Interview with Mike Parker Pearson: The Origins of Stonehenge

Mitchell: Hi, I'm Mitchell Rocheleau. I'm an architect searching the world to learn more about the buildings and environments humans have created. From modern era, back to pre-history. I believe that our buildings reflect the culture and context of the people who built them, and can reveal fundamental insights about ourselves. Using architecture as our lens, we can gain a deeper understanding of who we are, and how to design more effective environments for our future.

As more information is revealed about Stonehenge, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the community, ritual, and spirituality were primary facets of our ancestor’s world and were deeply important to them.

The construction process of Stonehenge, its presence in the landscape and its place among the surrounding Neolithic monuments, all suggest that there was an underlying intention to bring people together. Reflecting on this way of life prompts us to examine our contemporary environment and ask the question: If the city's buildings and monuments we’re designing and constructing today facilitate human flourishing or detract from our human vitality?

Today I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Parker Pearson. Mike is an English archeologist specializing in the study of Neolithic Britain, most notably Stonehenge. He was the director at the Stonehenge Riverside Project and the author of several books, including Stonehenge - A New Understanding.

It was such a privilege to speak with Mike. He has firsthand knowledge of the site and a deep understanding of its rich history; Mike has been intimately involved with Stonehenge for decades and is able to reveal insights into the people who created this stunning megalithic monument. 

Again, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to speak with him. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Mike, thanks so much for joining us and taking the time.

Can you start off and tell us a little bit about your research and involvement with Stonehenge, and what initially attracted you to the monument?

Mike: Well, it's a very famous site. People all over the world know about it. And of course, it's been known about for many hundreds of years. But, I have to say that as a young student and researcher, I didn't really want to get too involved with Stonehenge because it clearly attracted all sorts of strange people with all kinds of bizarre ideas.

And, I mean, that's just the professional archeologists. So, I'd kind of kept at arm's length from it. Of course, I'd been taken there on visits by my university professor. In fact, my very first visit was as an infant at one year old, because my father wanted to go and see the crane. He was an engineer.

The crane that was actually re-erecting, one of the settings, and that’s the trilithon, that's two uprights and the lintel on top of it. That's what he was interested in. He didn't give a, he was not interested in the stones themselves and the archeology as such. But yeah, I was perfectly happy pursuing  a career a long, long way away from Britain with research.

First of all, in Denmark and later on in Madagascar and curiously enough, it was Madagascar that was to lead me all the way back. The work I was doing in Madagascar, we were looking at a variety of different topics, one of which was what happened to the largest birds in the world, elephant birds that made these huge eggs. But we were also on the trail of a lost civilization. And also the tail of a shipwrecked sailor who had been kept as a slave, Londoner who’d been kept as a slave in around 1700. But alongside these I was also interested in the local funerary customs, because, where we were in the very south of Madagascar, they built megalithic tombs today. And I wanted to know more about what it was that made people do this, what it was like to live in a society that had megalithic tombs. And, I didn't really make any connections with Stonehenge until I was able to invite my fellow researcher, a Malagasy Archeologist, Ramilisonina, to Britain. And I thought he'd be really interested to see Stonehenge and the other great stone circle at Avebury. And he said “what do you mean you don't know what it's for?” Because we've been studying stone tombs and megaliths in Madagascar. And “for me, it's obvious”, he said, because in Madagascar, we build in stone for the ancestors, and we build in traditional and organic materials for our houses and for the living. And I think that's what you've got here. I think you've got a monument to the ancestors. And I thought, well, this is, you know, an intriguing possibility. But I didn't take it at all seriously. Then little by little, I started thinking about, well, actually, maybe what he is suggesting could actually fit the evidence that we have really quite well. But what it did most importantly was to make me think about how not only the metaphors of stone and timber are used in different societies. Of course you know I'm from a society where we put up gravestones to memorialize the dead. Whereas, at the beginning of the death rituals, we'll probably use flowers and even small wooden crosses to mark a grave before it becomes internalized with stone.

But I think the key thing was that, it made me think about that Stonehenge landscape, because we'd known for some time that Stonehenge wasn't sitting there in isolation, but on that particular part of Salisbury Plain, because just a couple of miles upstream, there were circles that had been built of timber, and it made me wonder if Ramilisonina had put his finger on something really quite intriguing, because how did we explain this juxtaposition of timber circles, the famous one is called Woodhenge. And just a couple of miles away Stonehenge. And I just wondered whether his suggestion might actually be worth following up. Was Woodhenge associated with the living? And was Stonehenge associated with the dead? And following on from that, the river itself, the River Avon, which flows past both of those complexes, the Woodhenge and the Stonehenge, might have actually been linking the two of them; Might there have been avenues connecting them to the river. The river has served both as a boundary between the living and the dead, but also as a conduit from one to the other. So, I thought, we've got to go and find out, because it was really eating a hole in me, this theory, this possibility. And of course, what we needed was fresh excavations. Did the avenue out of Stonehenge actually reach the river? Was there a similar avenue from the Woodhenge site at Durrington Walls? Was there evidence that the wooden structures were associated with the living and that Stonehenge was associated with the remains of the dead? And, we were actually able to do it.

