MONUMENTS OF LIFE & DEATH UNITED BY THE RIVER AVON

It could be that Stonehenge was multifunctional, as Tim and Geoff concede, and was used for ancestor worship amongst other things.12 This latter idea was pursued by the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, who led the most thorough excavation ever conducted between 2003 and 2009. Published in his book Stonehenge: The Greatest Stone Age Mystery (2012), he advances the main theory that Stonehenge functions as a monument of death connected by the river Avon to the nearby Woodhenge and Durrington Walls, monuments of life.13

Woodhenge was built around 2500BC and consisted of six concentric rings of timber posts forming an oval monument. Its close neighbour is Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement with a large village.14 A wealth of objects were discovered at Woodhenge and Durrington Walls compared to Stonehenge, where human bones were the only significant find. Durrington Walls as a place of living is best exemplified by the connotations of using wood as a perishable material. This contrasts with the use of rock over at Stonehenge and it’s connotations of permanence. These ideas have been seen regularly over time, in places like Ancient Egypt and China, with the sixth-century sage Laozi writing about it in Tao Te Ching.15 However, although it’s clear to us that different rituals took place at each, this does suffer from anachronism.

Although mostly living isolated, Neolithics would periodically gather in large numbers to feast and build monuments. Pearson explains “there is little doubt that the place for a good party was Durrington Walls and not Stonehenge”.16 In fact many of the animal bones found there, like the human bones at Stonehenge, originated from many different sites around the British Isles. Advancing Pearson’s theory is the evidence his team found: the identification of Durrington Walls as a neolithic settlement, the discovery of the avenue that links the Southern Circle to the River Avon and the inverse of it’s midwinter sunrise orientation to Stonehenge’s midwinter sunset. Finally, down by the River Avon a previously unknown henge was found, Bluestonehenge; The small stone circle constructed well before 2500BC and dismantled around 2400BC, emphasises and establishes the importance of this stretch of the Avon and the route taken.17

Fig 7. An artists depiction of Durrington Walls during its Neolithic heyday.

Fig 8. An artists depiction of Durrington Walls during its Neolithic heyday.

Fig 9. An artists depiction of Bluestonehenge during its Neolithic heyday.

12 Jones, Dan.

13 Pearson, Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery

14 Ibid

15 Tzu, Lao. 1969. Tao Te Ching, trans. by D. C. Lau (London, England: Penguin Classics)

16 Pearson, Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery

17 Ibid