Stonehenge A Timewatch Guide

Stonehenge - our greatest ancient monument.

It has captivated and intrigued us

since the very beginning of recorded history.

In fact, there's nothing else in Britain

that fires our collective imagination

quite like these mysterious standing stones.

Some of our greatest archaeologists and historians

have helped to drive our fascination with Stonehenge.

For centuries, they've been attempting to solve

the riddle of the stones,

trying to answer some of the really important questions

about this enigmatic structure.

How was it built?

Who built it, and why?

Over the past seven decades, the BBC has been on location,

as historians and archaeologists have tried to tackle

these fundamental questions.

At the forefront of documenting their work

has been the history series Timewatch.

During its three decades on our screens,

Timewatch investigated some of the most exciting archaeological digs

in and around Stonehenge,

as well as exploring the leading theories of the day.

I'll be using Timewatch,

and 70 years of BBC history archive,

to look at how our understanding

and our view of Stonehenge has changed over the decades.

And that's been a process driven by new archaeological discoveries,

by ground-breaking scientific research

and by the evolution of compelling

and often contradictory theories about how it was constructed,

about the people who made it and about the purpose behind it.

Britain's most famous stone circle stands timeless,

imposing and mysterious on Salisbury Plain.

But today's Stonehenge is just the final version of many

different incarnations that once stood on this site.

We now know the monument evolved through several distinct phases.

The first was a circular ditch and bank, built around 5,000 years ago.

Wooden or stone posts were added to form an inner ring.

Then, some 500 years later, around 2,500 BC,

the monument we know today was constructed.

Giant sarsen sandstones were used to create an inner

horseshoe of five trilithons.

Around these were two rings of bluestones...

..and the monument was then surrounded

by a final ring of lintel-topped sarsens.

Over the next few millennia, the ravages of time

and the robbing of some stones left us with a partial, ruined monument.

For the past five centuries, scholars and antiquarians

have pored over the stones, trying to make sense of them,

and often fitting the evidence into their own pet theories.

Over the last 100 years or so,

advances in archaeology have really driven forward our understanding,

helping to dispel some of the myths and misunderstandings of the past.

The archaeologists went beyond the legends,

in search of hard evidence to help them solve the riddle of Stonehenge.

One of the biggest mysteries of all is how such huge stones

were brought to Salisbury Plain in the first place,

especially as many of them are known to have travelled a great distance.

In 1954, one of the first ever archaeology programmes on television

attempted to solve this conundrum.

The eminent archaeologist Richard Atkinson...

Good evening.

..devised an experiment to try

to explain how the important bluestones,

originating from west Wales, were carried 150 miles to Wiltshire.

This is the raft we devised for the experiment.

It's made up of three long, narrow punts.

The copied bluestone was made of reinforced concrete

and weighed nearly a ton and a half.

With it sitting securely on the platform, we set off,

punting upriver with some boys of Brownstone School as crew.

Even though they weren't perhaps the most expert punters in the country,

we had no trouble moving it upstream,

even where there were shallow parts and bends.

With the raft towed instead of punted,

which of course could only have been done

where there was a firm bank available

and not in marshy or overgrown country,

the raft moved at a fine pace,

with the help of a man on board to steer.

In fact, this part of the experiment showed that there would have been

no difficulty in transporting the bluestones upriver

with just a few men,

even if the river was narrow and shallow.

Now, for the experiment on land.

For this, we used a rough wooden sledge

which would probably have been made of oak.

With the copied bluestone lashed in position,

the weight to be moved is about a ton and a half.

Now, with 24 gallant volunteers from Canford School hauling,

off we go.

But, no, 24 can't do it.

Can 28?

No, it's still too much for them.

Can 32?

Yes, they can,

and off the sledge goes.

It is pretty hard work for the boys,

so I calculate that to allow for sustained pulling up slopes,

this stone would need 40 men to handle it like this.

Now suppose one puts rollers,

consisting of roughly cut logs,

under the sledge.

What happens then?

This time, the hauling is being done by four...

..eight...

..and 14 boys.

And off we go,

with less than half the previous hauling party,

moving the sledge quite easily.

The trouble here is coping with the steering of the sledge,

and getting the rollers into position,

which needs a lot of organisation and experience.

When Richard Atkinson and his team

undertook their research in the early 1950s,

experimental archaeology was really quite revolutionary.

The idea was to take existing theories and to test them

using practical, hands-on experiments.