Mitchell: Yeah. It's super interesting thinking about the possibility that these people, ancient people in both Neolithic Britain and in Madagascar, were thinking about materiality in the same way and in a form of symbolism.

Mike: Yes. The interesting thing is realizing that lots of different cultures at different times have come up with similar metaphors about materiality. And so, if we look at, say, ancient Chinese philosophy, Lao Tzu, I think he was writing in the sixth century BC. He actually talks about, hard and dry is for the dead, whereas soft and flexible is the living. You know, we have, we have other metaphors of putting things, set in stone. That's to last, for eternity or for at least a very long time. So I think it pops up in different cultures at different times. It's not something that we're hardwired with. It's just a useful metaphor. And then an obvious one, drawing from the properties of the natural world that people will draw on it at times when it's appropriate.

Mitchell: Fantastic. Can you give us a little bit of a high-level overview of Stonehenge? For those of us who maybe can see Stonehenge only as a photograph of a bunch of megalithic stones stacked up, maybe talk a little bit about the general layout and the components of it.

Mike: Well, it's not actually that big. Avery to the north 20 miles away is our biggest stone circle. And that's about what, 330 meters. So that's what, 1,000 feet across. Stonehenge is just 30 meters across the circle of stones that form the outside parts of it. And, so what? That's about 100 feet. And, that outer circle is made up of stones that we call Sarsens. These are the local silcrete, is the technical term, it's a hard kind of sandstone. And that's where we have the uprights with a number of lintels surviving. And that encloses another setting of five arrangements of sarsen. So these are called Trilithons. And they have two uprights and a lintel. The largest of them, the great Trilithon, is the end of a horseshoe plan. So you've got two along each side and the great Trilithon at the back. And that's to the southwest. So in the prehistoric times, when it was standing, because of course, it fell over a long time ago now. But when it was originally standing, you could look through the gap of the two uprights towards where the mid-winter sun set on the shortest day, the winter solstice. So you've got these two main arrangements. And then between them, so inside the Sarsen circle, but outside the horseshoe of Trilithons, there's a circle of much smaller stones. And there's a second arrangement, more another horseshoe of these small stones just inside the horseshoe of the sarsen Trilithons. And these are the stones that have come all the way from West Wales. So that's a distance of over 140 miles as the crow flies, they probably had to go at least 180 miles to follow the lines of land to get to these across water. And so, and then right at the center of Stonehenge, right in front of the fallen Trilithon, the great Trilithon, there is a stone lying flat. It's almost invisible. Just the very top of part of it can be seen today in Stonehenge. And that is the altar stone. So that's the central setting. And then out beyond that, there is a circular ditch in a bank, and that has an entrance to the northeast, looking towards mid-summer sunrise. So that's the midsummer solstice sunrise. There's a second entrance in the enclosure to the south. And then there's a variety of single sarsen stones. But within that outer area, one of them’s called the Slaughter Stone, just inside the main northeast entrance, because that was what early archeologists thought might have been used for sacrifices. It's actually simply a fallen over upright which guarded the entrance way into Stonehenge. And then out beyond that, there is a stone known as the heel stone. Supposedly because the devil threw it at a passing friar, a holy man, and it left the mark of his heel in the stone. And that is not quite on the axis of the solstice at midsummer sunrise, but very close to it. And then there's another setting of which just two stones are left, which are called the station stones. And these originally formed a rectangle within the ditch and bank enclosure. And they have alignments and one direction towards where the moon that has its maximum rising and maximum setting, as well as also towards the midsummer sunrise.

Mitchell: I've heard people refer to Stonehenge as a calendar and I think in one of your previous lectures you had clarified this and said, you know, although it does have these alignments to solstices and certain events, this was more a monument for gathering that rather celebrated.

