Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos

Customs seem to have varied, but in many cases in Britain it appears that the dead were first exposed to the elements, and the bones only moved to the mortuary house at a later stage. (This is not a customary reading of the evidence in northeastern Europe, although barrows there may contain several interments.) In some cases at least, the covering mound of the earthen barrow proper was added only after the house had stood for many months, or even years. The sheer weight of the soil or stone or chalk rubble covering the mortuary house could then cause its collapse, as was the case at Fussell’s Lodge (Clarendon Park, barrow 4a), 12 km southeast of Stonehenge—where the house was an oak structure, about six metres long and a little over a metre wide. In this particular case the house contained the remains of more than fifty men, women and children. It was certainly well established before the end of the fifth millennium BC.

Apart from human remains, several long barrows have been found to contain the skulls of oxen as well as their hooves. This has been thought to hint at the hanging of hides (with horns and hooves still attached) as cult objects. Evidence for such a cult from the Bronze Age has been found in the form of wooden horns at the corners of a rectangular wooden temple-like structure at Bargeroosterveld, in Drenthe (the Netherlands). These are important pieces of evidence as to religious practice, and might be connected with astronomically guided ritual, the cult of the bull linking with the celestial bull, Taurus. What seems to be an example of this, requiring a new interpretation of the Uffington ‘White Horse’, will be given in Chapter 4.

Of the many hundreds of long barrows recorded in Britain, a large proportion seem to have been used to house multiple burials—typically five or six, but occasionally twenty or thirty or more. It has been argued that such long barrows indicate an egalitarian society. This presupposes what is not at all certain, that long barrows represent the norm rather than the exceptional means of burial; that they are for the family unit, and not shared, as religious centres might have been shared among a much more extensive group; and that bodies were placed in them close to the time of death. Variations in grandeur, complexity, and grave goods, seem to indicate variations in wealth and political power. A little light is thrown on this question by two facts taken in conjunction. First, there is the sheer magnitude of the enterprise of building a long barrow: this required, say, between 5,000 and 15,000 man-hours. Second, as time progressed, the number of burials in each long barrow seems to have fallen drastically, often to one or two. The great investment of time and labour has therefore been often seen as a symptom of a steady growth of political or religious hierarchies, the barrows having been set aside for the burial of highly favoured personages. The social function of the tombs might of course have been much the same, whatever the number of burials, large or small.

It does not follow that the religious meaning remained constant. In places as far apart as Ile Carn in Brittany and Corrimony in the northeast of Scotland, individuals were selected for burial alone in a vast tomb. On what social or religious grounds this favoured treatment was meted out is a difficult ethnographical problem, but it is one that should not be addressed without reference to barrows that were used for no burial at all. Horslip, Beckhampton Road, and South Street, for example, all in Wiltshire, have left no evidence that they were ever used for burial. If barrows generally are to be understood as adjuncts of a religion of the stars, capable of religious meaning even in the absence of burials, all arguments for the distribution of social power based on the number of burials will need to be reviewed. What if, for example, in the gradual reduction in the number of burials at certain places and times, we are seeing no more than a slow transition from a religion based mainly on ancestor-worship to one at a higher level of abstraction, based, for instance, on a more sophisticated and extensive mythology of the heavens? Selection for burial might in this case have been made on spiritual grounds, and might in principle have had no implications for a decline in the breadth of the power base. Spirituality might as well have resided in an epileptic, an innocent chosen by lot, a captive, a priest, or a prince. A barrow without burials could mean simply further progression along the same spiritual road. The whole question of a possible religion of the heavens is one that cannot be easily evaded.

Orientation of the Body

There are well over five hundred known long barrows in continental Northern Europe, of which more than a hundred have been investigated professionally. Relatively few have been adequately charted for our present purposes. Rough statistical analyses have occasionally been made that divide the compass into eight or sixteen sectors and take counts of general orientations of the tombs. Across Europe, orientations have seemed to show a definite tendency to cluster around certain preferred directions, and the same tendency has often been remarked in Britain. Such coincidences tell us virtually nothing of value, however, if the aim was everywhere to be astronomically precise, since the most probable astronomical orientations—whether involving Sun, Moon, or star—depend heavily on factors that are ignored in such simple accounts, notably geographical latitude, irregularities in the height of the local horizon, and even the form of the monument itself. Poor statistics make a poor guide. The only acceptable approach is through a comprehensive set of detailed analyses of individual cases—a programme far beyond the scope of this book. A few important examples will be touched on in the remaining parts of this chapter: they conform closely to a few simple principles, and it would be very surprising to find that others failed to do likewise. But first to a related theme, a favourite object of archaeological comment, namely the orientation of the body within the tomb.