And in doing so, they gained a real appreciation of the ingenuity

and the skill of the Neolithic engineers.

Not only that, but through the medium of television,

they demonstrated to a mass audience that experimental archaeology

could be a really useful tool in understanding our ancestors.

I think the thing about Atkinson's experiment with moving a stone

is that it was done in a very kind of gentlemanly way,

in a very British, mid-20th century, almost public-school environment.

And, of course, that's not really what things were like

in the Neolithic when Stonehenge was built,

and I think if we are to really understand

how those stones were moved,

we need to think not just about the really small ones but the big ones,

and we also need to try and get ourselves into the

Neolithic frame of mind, which is so different from our own.

I think what's happened since Atkinson's time

is that we've realised that there are many ways of moving a stone,

particularly one of those little Welsh bluestones.

And I think we've actually learned rather more from what people

do with stones in their own societies around the world today.

And actually, the overengineering that we often try

and put into these projects is maybe not necessary.

Richard Atkinson's experiments proved that moving

the bluestones would certainly have been possible.

But in time, new evidence would emerge that cast doubt on the whole

theory that humans were involved in moving the stones at all.

In 1972, the BBC series Chronicle investigated a new hypothesis

put forward by the geologist Geoffrey Kellaway.

He believed that Atkinson was wrong

and that, in fact,

natural forces had delivered the bluestones from Wales to Wiltshire.

'In 1970, the M5 motorway across the West Country was well under way,

'when it came up against a limestone ridge near Clevedon in Somerset.

'So, in went the bulldozers and the explosive experts,

'to loosen and remove four and a half million tons of rock.

'But when the rock face was removed,

'something of startling significance for British geology stood revealed.

'For the section of rock showed Mr Kellaway that once upon a time

'an immense ice sheet had cut a path for itself through the hard rock.

'Kellaway believes that the ice sheet moved eastwards across Wales,

'and in so doing, tore huge rocks from the Preseli Mountains

'of Pembrokeshire and carried them the 150 miles to Salisbury Plain.'

So, it's the great bluestone controversy -

and in the studio tonight

a direct confrontation between geology and archaeology.

On my left, we have the original iceman,

Geoffrey Kellaway the geologist.

And on my right, Professor Richard Atkinson,

who speaks for the accepted archaeological view.

Professor Atkinson,

do you think that Mr Kellaway is talking nonsense?

If I were to say yes, that would be rude.

But what I would like to say

is that I should like to see a great deal more evidence about this.

If the bluestones were brought by ice to somewhere on Salisbury Plain,

it seems to me highly improbable that what was brought was

subsequently sufficient just for the needs of the builders

of Stonehenge and left nothing over.

Well, this is a basic problem, Mr Kellaway, isn't it,

that the ice brought a certain number of nicely shaped bluestones

to a specific spot, dumped them there and nowhere else,

because there is no trail of bluestones all the way from Preseli?

No, there couldn't possibly be a trail all the way from Preseli,

unless we had done sufficient underwater work

to trace them up to the Somerset coast.

Now, the point is that it's no good looking at Stonehenge

as a collection at the present time.

It's just a collection of erratics.

I mean, most of them are worked stones.

Their exteriors tell you absolutely nothing about what they were

before they were trimmed. This is just the whole trouble with them.

You can't tell anything by looking at the exterior of the existing

stones seen above ground at Stonehenge.

What nobody has explained is why rotten stones,

that have in fact come out of a peat bog,

which are absolutely useless for building, which have come from

north or central or south Wales, we don't quite know which,

why those should be gathered together

in heaps on Salisbury Plain.

We do know they were using the same rock, the same Preseli rock,

for making axes,

and that these have been found at considerable distances.

I mean, in the eastern part of Wales, for instance, in Devon

and in the vicinity of Stonehenge and in that case, of course,

the source may have been the stones of Stonehenge itself.

The distribution of these axes in itself is very interesting,

because I've been plotting these, and, in fact,

they show, in many cases,

a clear relationship to the inferred directions of glaciation

deduced on totally independent grounds.

But in many cases they don't.

I mean, if you take for instance the axes from Tievebulliagh,

on the coast of Antrim in Northern Ireland, you cannot

pretend that ice has carried these to the shores of Aberdeenshire.

Before we take too many packs of axes, gentlemen,

thank you very much indeed.

The glacial argument's an interesting one,

and it's a tricky one,

because there certainly was glaciation in west Wales.