Mike: Yeah. We've been very lucky to work with the leading archaeostronomer in the world - Professor Clive Ruggles. And, his view is, I think that crucial here because what he says is it's not an observatory. It's not a calendar because the directions towards these particular risings and settings of the sun and the moon. They're approximate. They're only to within 1 or 2 degrees. They're really not interested in getting perfect alignments. Because the point is, it was built as a monument, not as some kind of working artifact. It's actually that is, and nor is it a temple, because it certainly seems to have been left at its different stages of construction as a kind of unfinished building site through the four or even five stages of its construction. So, yeah, I think that really focuses thinking now on just seeing it in a rather different setting as a structure, not roofed and very definitely not roofed with a structure in stone which is mirrored a few miles away with Woodhenge and two other  large timber circles. And to see that it's just one part of this larger complex, which is divided in terms of activities.

Mitchell: It seems hard for maybe the Western mind to wrap their head around the idea that maybe there was no actual function of this, this monument. We keep thinking, or maybe we keep thinking, what did it do? What was it for? What was the purpose of this? And, to be just a monument I think is maybe enough.

Mike: You know, we live with monuments today, and you've got plenty of them in Washington, D.C. for example. They didn't have to do anything. They're there to be visited, and they're there for, you know, solemn occasions for gatherings, people to come, you know, if only in their own time and space to look at them. Yes.

Mitchell: You talk in your book too, a little bit about this place on the Salisbury Plain, how it would have been a sacred space. And we think maybe because of the some geological striations from the Ice Age in the landscape, that this would have been deemed sacred. But can you talk a little bit about that and maybe why this place was important to them?

Mike: Yes, we've known for some time that there was something very special about that part of Salisbury Plain, because it's where we have the densest concentration of Neolithic burial mounds. So, these are long mounds that we call long barrows that were built from around 3,800 B.C. so from about 800 years before Stonehenge.

And, of all the Britain, this is where we find the heaviest concentration. And there's also a pit that was discovered overlooking where Stonehenge was, which was used at a similar date. And it was absolutely full of feasting debris. So there were the bones of enough animals to provided meat to feed about a thousand people.

We know that this was from a single episode of carcass butchery, meat extraction. And then the bones were all thrown into that pit. Fortunately for archeologists to discover. So this shows that Stonehenge was already in a place that was extremely important for large numbers of people to gather. And then it was a realization when we were looking at the beginning of that avenue leading out towards the midsummer sunrise, that it was actually constructed on top of a pre-existing feature.

So, a linear array of gullies in the ground and on both sides of them, a chalk ridge, so that so it was the discovery by geologists that this was actually a natural feature, the feature that had formed in a previous ice age, to do with freezing and thawing and tundra-like conditions. So, we're quite a long way to the south of where the ice sheets could ever have reached. But if you think of the very cold environment, the tundra-like conditions that are found to the south of icy areas, you get these geomorphological processes that result in cracking and creation of subsurface features. 

And although we have them all over Stonehenge, these fissures, these gullies caused by Periglacial activity, it's just in that particular area within the line of these two natural ridges of chalk that the fact that the fissures are widest and deepest and it's been suggested again by geological specialists on the project that these would have actually been visible in times of low rainfall in times of summer drought as stripes within the landscape, somewhat sort of 5 or 6,000 years ago. 

So, it's saying that Stonehenge is actually built on to the southwest end of a particular natural, a natural landmark. And yeah, I think that's one of the key reasons why we have so many solstitial alignments, not just at Stonehenge, but within the entire Stonehenge landscape. And it makes it very special amongst all of our monument complexes. I've mentioned Avebury. If you go to Avebury, there's not a single one that has any astronomical significance, none of the alignments there do. So, it helps to mark Stonehenge out as special. More so than any other Neolithic complexes of that time.

Mitchell: You can kind of imagine maybe the Neolithic person walking up to that striation in the landscape with the bright white chalk on either side and seeing the alignment to the solstice and saying, wow, this is you know, this is the spot, this is sacred. And how that thought process would evolve.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Stonehenge Riverside project and specifically those interests within the project, namely the bluestones that are your, seem to be, your area of focus.

Mike: Sure. Well, we started off with what we called the Stonehenge Riverside project because we wanted to really look at the significance of the river and how it was the link between the Woodhenges and the site of Stonehenge itself. And that really morphed into a second project that we called Feeding Stonehenge, because we found so many remains of food residues at Durrington Walls beside Woodhenge that we wanted to use that material to look at where people were bringing all of the food, all of the animals on the hoof to Stonehenge from what was its hinterland and how encompassing was it across Britain. And then the third project that grew out of that was the stones of Stonehenge, because it was the realization that, well, there's some geological work had been done on provenancing where the different stones of Stonehenge came from. We really didn't know that much about it. And thanks to the absolutely brilliant research of teams of geologists in the last decade, that knowledge has revolutionized our understanding of Stonehenge and thrown up some amazing surprises as well.

Mitchell: Yeah, it's incredible to think about the upturning of thinking about the monument and how your team and the Riverside project is coming and giving this a new light with Ramil I think you said your colleague was in Madagascar as well.