There seem to have been many local variations in burial rites. In the Wessex long barrows the bones were generally placed in the tomb in a disarticulated state, sorted by type, presumably following exposure of the body elsewhere. Where a skeleton in a chamber tomb is found in a recognizable direction, however, it is often with the head to the west or to the east–occasionally both are found in the same tomb. Opinions differ as to whether these variations indicate differences of age or sex. In a study of the positions of very many skeletons in tombs in Bohemia and Moravia, W. Schlosser and J. Cierny found some interesting patterns. It seems that the culture responsible for linear pottery (in the centuries around 5000 BC) had a very strong preference for placing the head roughly to the east; that among the ‘corded ware’ peoples (around 2200 BC), west and east were favoured in roughly similar numbers, with a slight preference for west; but that the Bell Beaker peoples favoured placing the head to the north or south (in the ratio now of about two to one), with a small subgroup roughly northeast or southwest, and a few roughly southeast. Three thousand years later, many Germanic groups were still putting the feet of the corpse to the north. In an English Saxon cemetery at Fairford, for example, this habit was found to be almost universal. J. Grimm, writing on German mythology in 1854, drew attention to something that appeared to point back from the Middle Ages to an ancient pagan tradition of worshipping towards the north. Thus in some stories of Reinard the Fox, the wolf did just that, while the fox adopted the Christian convention, facing east.

It has to be said that in the Bell Beaker class of burials the bodies were no longer laid out full length, but in a contracted posture, with the knees drawn up in the manner of an embryo, and that for this reason, a precise direction of the body simply cannot be specified. Nevertheless, some rough statistics from the Wessex round barrows belonging to the Bell Beaker culture fit well with the continental evidence. In a count of 55 instances made by William Long in 1876, on the basis of previous reports, in 35 cases (in other words, more than six out of every ten) the head was said to have been to the north. Six had heads placed to the northeast, and five to the east. All eight points of the compass with the exception of south were mentioned in one report or another, but the three named were the most common. (West and southeast accounted for three each, northwest for two and southwest for one.)

Rough and ready as these data are, it does seem that customs in the orientation of the body of the deceased are almost as characteristic as pottery types, although possibly not as subtle. They were obviously ‘astronomical’ in some degree, but how are they to be interpreted? Some of the problems to be expected have already been mentioned. Death has some plain analogues in the heavens. It seems natural to represent death by the western half of the horizon, the place of the dying Sun for peoples in the northern hemisphere, and this is borne out by many later religious rituals known from direct textual evidence or report. (The eastern half of the horizon tends to represent life or birth.) In those Neolithic practices in which a near north–south line was preferred, the body might have been lain with head turned to face an appropriate easterly or westerly direction. Why east or west? Was it the general phenomenon of rising and setting of heavenly bodies that counted? (It was obviously not a precise arrangement, if the Sun was involved at any other season than the equinoxes.) It will shortly be noted in connection with tomb architecture that an approximate north–south line was associated with the behaviour of the star Deneb, in which case that more obvious explanation counts for nothing. Granting for the sake of argument that this was so, how should one interpret the intentions of those who laid out a body east–west? Might the relatives of the deceased have looked across the body, perhaps, towards Deneb? Or did they look over the length of the body towards Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus, which happened to rise near east and set near west? There is evidence from some much later societies that the feet are placed towards the land of the dead, but this of course is often related to the daily passage of the Sun.

Is the argument helped out by the orientation of the tomb itself, as for example in certain passage graves that restrict a line of sight? At Gavr’inis in Brittany, for instance, and Newgrange in Ireland, where there are chamber tombs dated to within a century or two of 3500 BC, the main corridors were clearly directed towards midwinter sunrise, in the sense that they opened towards it and were illuminated by it. (There might also be lunar directions implicit in both.) And if we settle on a solar ceremony at the laying out of the body, there remains the question of the timing of events. Was the body preserved until the Sun was in the right position, say setting at one of the solstices? Or was the Sun’s direction preserved, marked out as something appropriately sacred, say at the time of one of the solstices, and used for burial even if the Sun was not rising or setting in that direction at the time of the burial? Another possibility is that in some cases there was human sacrifice, a death that was contrived rather than natural, at precisely the appropriate season.

There is some evidence from modern anthropology as to comparable burial customs, but it is not coherent. All told, it is virtually impossible to place a reliable ‘astronomical’ interpretation on even comprehensive statistics as to the directions of burials, if they are merely to the four cardinal points of the compass. Even so, there is a conclusion to be drawn that is far from trivial. Whether or not the ritual interpretation can be discovered, there is no doubt that burial was in these cases an activity governed by rules relating to celestial phenomena, for only by reference to the heavens can the cardinal points be found. To progress further it is necessary to look to the tombs in which the bodies were placed.