The problem is that nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory

arrangement of glaciers which would have transported the

stones eastwards from the Preseli Hills across to Salisbury Plain.

The furthest the glaciers could reasonably carry them would be

into South Wales, and that's why Kellaway's discovery,

which isn't entirely as clear-cut as perhaps it seemed back then,

was at least an interesting piece in the jigsaw puzzle.

However, we've now come to understand

that there is no material on Salisbury Plain

that's been carried from west to east by glacial action.

Geoffrey Kellaway's glaciation theory has cast a long shadow

over the story of Stonehenge.

Understanding how the stones were moved

might seem like a detail,

but in fact it's crucial to understanding

how this monument was built

and how it fits into the wider story of Neolithic Britain.

The debate between some geologists

and the archaeological community continues to this day,

and it will probably never be completely resolved,

as each side interprets the evidence differently,

finding support for their own theories.

So, for now, the journey of the bluestones remains mysterious

and contentious.

In the 1990s, experimental archaeology underwent

something of a renaissance.

Right, let's see if we can shift that stone!

40 years on from the work of Richard Atkinson,

a new project attempted to shed light on how the biggest stones

of all had been stood on end to create the five giant trilithons.

Julian Richards, together with engineer Mark Whitby,

had been given the task of finding out how Stonehenge was built.

For me, this has been one of those projects

which the nearer you got to it the more difficult it became.

Or, the more frightening it became.

The reality of taking two 40-ton stones

and turning them on their ends

without using any machine power whatsoever is quite a daunting task.

I don't think people have really stopped to think about

the problem at Stonehenge in a realistic way.

All the theories are put together by people who haven't actually

been faced with the practical task of doing it.

The first step in moving the giant concrete replica upright

was to dig a huge pit beneath the stone.

That just left the problem of levering it into the hole.

There's no evidence that the Stonehenge area had

hordes of people available to build monuments.

So Mark Whitby's method uses as few people as possible.

He has an ingenious plan to tip the 40-ton stone

as if it were a seesaw.

The basic concept is we've put six tons now

on the back of the stone, by dragging it up these ramps.

When it travels a certain distance along, this stone is going to stop.

However, before it reaches that point,

it will have passed this magic point of the centre of gravity

and we'll be inducing the force

which will make the whole stone start to turn.

One, two, three.

This is a real point of sort of crisis for us, in a way.

I have never done it before.

I don't know anybody who has done this before,

so we are in the experimental stages.

Watch that the rovers don't pull back on you.

OK? Good luck.

Right, take the strain.

One, two, three, pull!

THEY GROAN

CHEERING

Oh!

LAUGHTER

It's literally just dropped just as we planned it to drop.

And the only thing which is slightly different is

it's kicked out the back here. But that's...

That's just better than we expected. That means it's more upright.

I think it's probably one of the most spectacular ways

one can think of getting a stone this size into a stone hole.

I've heard comments that it was perhaps an overengineered approach.

I'm not convinced about that.

I mean, the people who built Stonehenge were very sophisticated,

and were obviously capable of thinking out

grand schemes like that and carrying them through.

And I don't see why,

especially after you'd perhaps had a go with some smaller stones,

that somebody wouldn't have come up with an idea like this.

"Let's use the weight of some smaller stones to help us

"move a bigger one."

So, I don't find it completely implausible.

What's interesting with experiments at Stonehenge is that

almost all of them have been done for television.

So we get this great visual spectacle

and a wide public thinks about how Stonehenge was built.

But the funny thing is that archaeologists themselves

have not done these experiments.

They haven't been conducted scientifically and methodically

and recorded in great detail and, you know, different

ways of building Stonehenge

compared logically and systematically with other ways.

And so, what experiments we've had haven't actually told us that much.

So, I think there's great scope there for somebody out there now,

you know, to develop projects and systematically think about

how Stonehenge was built,

and to move on our understanding of the monument.

Experimental archaeology might have helped to paint

a picture of how Neolithic man could have tackled

such daunting challenges,

but understanding how this feat of engineering was

achieved doesn't tell us much about the people who did it.

The quest to uncover who built Stonehenge has a long history.

In the Middle Ages it was said that

Merlin had conjured it into existence.

But by the 17th century a consensus had emerged that it was

probably built by the Romans.

In 1989, the BBC series Chronicle investigated

the work of William Stukeley,

who, in the 18th century, had challenged the status quo

and he came up with a whole new creation myth for Stonehenge.