Mike: Mhmm Ramilisonina. And I think the other great thing was when we started, there'd been a moratorium on doing any excavation within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site for at least ten years. And, I think there's more than that. And, it was a real opportunity for other teams as well to come and join in. 

So, it was the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes project. There was another project that had started in the bluestone area in Wales. So it was a chance also to really stimulate research and get many different archeological projects up and going. We weren't the only show in town. So, you know, I think we've really benefited from that. And not just pure research, but of course, that part of Salisbury Plain is an area of ongoing developments, around the edges of the World Heritage site. And of course, there's plenty there to discover that commercial archeological companies have investigated in advance of development. So, yeah, there's a huge amount of new research results in the last 10 to 15 years.

Mitchell: Can you tell us a little bit about the bluestones and your recent investigations, research, excavations in West Wales and the Preselis?

Mike: Well, yeah, the exciting thing there was that geological colleagues had managed to interest them with some chippings that had been found in the field north of Stonehenge in 1947. And they were just sitting in a shoebox in the museum, and I got them out of the museum and sent them to the geologists. And they were very intrigued by these because they hadn't seen anything quite like it.

And, one of them, Richard Bevins was startled to wake up in the middle of the night with one of those eureka moments. But he said, I think I know where it's from. Because years ago, he had sampled all of the outcrops of that type of rock in the Preseli Hills, and none of them were anything like this particular type of rhyolite. So, he suddenly realized that of all the samples he'd collected, there was one batch that he never analyzed. So he dashed into the laboratory and to his colleague basically he said, right, “analyze these now.” And they were, yes, indeed, the one missing, the one outcrop he'd never actually done the chemical analysis of. His colleague is a specialist, not in the chemistry like Richard, but in the microscopic analysis of the structure, of the structure of the rock. And he was able to say, look, it's not just from this particular outcrop. It's actually from that spot on the outcrop, no other, that's what it matches. So, yeah, we actually had a signpost to say, “look here” and we started excavations and we could see the gap, the niche where there was a missing pillar.

And then that close to that, beside that, we actually found a little fireplace where somebody had dropped hazelnuts onto the fire. So, we got radiocarbon dates of those hazelnuts to just before the very start of Stonehenge. And a little while later, we even discovered that there were stone wedges jammed into the next pillar along on that outcrop. In other words, they'd removed one, and they were about to remove another one, and for some reason they stopped. So yeah, we had a little smoking gun. So, the neolithic quarry workers removing from that quarry. And that was the really the beginning of the chase because at the same time, Richard and his colleague Rob and another geologist- Nick Pearce were both were all of them looking at the different kinds of bluestone. There's rhyolite, which is basically sheet lava. There's dolerite, in American you call it diorite. And that comes in various forms, spotted and unspotted. And they were able to chase down many of the locations where these had their source in the Preseli Hills. So, we've been able to bit by bit with their help, map out the locations of where all the stones were brought from.

And what's really exciting now is we're homing in on what may be a large, Neolithic henge complex right in the middle of where all of those quarries are. So, let's watch this space, because I'm hoping we may find something really exciting there.

Mitchell: Sure. And which could possibly suggest that, this was a secondhand monument that had previously been erected or some sort of previously been erected in that area.

Mike: And I think, yes, it is a very strong possibility now. We knew that  from the bluestones and this and their shaping at Stonehenge that some of them, are not in the positions that they were originally intended for. Two of them, for example, are shaped as lintels, so cross pieces sitting on top of vertical uprights. And yet this they are set as uprights within their setting at Stonehenge. So, it may well be that they were even shaped beforehand. But although my guess is the shaping may not have happened until they actually reached Salisbury Plain.

Mitchell: Interesting, interesting. So the, I guess the big question, probably the unanswerable question at this point is why did they move these stones? Why did they do that? And do you have any, maybe not answers, but thoughts on that?

Mike: Yeah. Well, archeologists have thought about this for a very long time. As soon as it was realized that they'd had to have been brought, the bluestones had to be brought all the way from Wales. But we also have a really ancient story from the 12th century from somewhere around 1130 A.D. and this was written down by a monk called Geoffrey of Monmouth. And, he's one of the very first people to actually record Stonehenge to mention it in a manuscript, but he goes to some lengths to talk about why it was built. And he's the man who's responsible for us having the story of King Arthur-the famous mythical hero. And so it's all thanks to Geoffrey Monmouth and of course, alongside King Arthur, there is the wizard Merlin and Stonehenge is all to do with Merlin. Because according to Geoffrey Monmouth, what had happened was that a group of Britons, ancient Britons, were treacherously killed by Saxons at a parley, at a meeting. And Merlin decrees that a monument should be built for, to commemorate these murdered Britons. And he says it's not just going to be out of any old stone. It's got to be special stone. It's got to come from a stone circle. Not in Wales, but in Ireland, even further to the west, across the sea. And the reason is that that stone circle, the ring of the giants, the, or even the dance of the Giants. That must be brought stone by stone because it is a magical circle. It has properties of healing. It is something that we need to reconstruct on Salisbury Plain where these Britons were killed. So that's the basis of the story. And it's taken by force. What is it? Ten, 15,000 men, I think, are sent out to defeat the Irish in battle and to bring these stones all the way back. And so that's one story. 

