of the writings from which such beliefs are known, in particular the Gilgamesh epic, are much earlier than MUL.APIN, and even antedate the main structures at Stonehenge.

There appear to be no preferred alignments among the numerous Babylonian and Assyrian tombs excavated. In contrast, the alignments of Egyptian pyramids were settled accurately and deliberately, typically towards the four cardinal points of the compass. The interred ruler faced east, while his dependents faced west to the entrance to the kingdom of the dead. Confronted by such utterly different practices among two peoples who simply happen to have left written testimony of their attitudes to celestial affairs, it is on the whole wise to start with a clean sheet, and to base northern practices on northern archaeological remains. Whether there is an element in common to all of these peoples, in the form of a shared psychology, driving them all to found their religions on their common experience of the heavens, is highly questionable. There are certainly a surprising number of patterns of behaviour that many of them have in common, but they are beyond the scope of this book.

What if it should be possible to produce evidence that many prehistoric monuments were deliberately directed towards the rising and setting of Sun or Moon or star? Why devote so many pages to such a trite conclusion? There are some who will consider that the ways in which this was done were remarkable enough to be put on record, but others will naturally hope to draw conclusions as to motivation, whether religious or of some other kind. Does it not follow that the celestial bodies must have been objects of worship? Historians of religion who have come to this conclusion have rarely used orientations as evidence for it. On the other hand, many of those who have written about the alignment of monuments have taken for granted the idea that the motivation came primarily from the need to provide farmers with a calendar for the seasons. The religionists have interpreted isolated symbols found in the religious contexts of birth and death as self-evidently lunar or solar. They have claimed that worship of the Moon would have long preceded worship of the Sun, on the grounds that the tides and the menstrual cycle in women would have pointed to obvious links between the Moon, the weather, and fertility. The calendarists have argued from a supposed practical need, one that they find in evidence in early Greek texts relating the chief points of the agricultural year to events in the heavens. Both lines of discussion have rested far too heavily on intuition. There are a few tentative pointers to Neolithic and Bronze Age religious beliefs to be found from Stonehenge and its surroundings, but they belong to the end of the book, not the beginning.

FIG. 3(a) Britain and Ireland, showing (as small circles) the main henges as known at present. The rectangle covers the Stonehenge region as drawn in Fig. 3(b).

FIG. 3(B) Some of the principal prehistoric monuments of southern Britain, discussed in the following chapters. The rectangular grid (at intervals of 100 km) is that of the Ordnance Survey, and will provide a frame for more detailed maps of the Stonehenge and other regions in later chapters. Small squares mark modern towns.

FIG. 4 A star map for the year 3000 BC, here meant only to introduce the names of the brightest stars then visible from Wessex and mentioned in later chapters. The constellation names will be found in a similar figure in Appendix 2. It should be appreciated that star positions change with time, and that no single map can do justice to them over a period of a century, let alone two or three millennia. Other relevant astronomical matters will be introduced as needed, and the following points are added only for those interested in the type of representation adopted in the figure, which might be used to make rough estimates of visibility. It may be thought of as a movable diagram, in which the stars are moving and the shaded area is fixed. The aperture in the latter, bounded by the horizon circle, represents the visible region of the sky. Circles on the star sphere (such as the equator and tropics of Cancer and Capricorn) all appear as circles on this map, since it is in a projection known as stereographic. Stars are shown graded in size according to their brightness (thus Sirius is much the brightest star in the sky). Stars shown covered by the shading may move into view as the heavens rotate clockwise about the central point, representing the north celestial pole. Whether the stars will then actually be visible will depend on whether the Sun is visible or not. Star maps follow various conventions. Stars can be shown as they are seen looking out from the centre of the star sphere or as they would be seen from the outside of the sphere, looking inwards. The second convention, which is that used on a star globe, is the one adopted here. Had the figure been on a larger scale, scales of degrees could have been added, for instance the equator and the horizon (azimuths). The former graduations would have been uniform, but the latter not. (They would have crowded together more in the lower part of the figure.) The two points in which the tropic of Cancer (the smallest of the concentric circles) crosses the horizon represent the most northerly rising and setting points of the Sun. The most southerly points of its rising and setting are where the horizon meets the tropic of Capricorn (also concentric). The tips of the central cross are in the directions of the four points of the compass, north (below), east (left), west (right) and south (above).