But before tackling Stonehenge, Stukeley had spent much of his life

investigating other stone circles, including nearby Avebury.

With his experience of Avebury and other stone circles,

Stukeley was sure that Stonehenge could not possibly be Roman.

The fact that no Roman author had ever once mentioned it

also seemed pretty conclusive evidence.

But he came up with some ingenious forms of proof of his own.

First, he reckoned that if it was Roman,

then its dimensions should be in Roman units of measurement.

Whoever makes any ancient building, he said,

commonly forms it upon the measure in use

among the people of that place.

So, by reading the classical authors

and studying Roman remains in St Albans and London,

he worked out for himself the length of the Roman foot,

about 11 1/2 English inches,

which is about right for the standard Roman foot.

He then set about testing whether multiples of Roman feet

fitted the dimensions of Stonehenge.

In two and a half days,

he and an aristocratic patron, Lord Winchilsea,

took some 2,000 measurements.

The Roman foot, he concluded, did not fit.

And he came up with another measurement

of 20 4/5 English inches that did.

This, he persuaded himself,

was the standard unit used at all stone circles -

the druid cubit.

Stukeley was developing a very patriotic view

of ancient British achievements.

He saw in Stonehenge the origins of all architecture.

By Stukeley's reasoning, if the Romans hadn't built Stonehenge,

then it must have been created by those who inhabited Britain

before them,

the mysterious priestly class of Druids.

The white-robed figures of the summer solstice

are largely Stukeley's creation.

They may bear little relationship to any ancient reality,

but Stonehenge and the Druids have become part of the British psyche

as THE symbols of our ancient past.

I think probably the perception that the Druids built Stonehenge

does get under the skin a little bit.

Stonehenge was built a long time before the kind of Druidic orders

that Caesar would have experienced and Caesar said something about.

This was a monument that was built way back - at least 1,500 years,

probably 2,000 years before those people were around.

So it's a bit disingenuous to imagine that we can make

a connection between the two.

Stukeley's Druid theory has lingered on in the public consciousness

despite a century of archaeological evidence to the contrary.

Its tenacity demonstrates the power of a romantic idea.

Sometimes a fiction is simply more appealing than the truth.

But theories about who built Stonehenge have not just

stood still since the antiquarians and amateurs of the past.

Modern professional archaeologists have got in on the act too

and some of them have been granted permission

to dig at Stonehenge itself.

One of the largest and most important excavations

of the 20th century was undertaken in the early 1950s

by Richard Atkinson and Professor Stuart Piggott.

During their survey work at the monument,

they stumbled across what they thought was a smoking gun,

tangible evidence at last of who built Stonehenge.

Now, finally, we must direct our attention

to some most interesting discoveries which Professor Piggott

and Mr Atkinson made during their excavations.

Now, Richard, tell us about these interesting engravings.

Well, this was something discovered quite by chance last year

when we were digging at Stonehenge.

I was photographing modern,

let's say 17th- and 18th-century inscriptions on the stones,

and as I was focusing my camera on one of the modern names,

I saw the outlines of a prehistoric dagger and an axe.

Some of you may remember seeing these on Newsreel last year

shortly after the discovery was made.

Here they are.

Those are the stones on which the main carvings lie.

Here is the dagger on the left and the axe on the right.

The dagger appears to be a form unknown in Britain

or Northern Europe - it may be Greek.

The axe, on the other hand, is a local British type.

This is the sort of bronze axe

which is represented on the stones made in Ireland

in the middle of the 16th century BC or thereabouts.

But this is entirely a chance discovery

and one which one must be very grateful for

for the luck of getting.

The discovery of these carvings helped Richard Atkinson

concoct a new hypothesis that Stonehenge had in fact been built

under the influence of the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation

of the Eastern Mediterranean.

In the mid-1950s, when Atkinson put forward his Mycenaean theory,

archaeology was dominated by a movement

known as culture-historical archaeology.

It included the idea that all advanced ancient knowledge

must have spread from the Near East across the rest of the known world.

It was hard for archaeologists like Atkinson to accept that

native Neolithic Britons, who he considered to be howling barbarians,

could possibly have built Stonehenge

without the guiding hand of an advanced civilisation.

In fact, the carving of the dagger and the axe found by Atkinson

were almost certainly made many centuries after Stonehenge was built

and had nothing at all to do with Mycenae.

