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  • Thanks to our excavations, not just by our own team but other teams over the last twenty years

  • we've now established that Stonehenge was built

  • in a series of different stages, first of all

  • shortly after 3000BC.

  • It begins with a bank and a ditch

  • but also upstanding features such as standing stones

  • and timber posts.

  • It's also at that moment

  • that people started to use it as a cemetary,

  • so this is somewhere around 3000 to

  • 2920 BC

  • and it continued being used as a cemetary for at least two hundred years and

  • probably five hundred years.

  • It's then that the next stage of construction was put up

  • and that is these large sarsen stones, they're a type of sandstone, they come from

  • the Marlborough Downs about twenty miles away

  • whereas the smaller stones already in place

  • had come from the Preseli Hills in West Wales, a distance of a hundred and

  • eighty miles.

  • We started work about ten years ago

  • and our initial

  • emphasis was not on Stonehenge itself but actually on a nearby henge called

  • Durrington Walls,

  • in fact the largest henge in the whole of Britain -

  • it's about seventeen hectares in extent -

  • and what we established was that Stonehenge was just one part of this

  • much larger complex,

  • linked by avenues

  • to the River Avon.

  • What what we discovered at Durrington Walls

  • were the houses of

  • what must have been not just hundreds of people but thousands of people,

  • and it was there that we were able to work out that this was quite probably the worker's camp.

  • One of our other major advances

  • was to find out at what times of year people were actually inhabiting this village,

  • because although it's the largest known settlement from the Neolithic in

  • northwestern Europe,

  • it seems to have been occupied only seasonally; people coming in

  • for particular times of the year, and we can track that

  • by investigating the culling

  • of the animals

  • because thanks to the way that their teeth grow you can age them quite

  • precisely to within months,

  • so from spring birth

  • we were seeing that the majority were killed

  • around nine months later and then the rest of them some fifteen months from birth,

  • so this really fixed the occupation of

  • this large settlement to

  • the winter time and the summer time

  • and of course those are extremely important

  • points within the Neolithic calendar at Stonehenge,

  • because Stonehenge's main alignment is towards the midsummer sunrise

  • and in the opposite direction the mid winter sunset.

  • What we're seeing is at least

  • five constructional stages at Stongehenge, one shortly after 3000 BC,

  • one around 2500 BC,

  • two small phases of rearranging the smaller stones in the next 3-4 hundred years

  • and then a very last gasp

  • somewhere around 1500-1600BC,

  • they dig holes apparently to move stones but the stones are never moved;

  • whatever they planned never succeeded.

  • Those last stages of construction also coincide

  • with a fundamental social change in Britain,

  • and that's the arrival of what we call the Beaker people,

  • this is a continental style of ceramics and burial

  • but also an entirely new lifestyle.

  • These are people that have been using

  • metals, the wheel, and other innovations

  • which had been absolutely absent from Britain

  • for hundreds of years,

  • so Britain was basically cut off from the continent

  • up until the arrival of the Beaker people around 2400BC,

  • and i think it's their lifestyle, their politics, their social structure

  • that is so very different

  • to the host culture within Britain -

  • they are much more individualizing than the collective power structure

  • within Britain,

  • they also are not prepared to work

  • en masse

  • for just a few people,

  • so the great monument building that's going on in Britain at this time, and it's not

  • just Stonehenge but many other timber circles, stone circles,

  • earthen mounds of giant proportions like Silbury Hill,

  • these come to an end within two centuries of

  • Beaker arrival - they're coming from parts of Europe that don't have

  • these kinds of traditions at all,

  • they don't have

  • these great gathering centres,

  • it's a much more dispersed, decentralized

  • social structure,

  • and as it's adopted in Britain

  • so the whole rationale for these kinds of

  • mega constructions simply disappears.

  • We're starting to think of Stonehenge

  • not as a temple

  • where people come on pilgrimages and come to worship on a long-term basis;

  • all our evidence suggests that

  • it is used in a very punctuated form over time:

  • people come, they construct, they feast, they go away,

  • and this is really changing our notion of

  • Neolithic religious belief

  • that it's all in the building,

  • rather than the idea of building something in order to do something

  • with it,

  • which is very much our twentieth century take on the world.

  • What we have at Durrington Walls, if we're right that this is the work camp,

  • is that the houses show that we have

  • entire household groups,

  • so we're looking at men and women and children being involved in the whole thing,

  • and they're feasting on

  • cattle and on pig,

  • they're barbecuing them, they're boiling them,

  • and the huge concentration of resources

  • shows that this is a very sophisticated infrastructure to support them

  • and by examining the isotopes,

  • first trontium in the teeth of cattle,

  • and we're now doing this for the pigs as well, we're finding out that

  • the range that they're coming from

  • has exceeded all of our expectations. This isn't just some local construction event

  • for the people of

  • the chalklands of southern England - it's not even for the people of southern

  • England and Wales,

  • this is for people coming from

  • the width and breadth of the whole island of Britain.

  • So it's more than simply unnecessary food miles

  • to bring those animals from all over the country, it has to be part of a very

  • deliberate act of unifying

  • and bringing people together.

Thanks to our excavations, not just by our own team but other teams over the last twenty years

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B1 中級

重寫巨石陣的歷史(UCL) (Rewriting Stonehenge's history (UCL))

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    吳曜任 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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