Inconstant Stars

Long barrows were built in Britain from perhaps the middle of the fifth millennium BC to the early third, and as time progressed, several changes of style and custom took place. To hint at a change in custom one must first be quite sure that there was a consciousness of the need to act in a particular way. That there were architectural rules of some sort is strongly suggested by the fact that in a large proportion of the examples surveyed, the higher and wider end of trapezoidal structures heads (roughly) east. This might not be thought a very profound principle, but it was true of the long mounds of the Linear Pottery culture in Northern Europe, and it is reminiscent of the characteristic habit of that same culture in Bohemia and Moravia, where the body was so often placed with the head to the east. This encourages a search for more precise rules.

Those who have recorded the directions of unexcavated long barrows have usually been content with rough approximations, referring, say, to only eight or sixteen points of the compass. The original structures have almost always been largely destroyed, modified by rabbits and badgers, or ploughed out of existence—usually by the farmer, but occasionally in the course of military exercises with tanks. (Unfortunately here, the better the barrow the greater the challenge.) The line of the major axis of a barrow is often as much as we can expect, and this seldom to better than a degree or two, unless we are convinced that it was deliberately aimed at some distant point. One should not be satisfied with the axis alone, for the principal lines of sight will be shown to have often differed from that line.

A direction without reference to the location is worthless. The midwinter Sun at Stonehenge rises about 40° south of east; at Newgrange, the angle is nearly 44°. Such directions vary with geographical latitude and the altitude of the horizon, but they also vary with the century. All such data are needed. The first two items of information can usually be taken from the Ordnance Survey. For structural details, an archaeological survey is needed. It is worth bearing in mind that whatever the quality of the original, a third-hand copy might be in error by as much as 20°. One much-copied plan—by one of archaeology’s most expert draftsmen—displaces the West Kennet long barrow by 15°.

An approximate date for construction calls for independent archaeological evidence. The orientation of a monument might provide a date, but only in conjunction with an opinion as to precisely what the prehistoric practices of orientation were. The vicissitudes of star positions are at the root of one method of astronomical dating. What are often called the ‘fixed’ stars are anything but fixed. They move among themselves by very small amounts (their so-called ‘proper motions’), and these can often be ignored, although it is dangerous to do so when very long time-spans are concerned. Less subtle is another slow change in the apparent positions of all of them, making them seem to drift very slowly round what can be thought of as the celestial sphere (the sphere on which they seem to be carried round the sky with the daily motion). The movement of the stars round the sphere follows a path parallel to the Sun’s yearly path, but it takes them roughly seventy years to cover a single degree. (The Sun’s yearly path through the background of stars is called the ‘ecliptic’.) The change may be slow, but in spans of time of the order of four or five thousand years, the shift in star and constellation positions, amounting to about a sixth of the way round the sky, is highly significant.

The drift in question is actually a consequence of the instability of the Earth, which in relation to the Sun provides the frame of reference against which star positions are measured. Just as the longitudes of places on the Earth are measured from the Greenwich meridian, so star longitudes are measured from a point on the celestial equator (a great circle on the celestial sphere directly above the Earth’s equator). By convention, this is the point where the Sun, moving along the ecliptic, crosses the equator in spring, one of the two ‘equinoctial points’. What was earlier described as a drift in star positions, amounting to a slow increase in their ‘celestial longitudes’, is really a drift of the zero point from which their positions are measured. The drift is for this reason now called the ‘precession of the equinoxes’.

The increasing longitude of a star changes its apparent (angular) distance from the north pole of the sky, and in turn affects the point on the horizon over which it rises and sets. To take just one example: the Pleiades rose 10° south of east at Stonehenge in the early forty-second century BC, but twelve centuries later they rose due east.

This brings us back to a serious problem, hinted at previously. How are we to know whether an orientation indicates a concern with the Sun rather than with a star? east–west directions in long barrows, for example, are relatively uncommon but not unknown. Like alignments that seem to be to the rising and setting Sun at the solstices (midsummer and midwinter), they might well have been directed to a particular star. The change in the direction of sunrise and sunset at the solstices is very slow—say a fifth of a degree of the horizon in a thousand years. Over the same period of time, the point of rising of the Pleiades would have moved by twelve degrees. Continuity of custom is less obvious with the stars than when the Sun was involved. Prehistoric peoples might have aligned all their barrows on the rising or setting of a particular star or group of stars and have done so with great deliberation and precision at different periods of history, and yet have left us with a scattered set of compass directions, in short, with an impression of carelessness and imprecision. Fortunately there is a way of cutting through this problem, for it will soon emerge that the custom was to align long barrows on two or more stars simultaneously, and to consider mostly very bright stars. This greatly reduces the number of ways of interpreting individual cases, and from a study of well excavated examples a coherent picture gradually emerges, as clear in its way as that of the later monuments with their more stable solar orientations.