The whole idea of culture diffusionism

was really something first articulated by the Germans

and of course had a major impact on Nazi archaeology.

But the notion, I think, that...

out of the East comes civilisation

was something that even the leading thinkers of the time

were working on, and, of course, with very good reason,

because we know that agriculture comes from the Middle East,

we know that urbanism started in the Middle East

and, of course, we do have imports across Europe

that come out of the Eastern Mediterranean and further.

So it wasn't a bad idea at all.

This notion that there was some foreign influence at play

during the building of Stonehenge would soon be challenged

by a revolution in archaeology itself.

In the 1960s, a movement called New Archaeology

swept away many of the old ideas about how you could approach

the study of the past.

This new way of thinking put humans in an ecological context

and suggested you could see cultural change happening

as a response to environmental change

and not just because of an influx of people

and ideas from other cultures.

New Archaeology also enthusiastically embraced

what were then novel scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating,

and as whole edifices of old theory came tumbling down,

new hypotheses began to emerge.

By the mid-1980s, this new archaeology was at its peak.

And in 1986, the science series Horizon examined the work

of one of its leading proponents, Colin Renfrew.

Renfrew had reassessed old discoveries

to formulate new theories about who had built Stonehenge.

In this Horizon,

his focus fell on some important graves that surrounded the monument.

Around 2,100 BC, Stonehenge had become a most attractive place

to be buried, and some of the people buried there were very special.

Witness their grave goods.

An unprecedented wealth of gold and lovely objects.

Earlier archaeologists labelled this the Wessex culture.

Earlier archaeologists were perplexed by all this finery.

They couldn't imagine that these things had been produced in Britain

by local barbarians so, as usual, they produced an invasion idea

and they thought that all the good things of the Wessex culture

had been brought about by some invading warrior aristocracy.

And so they saw these individual objects perhaps as imports

or, at any rate, as inspired by objects found elsewhere.

For instance, these gold-bound amber discs are rather like one in Crete

so the idea came about that all these things might be inspired

by Crete or from Mycenae,

but from the East Mediterranean world.

But we today take a very different view.

We recognise that all of these objects were made

in the British Isles.

Who were the patrons of these British craftsmen?

Who owned this wealth?

Within sight of Stonehenge, there is a barrow of special significance.

It's known as Bush Barrow.

It was excavated in the 19th century.

When they dug down, they found a single male skeleton

with his grave goods.

He was lying in an extended position with all his finery around him.

And if we think of his skull here,

here on his chest was this magnificent gold breastplate.

And at his left shoulder, this bronze axe.

And, here, the shaft of a mace

which must have been an emblem of rank.

And since he was buried overlooking Stonehenge with all this rich

material, I think this must have been the Lord of Stonehenge.

Certainly he was an important chief and I think he must have been

the paramount chief of the whole of southern England.

And Stonehenge was his centre, where the political ceremonies

and the religious rituals took place.

Stonehenge was the centre of this man's rule over southern England.

If he didn't build Stonehenge, then his father or grandfather did.

We shall never know his name or the name of his people.

But, thanks to the New Archaeology,

we do know that Stonehenge was built by these very early Britons.

Thanks to the New Archaeology,

it's also possible for the first time to give credit where it's due.

The people of late Neolithic Britain who built it

are as worthy of admiration as the Romans or the Mycenaeans

who were once believed to have done so.

The shattering of the link between Stonehenge and Mycenae

was a body blow to a whole generation of archaeologists.

Their theory had also become politically important,

playing into ideas about nationhood and the British Empire.

They had essentially helped to forge a powerful foundation myth

linking the greatest Bronze Age civilisation

with their own British forebears.

And then New Archaeology came along and blew that all out of the water.

And just as their theory of the Mycenaean connection was being

discredited, so the British Empire was crumbling around their ears.

The tricky question of who exactly built Stonehenge

may never be fully resolved

and, of course, the Neolithic Britons left us no written records

to help us solve this puzzle.

But this question of who built the monument has in recent decades

been overshadowed by the even more taxing question,

why was it built?

What drove our ancient ancestors to build such a vast

and complex structure?

Over the past 70 years, archaeologists have agonised over

the evidence and a number of often contradictory theories have emerged.

It had been recognised as far back as the 18th century

that Stonehenge seemed to be aligned with the position of the sun

at the summer solstice.