THE LONG BARROWS

Neolithic Chamber Tombs—an Introduction

IN all of those ancient cultures from which written records survive, worship of the dead seems to have been bound up not only with religion, but with law and custom generally. The dead are typically considered as guardians, upholding order within family and tribe. Farming in particular encourages an appeal to the power of deceased ancestors, for there is no more conspicuous object of inheritance in need of defence than land. Farming communities not only depend on the landscape but help to redesign it. In northern Europe, for example, they created large enclosures, roughly circular in form, by throwing up banks of earth and stone taken from the surrounding area. In the course of doing this they usually created well-defined ditches which are likely to have had a purpose going beyond the mere supply of material for the bank. Some of the enclosures might have had a simple farming purpose, and others must have functioned as gathering points of some sort, since they show evidence of communal feasting. Evidence will be presented later that like so many of the smaller ditched enclosures that surrounded tombs and acted as focal points for religious ritual, the large enclosures also had a ritual function.

Tomb and landscape together preserve what is known about Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonials of death. Building materials were usually determined by what was locally available, earthen tombs predominating where stone was in short supply, but existing simultaneously with dolmens elsewhere. (‘Dolmen’ is a Breton, Welsh and old Cornish word for ‘stone table’, and was originally used with an eye to the slabs of stone that had become visible when the covering material, usually earth, had disappeared. The word is widely used now for any stone monument, covered or not, containing a chamber created from upright stones capped with a roofing slab.) Some had an entrance passage, but almost all were originally covered with a cairn of stones or a mound of earth, or a combination of the two. If the dolmen was once a tomb, then it is usually called a chamber tomb, even where the chamber was only of timber. Where the soil acidity is low, skeletons will survive, and since undisturbed dolmens in such regions seem invariably to contain skeletons, equating dolmens generally with chamber tombs is not likely to be seriously misleading. Not all mounds were used as tombs, even when resembling others that clearly did, and even tombs served other purposes than burial alone. Several tombs have been found surrounded by thousands of shards of pots that had originally been placed on the tomb, a witness to some or other ritual of offerings continuing long after the primary interment. Similar collections of shards deposited over very long periods of time are found at many Neolithic sites throughout Europe.

There are two broad categories of chamber tomb: a passage grave is one in which it is easy to distinguish between the burial chamber and a passage leading into it, while a gallery grave is one where there is no clear distinction, but where the chamber-passage, usually slab-lined, is long—a substantial fraction of the length of the tomb as a whole.

Although there are large patches of territory without them, chamber tombs abound in a region of Europe and north Africa lying to the west of a line running roughly from south-central Sweden to Poland and across Europe to Tunis, taking in Sardinia and Corsica. There are also chamber tombs to the northeast of the Black Sea (the Caucasus), to its southwest (north of Istanbul), in Malta, the heel of Italy, and Palestine. Early in the twentieth century, surveys were made across Europe of modern human skull-formations, and it is a curious fact that the remains of chamber tombs generally are concentrated in much the same regions as those where the modern populations with longest skulls were then found to be living (dolichocephalic, those with highest cephalic index). The skulls those tombs yield up are similarly dolichocephalic.

Chamber tombs are found in a multitude of forms and sizes, and some date from at least as early as the fifth millennium BC. Tombs built with dry-stone walling—that is, using relatively small stones—seem to have given the lead to the builders of megalithic tombs, tombs with very large component stones. In the Iberian Peninsula and Brittany, and in Britain, the two techniques went on being used side by side, even under a single covering.