In brief, it turns out that the Wessex long barrows were mostly stellar, while the later circular monuments were solar and lunar. The later long barrows already show signs of change. There are two different criteria here—alignment and illumination. Matters were sometimes so arranged that at one of the Sun’s extremes it could illuminate the end of a long gallery in the tomb, through a suitable entrance slot. Even this will prove to have followed a similar arrangement with stars, from an earlier period.

FIG. 6. Four different examples of taper in long barrows, one from Poland, one from northern Germany, one from Lincolnshire, and one from Wessex. All have left interesting traces of mortuary houses (mh), the sides of all of which are approximately parallel to the sides of barrows erected later on the same site, or perpendicular to them. Note the letters (a, b) marking these highly significant properties. The scales and orientations of the different barrows are approximately correct, with Wayland’s Smithy, the smallest, about 55 m long. The outlines of barrow/mortuary house were formed by either timber posts (t) or stones (s). From left to right, the materials were: s/t, s/s, t/t, s/s. A mortuary house at Wayland’s Smithy, hinted at in the figure but redrawn in Fig. 19 was of timber.

First Thoughts on the Taper of Long Barrows

While some of the longer and earlier examples of earthen long barrows were parallel-sided, or nearly so, and just possibly of constant height over their length, most were tapered in height and width. (An idea of the plans of some of the different styles may be had from Fig. 6. The rationale of their three-dimensional forms is the subject of this chapter, and the differences are too subtle to be readily illustrated at this stage, but Fig. 53 should give an idea of what taper in height and breadth entails.) It is doubtful whether the property of taper originally had any astronomical purpose, since it is found in many early post-built houses throughout Europe, but the precision with which those houses were built—for instance in the alignment of their side walls—is usually greatly inferior to that of most large tombs. Precision might have signified respect, a wish to give something perfect to the dead, but there are good reasons for thinking that it served also to direct the eye towards significant risings or settings over the horizon. Even supposing that the trapezoidal form was first adopted for the housing of the dead by analogy with the housing of the living, support for this other explanation is strong. It is buttressed by the fact that time and again, on an astronomical reading, different sites seem to indicate an allegiance to a relatively small number of select bright stars.

Accepting the astronomical idea provisionally, two or three potential explanations of the taper in plan offer themselves. (Taper in height will turn out to be another question.) The first of these is easily appreciated in terms of what seems to have been a strong desire to find lines that point to the rising of an important star in one direction and the setting of another in precisely the opposite direction. This is easier said than done, but by taking two lines at a fairly small angle, it can always be done. Using those two lines as the orientations of the sides of a barrow, the assumption that stars were viewed along the barrow’s sides provides one possible explanation of taper.

It is not difficult to imagine others. As illustrated in Fig. 1 (Chapter 1), the direction of the rising midsummer Sun at an arbitrary place on the Earth’s surface is usually near to, but not precisely the same as, the reversed direction of the setting midwinter Sun. Since the (angular) height of the horizon helps to determine the directions of rising or setting over it, if there were hills of different heights in the two directions, the angle between the lines might be several degrees. This difference might have been built into a long barrow in various ways. The broad (interment) end of the barrow might have been made to point to midsummer sunrise, and another part, say a side or axis at the other end, to midwinter sunset. (There is an instance fitting this description in the Winterbourne Stoke group in Wiltshire.) On level parts of Salisbury Plain the difference between the ideal directions would have been only about 3°, so that there an edifice with only a 3° taper could have served both directions at once. It would be wrong to place much emphasis on a solar explanation at this stage, however. It is certainly not relevant to the early history of the taper of long barrows, the alignments of which will prove to have been primarily stellar.

At first sight it might seem that a single building alignment—say that of a central ridge along it—cannot cater for two opposed solar extremes—for both midsummer rising and midwinter setting, for example. This is where taper in height might have come into play. Something like the technique to be explained in broad outline here might have been applied at the Skendleby 2 (Lincolnshire) long barrow and more certainly at Stonehenge itself. The directions in which the first glint of the rising Sun and the last of the setting Sun are seen depend appreciably on the altitude of the horizon. By directing a tomb to horizons of different altitudes, or alternatively, by creating an artificially elevated horizon out of the tomb itself, the directions of rising and setting can be adjusted, and under certain circumstances brought into exact opposition. (The Skendleby case is illustrated in Fig. 40 in a later part of this chapter.)