But in the 1960s, some took this idea even further,

casting Stonehenge as an ancient astronomical observatory

or even a celestial computer.

Spearheading this new interpretation was astronomer Gerald Hawkins

who, in 1972, appeared on the BBC's Sky At Night.

One man who has done a tremendous amount of research into the

astronomical significance of Stonehenge is Professor Gerald Hawkins.

We now know it's much more than simply a monument.

It is also a kind of primitive astronomical computer.

The Aubrey holes. 56 of them. A significant number?

Very, very, of course.

The most critical number for the moon.

It's three nodal revolutions of the moon's orbit.

When the Stonehenge people came here,

they started with these holes,

the ditch at the bank and this circle,

and therefore they indicated that they knew

what they were doing right at the very outset.

Do tell us exactly how they were used.

I've suggested that they were a counting device.

They don't mark anything

but they will foretell what will happen year by year.

And, originally, I would suggest or I suggested that they counted

one hole each year and they would mark it by a stone like this.

And this would tell them what was going to go on,

such as eclipses during the solstice.

Because of the 56 Aubrey holes

and because of the alignments at Stonehenge, it could be said

to be more a moon observatory than an observatory for the sun.

And just as the sun rises over the Heel Stone at midsummer,

the moon rises over the Heel Stone at midwinter.

These trilithons at the centre, these great archways,

are transit instruments.

Each one points to a particular place for the sun or the moon.

They're not made for walking through,

they're made for looking through - they're observational.

-You can't walk through there, Patrick.

-Well, I'll have a go.

-Here we go.

-No.

-No.

-Are you stuck?

-I just can't.

You cannot walk through.

This particular archway was used for observing over there

the midwinter sunrise and it's a very accurate alignment.

Gerald Hawkins' astronomical theory caused a sensation at the time

and worldwide publicity helped to cement the idea

in the public consciousness

that Stonehenge was some sort of enormous ancient computer.

Well, that idea was enthusiastically taken up by the counterculture

and New Age movements of the '60s and '70s

and both groups held up Stonehenge as the ultimate proof

that there was some special lost wisdom of the ancients

just waiting to be revealed and decoded.

I remember reading Hawkins' book on a deserted railway station

when I was a teenager and it blew my mind.

It was the most extraordinary and provocative idea

I had ever come across with regard to prehistory.

So you can understand why this was such a bombshell at the time.

The professional archaeologists hated it because these were ideas

way beyond the notion of these rather primitive barbarians,

because what he was effectively saying is that this is

a very sophisticated society and they have got quite a complex

understanding of astronomy and mathematics.

And it really took off.

You can see, basically, generations of people who have been

massively influenced by that idea.

It wasn't just the public that embraced Hawkins' ideas.

His work also inspired a group of so-called archaeoastronomers,

who would, in time, come to challenge the basis of his thesis.

In 2004, an episode of the BBC series Meet The Ancestors

explored how these celestial theories

have moved on since the 1960s.

One of the main forms of theory at Stonehenge

is people trying to find pairs of stones and see whether

they are aligned on rising positions of the sun or the moon.

One of the problems with all these theories about alignments

is that everything has to align somewhere

and if you have a complicated site like Stonehenge,

you can pick a lot of pairs of stones,

there are many places where the sun and the moon rise

at different times in their cycles you can align them upon,

of course it's quite easy to find chance alignments.

But there is one alignment

that doesn't seem to be a matter of chance.

So every year, at midsummer,

tens of thousands of people come to Stonehenge

to witness the sunrise.

But Clive thinks these people could have come here

at precisely the wrong time of year

and that they're looking in totally the wrong direction.

The ceremonial approach to Stonehenge

comes from that direction.

People approach the monument from the north-east.

Now, if you think about approaching something like a church,

you don't wander into a church and then get inside

and turn around to look at the altar.

If you go into a sacred place,

the focus of attention is straight in front of you.

Applying the same argument to Stonehenge,

we might expect that if people were approaching along the avenue,

the focus of attention as they came into the monument

was not the midsummer sunrise behind them

but the midwinter sunset in front of them.

If Stonehenge was in some way built to mark the winter solstice,

then what was so important about the deep midwinter over 4,000 years ago?

The clues that can best help us answer this question

come, amazingly, from this.

What makes tiny snails like these so useful to archaeologists

is that their shells can tell us about the prehistoric landscape.

Environmental archaeologist Mike Allen has spent 15 years

looking through hundreds of soil samples from around Stonehenge,

some dating back to long before the monument was built.

