Kate Welham

The age of Stonehenge

Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the authors demonstrate that the ambiguous dating of the trilithons, the grand centrepiece of Stonehenge, was based on samples taken from the wrong context, and can now be settled at 2600-2400 cal BC. This means that the trilithons are contemporary with Durrington Walls, near neighbour and Britains largest henge monument. These two monuments, different but complementary, now predate the earliest Beaker burials in Britain – including the famous Amesbury Archer and Boscombe Bowmen, but may already have been receiving Beaker pottery. All this contributes to a new vision of massive monumental development in a period of high European intellectual mobility….

Materializing Stonehenge - The Stonehenge Riverside Project and new discoveries

This article reviews recent interpretations of Stonehenge in terms of contrasting uses of stone and timber in the mid-3rd millennium BC. It explores the relationship of this enigmatic monument with circles of wood at nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, establishing how these various monuments might have been integrated into a single scheme in which these remarkable structures were linked by artificial avenues and the natural feature of the River Avon. It also investigates the ways in which substances other than wood and stone – turf, earth, chalk and wood ash – may also have had significance for ideas and practices of transformation involving the living and the dead. The results of excavations and fieldwork in 2004 and 2005 are also summarized.

Who was buried at Stonehenge

Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britains most famous monument may therefore have been founded as the burial place of a leading family, possibly from Wales.

The date of the Greater Stonehenge Cursus

The Greater Cursus - 3km long and just north of Stonehenge - had been dated by a red deer antler found in its ditch in the 1940s to 2890-2460 BC. New excavations by the authors found another antler in a much tighter context, and dating a millennium earlier. It appears that the colossal cursus had already marked out the landscape before Stonehenge was erected. At that time or soon after, its lines were re-emphasised, perhaps with a row of posts in pits. So grows the subtlety of the discourse of monuments in this world heritage site.

Geophysical Survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania

Geophysical survey at Kilwa Kisiwani, southern Tanzania, has recovered evidence for several aspects of town layout and the use of space within the town that enhance our understandings of this important Swahili site. Although excavations in the 1960s recovered substantial monuments at this stonetown and traced a chronology for the development of the site from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries AD, the overall site layout has remained poorly understood. This paper outlines the possibilities that geophysics creates for positioning the excavations within a broader urban landscape, and reports on a preliminary season of survey at Kilwa. Two areas were the focus of fieldwork during 2011. First the main town centre was surveyed, and the results suggest a denser town plan of coral-built houses that have subsequently been robbed. Second, the enigmatic enclosure of Husuni Ndogo was explored, and revealed evidence for activity relating to metalworking in this monumental space.

Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge

Abstract The long-distance transport of the bluestones from south Wales to Stonehenge is one of the most remarkable achievements of Neolithic societies in north-west Europe. Where precisely these stones were quarried, when they were extracted and how they were transported has long been a subject of speculation, experiment and controversy. The discovery of a megalithic bluestone quarry at Craig Rhos-y-felin in 2011 marked a turning point in this research. Subsequent excavations have provided details of the quarrying process along with direct dating evidence for the extraction of bluestone monoliths at this location, demonstrating both Neolithic and Early Bronze Age activity.

The dead of Stonehenge

Abstract The assemblage of Neolithic cremated human remains from Stonehenge is the largest in Britain, and demonstrates that the monument was closely associated with the dead. New radiocarbon dates and Bayesian analysis indicate that cremated remains were deposited over a period of around five centuries from c. 3000–2500 BC. Earlier cremations were placed within or beside the Aubrey Holes that had held small bluestone standing stones during the first phase of the monument; later cremations were placed in the peripheral ditch, perhaps signifying the transition from a link between specific dead individuals and particular stones, to a more diffuse collectivity of increasingly long-dead ancestors.

Airborne spectral imagery for archaeological prospection in grassland environments—an evaluation of performance

The new generation of aerial photographers is using different wavelengths to sense archaeological features. This is effective but can be expensive. Here the authors use data already collected for environmental management purposes, and evaluate it for archaeological prospection on pasture. They explore the visibility of features in different seasons and their sensitivity to different wavelengths, using principal components analysis to seek out the best combinations. It turns out that this grassland gave up its secrets most readily in January, when nothing much was growing, and overall the method increased the number of known sites by a good margin. This study is of the greatest importance for developing the effective survey of the worlds landscape, a quarter of which is under grass.

Stonehenge’s avenue and ‘Bluestonehenge’

Abstract Stonehenge is a site that continues to yield surprises. Excavation in 2009 added a new and unexpected feature: a smaller, dismantled stone circle on the banks of the River Avon, connected to Stonehenge itself by the Avenue. This new structure has been labelled ‘Bluestonehenge’ from the evidence that it once held a circle of bluestones that were later removed to Stonehenge. Investigation of the Avenue closer to Stonehenge revealed deep periglacial fissures within it. Their alignment on Stonehenges solstitial axis (midwinter sunset–midsummer sunrise) raises questions about the early origins of this ritual landscape.

Road my body goes: re-creating ancestors from stone at the great moai quarry of Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Abstract Recognizable throughout the world, the stone statues (moai) of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) represent the largest monolithic architecture produced in Polynesia. The exquisitely carved and finished head and torso of each statue testifies to a skill in stone carving and dressing unmatched throughout the Pacific. Yet, approximately one thousand ‘classic’ statues were produced at the quarries within a few hundred years. What was the ritual status of the quarry and the labour necessary to produce the numbers of statues that allowed Heyerdahl to declare that the ‘whole mountain massif has been reshaped, the volcano has been greedily cut up’ (1958: 83)? What was it like to go to work at Rano Raraku? By drawing on a range of evidence we argue that walking to and labouring at Rano Raraku represented a spatial and temporal journey to a place of highly dangerous forces, a cosmogonic centre where prehistoric Rapa Nui people came face to face with their ancestors and the Polynesian gods.