Many of the earliest of the chamber tombs had a long, tapered, trapezoidal form, almost always with the burial section lying across the broad end, which was also the higher end. (Various Wessex examples will be illustrated later in the present chapter. The word trapezoidal here indicates a four-sided figure with two sides parallel and two not so.) In Poland the taper may come almost to a point, while in Denmark and Britain the plan is often a long and narrow rectangle. The traditional English name used loosely for such tombs, without regard to their internal structure, is long barrow. It is possible that some rectangular tombs were of constant height rather than wedge-shaped, but until firm evidence is offered for this idea it is best ignored. In Britain—for example at Wayland’s Smithy, on the Ridgeway near the well-known White Horse at Uffington—as well as in northeastern Europe, there are long asymmetrical barrows that were quite obviously made deliberately so. That the lie of the barrows’ sides was not random, or a product of incompetence, will soon be evident from aspects of their internal structure.

While regional fashions do assert themselves, several properties of the tombs clearly rule out the idea that they were developed in the various centres entirely independently. The problem of the spread of tomb design across Europe is a difficult one. The homeland of farming and cattle-breeding seems to have been in Asia Minor, from whence it worked its way into the Mediterranean and Europe. The spread of European languages, however, followed different routes. The historical Indo-European languages are thought to have radiated from the Balkan–Carpathian region, around the fifth and fourth millennia BC. The spread of the Neolithic peoples responsible for the long tombs, one that took place over millennia rather than centuries, seems to have radiated from Anatolia or the Balkans. As an archaeological measure of cultural movement, pottery styles link the later English long barrows with the tombs of the Funnel Beaker Culture of Northern Europe, but long barrows had been built by earlier Neolithic groups, who had also come from the continent. There are those who believe that the (Belgian) Michelsberg culture is a part of the Funnel Beaker Culture, and that it was a group of Michelsberg people that crossed to Britain and influenced the earlier Neolithic Windmill Hill culture there, with its characteristically simple ‘baggy’ pottery.

Many centuries after the immigration that had brought funnel-shaped beakers, a new immigrant people introduced beakers of bell shape—the ‘Bell Beaker people’. They favoured round rather than long barrows. The Bell Beaker expansion was an important agent of cultural change in western Europe during the earlier Bronze Age, say from 2500 to 1800 BC. It is impossible to do justice to it in a brief space, but its movements were evidently largely sea-borne, with influences passing from the Low Countries down the Rhine, and to Britain and Brittany, thence to the Atlantic rim of France and Spain, as well as into the western Mediterranean.

The Funnel Beaker Culture—also known as ‘TRB’ from its German name, Trichterbecherkultur—covered at one period or another most of the area from the Low Countries in the west to central and southern Poland in the east, and from southern Scandinavia down to Bohemia and Moravia in the south. No doubt the great rivers of Europe, not forgetting the Elbe, helped with the dispersion of its influences. Most sea navigation would have been chiefly coastal, with crossings to Britain kept as short as possible, and presumably made in skin-covered boats capable of carrying at most two or three tonnes.

There are other traces of contact between the distant peoples of the Danube area and those of the north and west. The styles of fortification and enclosure they had in common are hard to overlook, if only because they are on such a massive scale. Use was made of rings of concentric ditches broken at intervals by what have been described as ‘causeways’—a potentially misleading name, in view of the fact that while some ‘causeways’ were several metres wide, others were only a few centimetres across. Causewayed enclosures are typically found on promontories, with the ground falling away—in Denmark often to water or bog—on two or three sides. Links between some of these structures and the long barrows will be proposed in Chapter 3.