And then, we have ideas after the Renaissance and primarily this in the 1600s and 1700s. And it's two early archeologists, John Aubrey and then William Stukeley. And they worked out that it had to be prehistoric. So for them, it reminded them of the classical temples of the Mediterranean. So, they thought, well, it must be a temple. And, if so, it has to be built by people from before the time of Julius Caesar. So if that's the case, what does Julius Caesar say about temples in Britain? And the key thing is that, there are priests known as druids, and that's how the association with Stonehenge being a temple manned by druids started off. And that's really been one of the kind of and dominant theories about Stonehenge.

Things changed in the 1960s when the astronomer Gerald Hawkins uses a computer, but at that time, a wonderful machine the size of a house too, as he reckoned to tell us that Stonehenge itself was some kind of Stone Age computer. So, with its astronomical alignments and so forth, most of what he was proposing seems to have been rather over the top, and now in retrospect. 

But you know, that was just that then led to the second hypothesis of the modern age, thinking of it in terms of a calendar or this observatory. And, so, yeah, I think what the line that I've been more interested in was first picked out, well, nearly 70 years ago by the greatest prehistorian of his age, a man called Gordon Childe. And although he was largely interested in the pre-history of Europe, shortly before he died, he just wrote a very short set piece. It's basically a footnote to his great work on the dawn of European civilization, in which he says that the bluestones’ movement to Stonehenge reveals that it has to have been built for a sacred piece or a unification. And I think he just put his finger on it in that very simple, small footnote as to what was going on.

And this is where it's been particularly exciting with the geological studies, because Stonehenge is the only stone circle that is built with stones, none of which are local. Because even the Sarsens come from 15 miles away. And some, we know also that other fragments of sarsen which are from broken up blocks at Stonehenge come from even further away as far as the south coast of England. And then the bombshell last year, the discovery that the altar stone right in the middle, all six tons of it, has been brought all the way from the far north of Scotland. So, it's realizing that they're very deliberately selecting materials to demonstrate their far-flung connections and whether these are gifts given, whether they're taken in anger, as the Merlin myth might suggest, I suspect that these are brought, not necessarily after conflict, but actually as part of a, as Childe said, a unification and a sacred piece. So, yeah, we, I think we have now dramatic new evidence to really back that up.

Mitchell: Yeah. Thinking about the people going through that procession in the landscape or whatever theory you had here to landscape or water, but bringing the stones to the site, and it being a kind of this communal bonding procession is a really beautiful idea. And I think something that would resonate with the communities along the way. People would want to join in, they would want to be involved in this. They’d be curious. It just seems to resonate with human nature. It feels right.

Mike: You know, I've been very privileged to work in a society that builds megaliths. And to see the collaboration, the community ethos that it inspires and engenders. It makes people, you know, you are literally pulling together when you join in these great stone haulings and monuments erections. So it's realizing that it's, yeah, it's a spectacle, it's also, it's something that everybody wants to be involved in. And I often get emails saying, well, where people are trying to think how efficiently can you move these stones? How few people do you need? Well, out there in the real world, the problem is that there's always too many people because everybody wants to be part of it. And it is a wonderful spectacle to see, you know, a great stone of 3 or 4 tons being heaved and moved by a massively overenthusiastic crowd. Yeah. I'll never forget the moment when they’re putting up one of these standing stones in Madagascar. And there I was standing amongst the old men at the back, and they were all muttering to each other. “Oh you don't want to do like that?”;  “Oh, no. No.” Younger men were pushing their way to the front. “Let me do it. Let me sit.”  So yeah, it's the community focus of the whole thing that is absolutely central.

Mitchell: Yeah. The idea about us thinking about maybe the transportation of the stones or the erection of the stones in the most efficient, economical way possible it’s just again, I think that goes back to our Western minds and thinking about how we build buildings maybe today. And what's the minimum cost so we can get this done for, you know, that way of things. I think there's a much deeper richness behind the community building aspect of it besides, being completely financially or profit driven.

