“Stonehenge: built by immigrants,” reads a sign designed by the artist Jeremy Deller – a pithy reminder of an archaeological truth: that populations have been more mobile than is often convenient to believe in our modern age of borders and the nation state. Stonehenge was indeed built by “immigrants” – by the descendants of those who had crossed to Britain from continental Europe, bringing farming techniques with them, around 6,000 years ago. And from the medieval period, when mythographer Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that it had been built by the wizard Merlin, to our own era of the druids, new age travellers and tourists who have worshipped, revelled and marvelled there, it has continued to accrue fresh new meanings and associations as each generation projects its own desires on to it.
But one of the most intriguing points made by the curators of the new British Museum exhibition The World of Stonehenge is that the monument had a long and dynamic history of development and change before it began the second phase of its life as a ruin. The Wiltshire downlands around Stonehenge were, it seems, already special to the Mesolithic people who drove wooden stakes into the ground there before Doggerland, a territory that connected Britain to the continent, was subsumed into the North Sea around 8,500 years ago. Later, 5,000 years ago, the origins of Stonehenge itself were established when a mighty circular ditch and bank were built, with wooden posts or stones set just inside it. Not long afterwards, these were removed, and huge bluestones quarried in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire were, remarkably, transported all the way to Wiltshire and set up there. Later still, around 4,500 years ago, came the erection of the giant sarsen stones.
These prehistoric time periods are hard to wrestle with; archaeology can show us only a flickering, evanescent glimpse of the lives of the peoples of the distant past. The British Museum’s exhibition covers a span of 12,000 to 3,000 years ago. To give some context to those dizzying aeons, it is worth remembering that earliest surviving texts about these islands come from only around 2,000 years ago, when classical writers such as Diodorus Siculus and Tacitus described Britain’s misty climate and the terrifying behaviour of its chilly, gelatinous, grey seas.
What can we know about the people who built and used Stonehenge? Their stone circles often align with solstice sunsets or sunrises, so it is possible to infer that the sun was an important part of their cosmology. They valued beautiful things, and devoted time and skill to creating highly polished, elegantly shaped mace heads and axe heads – and, later, golden ornaments. Some of them travelled surprising distances – the “Amesbury archer”, who was buried nearby in around 2,300BC, had probably grown up in the Alps. But what of their desires, their passions, their beliefs? Mostly, they are irrecoverable. The generations of humans, as Homer wrote, are like leaves – they die away, forgotten, and are replaced. To consider the deep past is an exercise in wonder. It should also, perhaps, be one of humility.
