Science: Prehistoric Shrine

Modern archeological methods—including electrical soil probes and carbon 14 dating—are stripping bit by bit the ancient mystery from Stonehenge, the great megalithic monument on Britain’s Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge’s origin had been forgotten even in Roman times. Now the diggers know the age of different parts of it, where the great stones came from, and what sort of people dragged them to Salisbury Plain. At the Bristol meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Prehistorian R.J.C. Atkinson of the University of Edinburgh told the latest Stonehenge theories.

Savage Shrine. Stonehenge was a center of a savage religion, and like the many cathedrals of medieval Europe, it took centuries to build. The first shrine, says Atkinson, was built about 1800 B.C. It was chiefly a circle of 56 “ritual pits,” some of them containing cremated human remains, perhaps of ritual victims. A single stone stood upright at the circle’s entrance, and near it was a wooden structure whose traces still remain.

At this period, Stonehenge was one of the largest of many savage sanctuaries in prehistoric Britain. Chief sign of its special eminence is the unusual number of neolithic tombs (Long Barrows) concentrated around it. But about 1650 B.C., a new tribe of barbarians came to Salisbury Plain. They were the Beaker People (socalled because of their characteristic pottery) and although they may have brought their own religion, they improved the Stonehenge shrine instead of destroying it. Their contribution was 82 “blue-stones,” arranged in a double circle with stones flanking an axis that points toward the midsummer sunrise. This was a step forward in religious technology; it showed that the Beaker People had tied their ritual to the movements of the sun.

This kind of stone (a rhyolite) is found mainly, in one place in Britain: the east end of the Prescelly Mountains in the south of Wales. The stone may have been sacred because it makes fine axes, and the Beaker People had a cult that centered around the ax At any rate, says Atkinson, they must have dragged and floated those 82 tones, weighing up to seven tons, all the way from Wales (about 200 miles). Wessex Aristocrats. Stonehenge II lasted for some 150 years. Then a third people moved in to take over the ancient shrine. They decided that the bluestones were not big enough, so they quarried enormous blocks of sandstone in the Marlborough Downs, 25 miles from Stonehenge. Some of these weigh 42 tons, and they were dropped by sledge. Although estimates that this job took more than 1,000 men working for ten years.

The builders of Stonehenge III were still barbarians whose chief occupation was herding sheep. But some of their chieftains, whose rather impressive tombs rich by buying had grown by buying the products of Irish bronesmiths and trading them to customers all over Bronze Age Europe.

The foreign commerce of the “Wessex aristocrats” is probably the reason for sophistication of the shrine they built at Stonehenge. The heavy stone lintels are not merely placed on top of the uprights. They are laboriously fitted The lintels are curved to fit the circles in which they lie, and their sides are in clined to counteract the foreshortening effect of perspective.

Such architectural subtleties are not normal for herdsmen. Atkinson’s theory is that the trading of the chieftains brought them ln contact with the Minoans, the highly cultured seafarers of ancient Crete.

The Wessex aristocrats acquired artistic ideas from the Mediterranean world and these ideas were dimly reflected in Stone henge III A dagger like those of the Minoan culture was recently found carved on one of its stones.

Perhaps, speculates Atkinson, some Minoan came in person. To the barbarians of Salisbury Plain he must have seemed like a derm-god, full of wisdom and technical skill. If this traveler from civilization was the actual architect of Stone henge III, Atkinson thinks that his glorious name may have come down through history as the magician Merlin of King Arthurs court, to whom ancient British legend ascribes the building of Stonehenge.