So, Mike, what does Stonehenge or Durrington Walls and the surrounding monuments reveal about our human nature? If anything, that you think is relevant for us today or our societies today?

Mike: Well, I think, you know, we've been touching ends already, and it is the collaboration that the work of people together, pulling together, literally pulling together, allows enormous things to be done. And it also builds that sense of community. Yeah. I think one of the interesting features about the nature of Neolithic society in Britain at that time is that this isn't a place with towns and cities, it isn't even a place with villages. When we do find remains of settlements, they're pretty much scattered and dispersed farmsteads. So it's only these particular places, Stonehenge and all of the other monument complexes. And there must be at least 70 of them from that period all across Britain that these were the one moment in people's lives when they would actually gather in large numbers. And I think we can see this happening in different types of different places. Yeah. As, as the kind of the social glue that brought these societies, brought these communities together or otherwise fairly atomized and fragmented lifestyles. So, it's like, yeah, it's like they were living in two different societies at once. Half a year you'd be out there in a farmstead with little or no communication with people. And then the rest of the year you’d brought your all of your animals and you'd be feasting for as long as the food lasted out. So, you know, it's the fact that it's the possibility to build a society through collaboration, not individual competition.

Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. That's I mean, that really resonates. And I think it makes me think about our contemporary world. And are we building buildings today or monuments that help to facilitate that deep human nature to collaborate, come together in a communal way? I think there's arguments on both sides of that, but it piques the question in my mind.

Mike: Yes, we've been thinking about the whole business of circularity as well. That, with a circle, nobody comes first and nobody comes last. Everybody's actually part of the equal relationship to each other. And I think what's been interesting about our discoveries is that, you know, we know that there are certain inequalities, and some of them show up within the domestic arrangements of the houses all around the woodhenges. Because we can see that some houses are better equipped or slightly larger than others. Not massively, but enough to suggest that there is social difference of some sort or another. But of course, that is all subsumed by the participation in a circular arrangement where everybody has their spot around the whole thing.

So, yes, I think the architecture itself also helps to engender particular attitudes to collaboration and cohesion.

Mitchell: Sure, sure. And it's interesting as architecture is a symbol of maybe a more or representation of maybe a more egalitarian society that wasn't super rigid in their hierarchical ordering.

Mike: Yes. I think it's an egalitarian ideology. And so that doesn't necessarily match what's happening on the ground in terms of inequalities and social relationships. So it's the presentation of a way of doing things which may be slightly at odds. Though, that said, we really can't find any chiefs at the time of the Stonehenge's two big stages of construction around 5,000 years ago and then again at 4,500 years ago, it's rather later that we start to see people buried in gold and other finery. At this point, there's really very little to distinguish people in life or in death. So, yes, it's not a  pharaonic society with the slave drivers, and pharaohs,  and kings, that sort of thing now.

Mitchell: Do we have evidence of wars between different tribes and fighting at that time, or is there one?

Mike: Yes, yes, but only before Stonehenge really. Because what we see then is that the area to the west of it, well basically between where the bluestones are and Salisbury Plain.  We've got Neolithic tombs which contain the bones of hundreds of people. And there's a good proportion of them have got, what we call them, blunt force trauma to the skulls. So, this is being hit over the head very hard, probably with wooden clubs, some of them maybe with stone axe, with axes, stone axes mounted in wooden handles. And about half of them are healed, so they survive the blow. But the other half, they're fresh.  So they're Perimortem, they're from around the time of that individual's death. And these number about 7, 6 or 7% of all of the skulls from the tombs in that area, which is a remarkably high percentage when you look at more recent figures of numbers of dead even in the World Wars of the 20th century, where I think calculations have shown that there's like 1, 2% maximum.

So yes, we do have areas where there was certainly violence going on or most likely in a coordinated fashion. But for the time of Stonehenge itself, it's very difficult to actually point to anything. We've got one bone from a settlement at Durrington Walls. It's a leg bone, all on its own. The radiocarbon date shows that it was centuries old by the time it was deposited, but it's got an injury in that bone, probably from a, from an arrowhead. So, it's really and then again later that we see trauma in burials. And even then they tend to be a few broken bones, broken limbs rather than the really nasty results have been clipped to death or shot through with arrows that there's a handful of those. So yeah. Yeah. At the moment it's looking that there's conflict before conflict afterwards, but not at the same time.