Quite apart from similarities of form, and cultural traces of those responsible for them, it will soon emerge that there are very specific astronomical parallels between the long barrows of Northern Europe and Britain. While this reinforces the idea of a continental source for custom and ritual in Britain, it seems quite possible that a number of island practices developed independently, and then passed back to the continent. Megalithic tomb styles as such do not seem to be traceable to the cradle of the TRB culture, but their relatively rapid spread becomes a little less mysterious if we are prepared to suppose that there were established and continuing cultural links over great distances between different groups. If only by hearsay, these groups could have known much about each other—much more than we know about them, for instance. In short, the essential movements need not have been of whole peoples, but of ideas, carried in all probability by a few individuals. It has often been said that the outward forms of northern and western graves agreed far more closely than the grave goods in them, and the rituals to which they point. The astronomical principles they embody, simple as they might appear to us, must have represented a great mystery to many of the prehistoric community, so yet again the movement of a few experts might be of greater significance in the cultural transmission than the movement of whole peoples.

The densely populated long barrows of the earliest Neolithic Windmill Hill culture in Wessex have been intensively studied. There are less numerous groups in other regions, such as Sussex and Kent, the Hampshire Uplands, the Chilterns and East Anglia, the Lincolnshire Wolds, Yorkshire, Wales, Western Scotland, and Ireland. The British long barrows, like their Northern European counterparts, are usually a few tens of metres in length, although an unusual bank barrow running across the ditched camp at Maiden Castle in Dorset, and later surrounded by an Iron Age fort, is as long as 540 m. More than half of all British earthen long barrows are between 30 and 60 m long, and outside the Sussex area few groups of small barrows are without at least one long example. The Stonehenge district is well populated with earthen long barrows, some of the properties of which are summarized in Fig. 5.

Long barrows in Northern Europe frequently occur in tight clusters, and conventional wisdom is that this was not so in Britain—although this is largely a question of definition. Colin Renfrew has claimed, on the basis of the distribution of around 120 long barrows in Wessex, that the region was divided into five territories, each with its group of long barrows and a so-called ‘causewayed enclosure’. The prime example of such a site, but perhaps not the oldest, is at Windmill Hill itself.

FIG. 5. Earth-covered long barrows, all well within an hour’s walk of Stonehenge. The crosses mark the barrows, the directions of the lines represent the approximate directions of the barrows (with the cross always the lower end) and the lengths of the lines are proportional to the estimated lengths of the barrows (but they are not to the scale of the map). The average length is about 40 m. The circle marks the main surviving circle of stones at Stonehenge, to the same scale as the barrow-lines. The naming of barrows might seem odd, if it is not realized that they are conventionally numbered within parishes. There are more than fifty long barrows on Salisbury Plain as a whole.

The deep ditches that flanked the long barrows and provided the soil for the covering-mound were in some cases three metres or more deep, and occasionally ran in a U-shape round one end of the barrow. In some instances they formed a virtually complete perimeter. They were often shallower, say the height of a man, and they play an important part in our story, for it will be argued that significant observations of the sky could have been made by people standing at suitable points in these ditches.

In Britain, as well as on the continent, the grave mound often covered a wooden mortuary house. The forms of some of these will be discussed in the following sections. The evidence has often been taken to point to structures in the shape of a ridge-tent, with very heavy end-posts supporting the ridge-pole, on which inclined and close-packed rafters rested. This ‘tent’ interpretation has been offered for structures found in Denmark, Poland, and Germany, and in all of these centres examples have been found of burning in the timber structure. The first structure was in some cases first covered with a layer of stones (in Britain often flints), over which was laid turf. Those responsible for excavating them have remarked on the excellence of the verticals in the pits that held the posts—which might have been seven or eight metres high and must often have weighed as much as two or three tonnes apiece. Excavators of shafts on English sites—Normanton Down (Grinsell’s no. 330) is a good example—have commented similarly on the evident use of a plumb line in the digging of shafts and the dressing and setting of stones. These marks of technical competence are of some importance to our later argument that the posts helped to create a network of sight lines within the structure, for the very fact that the plan of a mortuary house at the heart of a long barrow lacked symmetry must then mean that this was deliberate. That the same plan can be found in more than one barrow serves only to strengthen the conclusion. And if our explanation of it is to be rejected, then another explanation must be found for what must have been a deliberate act.

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