This last possibility puts paid to a claim that has been made on many occasions, that the minor variations in the directions of chambered tombs and long barrows show that their builders were very casual about directions, and were happy enough if they could get them roughly right. Our hypothesis is capable of explaining why the chamber-tombs in an otherwise apparently coherent group are almost, but not at all precisely, parallel—say with a scatter of 4 or 5°. The differences in direction, which might in some cases have been the results of variations in the height of the distant land-horizon, might in others be the result of taper in height, that is, of differences in the slopes of monuments that were themselves used to set artificial horizons close at hand.

Apart from the rectangular and trapezoidal forms of long barrow, which are found often in an area stretching from Jutland (Denmark) to Western Pomerania, there is the near-triangular form already mentioned, not unlike the trapezoidal: it is a long isosceles triangle with very slightly concave sides, higher at the wide end. This is the form at the site of one of the best collections of well-excavated long barrows in Europe, the Sarnowo group in Kujavia (Poland). There are nine in all, ranging in length from 30 m to 83 m, and judging by a radiocarbon measurement, their dates are probably all within a few centuries of 4500 BC. They are all on spurs of land, with the wide ends always in the northeast quarter, and facing down gently sloping ground.

The Sarnowo barrows are in a parlous state, and it is at present difficult to assess more than their general orientations. (Even this is a dangerous undertaking, since two modern surveys display compass directions which may differ by as much as 14° on a single monument.) Nevertheless, there seems to be much the same pattern in the directions of the barrows as is to be found in a selection of four or five of their English counterparts. Three are conceivably aligned on the following stars: Aldebaran or the Hyades (nos. 2, 4, and 5); the Pleiades (no. 6); two perhaps simultaneously on Bellatrix and Regulus (nos. 1 and 9); one simultaneously on Deneb and Rigel (no. 7); and one on Sirius (no. 3). Only one (no. 8) seems to be aligned on the Sun—and even there it is possible that Orion’s belt is somehow indicated. All of these are possibilities within the approximate period 4500 to 4100 BC. The uncertainties are chiefly inherent in the disordered state of the remains, and archaeological plans that cannot provide exact orientations. Perhaps at some future date the Sarnowo stellar orientations will be studied more thoroughly. Perhaps other stars were observed across the mounds, as at the Wessex barrows. Whether or not the long barrows reflect back on earlier European practice, they are vital to an understanding of later stone and timber circles relating to Stonehenge. They are also intimately related to the Avenue that leads up to Stonehenge and to the strip known as the Cursus, to the north of both.

The Orientation of Long Barrows

There are more than sixty long barrows on Salisbury Plain, and many hundreds elsewhere in Britain and Ireland. They tend to be on high ground with open views of the surrounding country in two or three directions. In Britain, Ireland, and on the continent, there was a mild preference for a near east–west orientation, a fact already the subject of comment as long ago as William Stukeley’s Abury, a Temple of the Druids (1743). While crude statistical surveys of the orientations of large numbers of chambered tombs will obliterate most of their essential differences, there are a few simple rules of this sort that are easily appreciated, if not easily interpreted. As a purely descriptive measure, the key direction may be regarded as that from the narrow end to the broad. (One might have said ‘looking out from the entrance’ were it not that many barrows had blind entrances.)

Taking the chief regions of Britain and Ireland with remains of such tombs, there are definite tendencies that are more or less duplicated in places of similar geographical latitude. Cairns in Orkney are like those in Shetland, in that in both places most cairns tend to look southeast. Those who built the earlier passage graves of Brittany had also favoured this direction. Coming down to the northeast of the Scottish mainland, the tombs of Caithness resemble those of Ross and Cromarty, in that most look very roughly east. The nearby Clava cairns, on the other hand, look southwest, a quality they share with tombs of an outwardly different pattern in Ireland, the ‘wedge tombs’ that are especially numerous in the southwest of the country. (This last name derives from the fact that the burial chamber is trapezoidal in shape, although it is usually given a round cairn as cover, so hiding a certain similarity with the overall wedge shape of many English long barrows.) Surviving megalithic tombs in Ireland number about twelve hundred, and more than a quarter of these, mostly in the northern third of the country, have a small court at the entrance. Such ‘court tombs’, especially common in the Atlantic coastal regions of Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, often look northeast; and in this, if not in their shape, they resemble the long barrows of the Clyde region, across the water in Scotland. The passage graves of the Boyne valley on the eastern coast of Ireland tend to look east and southeast, as do the long barrows of the Cotswold–Severn area in England.