Mitchell: Interesting. Okay. So it was an intermingling or mix as you would expect, maybe this idea of community and egalitarian society, but definitely with the brutality and, you know, more intermingled. I think about also the ancient cities in Mesopotamia, kind of at the contemporary time, Stonehenge was going up and they were built with walls around them, you know, so that's a clear signal to keep people out. There's an inside and outside, which is very different it seems than what Stonehenge is, it's you can penetrate the monument, you can go around. It's built for community. So it seems like there's a much different mindset of the people in Stonehenge versus Mesopotamia.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Stonehenge has a ditch around it with two entrances into that, but it's a sacred precinct rather than a defensive site as you say. Yes. You know what we're seeing in Mesopotamia around 2,500 BC is these are fully fledged state societies with standing armies, taxation. They're in a different world entirely.

And a colleague of mine came to talk about his site in Syria, where around the same period 2,400 BC. These got wonderful architecture, luxury items there, you know, well and truly in a metal using phase. Whereas all that is just, yeah, either beginning or nowhere near happening, all that distance away in what would have been the backwater of Europe at the time.

Mitchell: Sure. But don't you think that, let's say before your discoveries in the Riverside project, and kind of recent developments about Stonehenge and the communication networks, and in that area, don't you think the people of Neolithic Britain deserve a bit more credit, though? Compared to what they used to be given? It just seems like they're more developed than we thought.

Mike: Well, I think there's a key point is that primitive technology does not mean primitive people. And we have to remember that, you know, these are people who were living a mere what 140 generations ago. It's really not a very long time back. And of course, they would have been geniuses as well as idiots amongst the population you know, they would have had the same range of intelligence as in a society today. And, we've got to remember that they are sophisticated, but in just in ways that we don't see very easily because, of course, they're leaving a very limited range of materials, culture behind them. And what we have to do is to try and find out from those fragments, just you know what is that level of sophistication. That said, of course, there's absolutely no doubt that they're at a, they're in a different world to what we're seeing in Mesopotamia with those you know, early Bronze Age city states. This is a world that also their works on completely different principles as we were talking about that the individual themselves is really not very important. I'm sure that this was a time where you could draw on the labor of thousands to construct these huge edifices, very time consuming, vast quantities of feasting involved. So you've got an infrastructure to provide all of that. But it's the drive to build these monuments that have lasted through to today that, of course, we find incomprehensible. And that in a way is the magic and the mystery of it all, because it's truly a case of the past being a foreign country. Because it's so very very hard to get ourselves into the cultural logic, the mindset of who they were and why they were doing what they were doing. Because a lot of it would seem to defy common sense, at least in the way that we think of it.

Mitchell: Yeah. And that's I think that's the mystery of it all. But using architecture, using, you know, the excavations and everything to get the best picture, the clearest resolution that we can possibly get to make some sort of assumption on the psychological disposition and belief structure, religious, spiritual beliefs of these people, I think it's fun to imagine.

Mike: And of course it changes. It doesn't last, because after the second stage of Stonehenge at the time that the third stage is built. So that's about 2300 BC. So about 4,300 years ago, we've got a completely new form of society. We've got people coming in from mainland Europe use, their uses of a new type of pottery that we call the Beaker. And they have brought metallurgy with them. And even the knowledge of the wheel, but the extraordinary thing really about this particular moment is that's the transformation from the old ways where people were prepared to labor in their thousands for a common goal. Yes, a large monument. And after this, what we see is that those Beaker users, they're building burial mounds. But they're really very little effort compared to the great henges and mounds and the rest of it of previous times. So it's a real sea change. It's a much more hierarchical society. There's some people are flaunting their golden ornaments. We see certain individuals buried and celebrated with the carcasses of hundreds of cattle slaughtered, subsequent to their death. But it's and no one's prepared to work for the central authority. I think you have an expression for it in America, no one's prepared to work for the man, because they're actually working for their own, extended family groups, their lineage, their small clan, rather than the enormous, labor forces that are brought together to dig these great ditches around their henges, to construct  stone circles, to bring the stones there and so on.

Mitchell: So a much more larger emphasis on, yeah, the individual, the person, and less maybe about a larger kind of subservience to possibly gods or deities like it would have been in Mesopotamia at the time.

Mike: Oh yeah, yes. But I think what we can see in Mesopotamia also, it's not necessarily gods and deities. Because I think one of the interesting things is the fact that stone does stand for the supernatural. But as Ramilisonina, I think put his finger on, it's much more that the ancestors and a really important points for that supernatural world. And it's very clear that, of course, the moon and the sun are other features. Now we can call them gods or deities, but I think supernatural forces would probably be a more meaningful way of thinking about it. It's very easy for us to fall into using terms that come from our own history of religion, and indeed from ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, where there are gods and deities there.

Again, you know what we have to remember is what they have taken the step to actually give the moon a personality. So the moon goddess, for example, or you know, the god Asa, that's a huge rock formation right at the center of the Assyrian Empire. So, it's I think it's that doesn't seem to be a stage that is taken in the sense of personalized deities in the time of Stonehenge. It's more that these are supernatural forces, and the ancestors that are being commemorated. Because, of course, what I haven't mentioned was that you know we did recover a lot of cremation burials from Stonehenge itself, and it became very apparent that it's the largest cemetery that we have from that period anywhere in Britain. So yeah, the dead are absolutely integral to understanding its, Stonehenge's formation and construction.

Mitchell: So early on in its lifespan, it was served as somewhat of a cemetery, but kind of gravitated away from that in a way we think.

Mike: Yep. So for the first 500 years, it's a place of burial. And then they construct the second stage, and that's the Stonehenge that we broadly see today, the Big Sarsens going up at that point. And it's then that, I think it's not so much the place of the dead, but a place of the ancestors because you know the dead well and truly instilled in there and they're now ancient ancestors. And then it's in the next few centuries with the arrival of migrants from the continent using these Beaker pots.  What we see then is really it changes slightly again. They seem to actually construct well, push down two of the stones in the sarsen circle to face in a new direction, which is towards mid-winter sunrise.

That's previously it's been midwinter sunset, midsummer sunrise. So that they’re changing the cosmology, the relationship to a different point to do with the rising sun at midwinter. And they also maintain the rising sun at midsummer orientation. And that seems to fit in with what we know of solar cults on the continent at that time, which is that they are focused on the rising sun rather than the other aspect of it.

So I think you know we're seeing it changes its meaning and its purpose through time.

Mitchell: Well, I want to kind of round this out, Mike, and ask for you to let us in on maybe your latest thoughts and ideas about Stonehenge. Where are you at today? What do you what do you think about today?

Mike: Well, I think, one of the surprising results that's come out of the ancient DNA analysis is discovering the microbes that humans carry with them. So, it's not just reconstructing the genomes of these people who died a long time ago, but finding out what they were suffering from. And, you know, we are just beginning to open that box of finding out about disease. And, just over a year ago now, a paper was published just bringing together all of the ancient DNA results for pathologies and disease. And there's an extraordinary discovery from Neolithic Scotland. So from within two centuries of the first stage of Stonehenge, so around 2800 BC, there are skeletons buried in the islands of Orkney off the north coast of Scotland that were suffering from Yersinia Pestis. So of course that's the bacteria that we call bubonic plague. 

And I think we're just beginning to realize that it may have had a profound effect on prehistoric societies. We certainly can see that with its appearance in Orkney at that point, there is indeed a crash in settlement. So there's a sort of 200 year period where settlement just falls away completely and then builds back up.

We've got a similar gap in the Salisbury Plain area between the first stage and the second stage of Stonehenge that it's difficult apart from a few burials at Stonehenge. So, there's not a lot else going on in the landscape until about 2600 B.C.. So, and then we've also have evidence that in the time of those Beaker people, we have Yersinia Pestis evidence again in skeletons. 

And I think this is just the beginning. Now that we will realize how ubiquitous that and other diseases were at the time. And of course, these may have had profound impacts on these societies with virtually no resistance to them. And in a way, our Covid experience, I think this helps us to understand that, yeah, we thought that was bad. And what was the mortality? Less than 2%. Yeah. We're looking at bubonic plague in the medieval period, knocking out well up to a half of the population in those places.

Mitchell: Does the evidence of that bubonic plague in the first stage of Stonehenge, is that corroborate with a decrease of work on site, or is there any kind of additional evidence to.

Mike: Well, it's in what is at the moment rather a blank period. So, we've got lots of lots of things going on within the Stonehenge landscape, right up from 3700 BCE to the 30th century. So that takes us up to 2900. And then we really scrabbling to find much going on before about 2600. So, and there's no monument building that seems to fit in that.

Yes. We've got people still being buried at Stonehenge, cremated and buried there. But it's just the absence. You know at the moment it is highly speculative. It looks like it's definitely there in Orkney. And there is the signs that it may have had a catastrophic effect on the number of houses which declined massively there. We need to see if it was actually more widespread across Britain and yeah, that will come with time because of course the strides that have been made by geneticists have been astounding.

Mitchell: You know, it's great to see all the work you specifically Mike and your team too and everybody else involved in the projects have been putting into it, just because I think Stonehenge is kind of susceptible to be a one liner, you know, where did this come from? What's what is this? And with everybody's work involved, we're beginning to kind of just see much more resolution and a more clear picture painted of the complexity and the depth and the daily lives of these people. And yeah, so I just want to thank you for all the work.

Mike: That’s all.  Thanks for having me on the show.

Mitchell: Yes. Yeah. Thank you so much Mike.