In each sample, Mike looked for tiny fragments of preserved snail shell.

Different species and different groups of species

live in different types of environment

so by looking at all the different types of snail in there

and looking at the percentages, we can analyse them

and carefully work out what the landscape probably was in the past.

He discovered that it used to look very different.

The biggest single change occurred at the time

that the stones were erected at Stonehenge.

That's when the landscape moved from an open pasture

to a very intensively farmed landscape with crops and animals

and people living in and working in that landscape.

So as Stonehenge was being built, the people living around it

were undergoing a radical change in lifestyle,

moving away from hunting animals in woodland

and towards an economy based on farming.

If the crops failed or their animals died,

starvation was inevitable.

And that threat was at its most terrifyingly real

in the depths of winter.

In the middle of winter, the people around here

would have been desperate for the days to get longer,

for light to return and for their crops to grow.

More than at any other time of year,

this is when they would have needed to ask their gods for help.

And at other prehistoric sites around Europe,

there's powerful evidence that the winter solstice

was the most important moment in the whole year.

Very often we try and make Stonehenge more simple

than it really was.

There's a temptation always to try and reduce Stonehenge

down to a single purpose, a single meaning, a single set of ideas

and perhaps a single set of activities going on there.

And really that's to do Stonehenge a great injustice.

It's a complicated monument.

Lots of different things happened there at different times.

It's a very long-lived monument.

It's a monument which I'm sure meant different things

to different people.

We could take an analogy, and it is only an analogy,

with a medieval cathedral, which was used for burials,

it's used for weddings, it's used for harvest festivals,

it's used for all sorts of things at different times of the year

and it has a different complexion, a different feel,

a different meaning to those who are there at that time.

And Stonehenge, I'm sure, behaved in that sort of way.

It's an architectural structure which is the container,

the crucible, within which lots of interesting things happen.

This idea that Stonehenge was built to mark the midwinter solstice

is an enduring one

and it has firmly entered into the public consciousness.

Today, many people visit the site on the shortest day of the year.

Other archaeologists felt there might be more to the great monument

than just acting as an astronomical marker.

But discovering what actually took place inside Stonehenge

has proven problematic.

The Stonehenge precinct has been repeatedly dug

and interfered with since at least the 17th century.

Curious but well-meaning antiquarians

have been all too eager to dig up the monument

and the surrounding landscape.

So it's likely that much crucial evidence has been lost

and will never be recovered.

Archaeologists today need to work with the knowledge

that there will always be missing pieces to this puzzle.

With that in mind, some archaeologists came up

with a counterintuitive way to shed new light on the monument,

going back to the much older investigations

and re-examining the theories of the antiquarians.

In 1985, Timewatch featured the work of Aubrey Burl,

who combined up-to-date astronomical ideas

with the evidence uncovered by the antiquarians.

To us, Stonehenge is this configuration of stones.

But the place itself has a history which is older

than even the oldest of them.

The latest theory on its origins comes from Aubrey Burl,

an authority on stone circles in Britain.

But what do you think this place was built for?

I think in the first place, long before these stones,

this was a charnel house, a place where the dead were brought

until the flesh rotted from their bones,

and the entrance of this house pointed across there

to the north-east, where the moon rose at its most northerly.

Now, long before Stonehenge, there were other burial places

on Salisbury Plain, all around Stonehenge, called long barrows

and they also pointed towards moonrise.

And in them we find dead bones, pits filled with earth

and skulls of oxen -

exactly the same things we find here at Stonehenge.

There are pits filled with earth,

and just where we are standing, at the very centre,

people like Inigo Jones, the Duke of Buckingham,

dug here in 1620 and dug up skulls of oxen.

If you put those things together with the moonrise, surely that

means that Stonehenge was somehow connected with death and burial.

We're never going to get a full picture of what happened.

It's in the nature of archaeology.

As somebody said,

we work with bad samples of depleted information.

But I don't think that really stops us

from trying to work out what the unknowns are.

The useful thing about the early work in Stonehenge

was that it was quite concentrated in the centre,

where they may not have done as much damage as we now think.

It's funny being an archaeologist and working at Stonehenge,

because if we just discovered it like some 19th-century explorer

in the South American jungle,

there would be this great blank canvas and this fabulous ruin

and you could start from scratch, but Stonehenge isn't like that.

There have been generations of studies and thought

and this thicket of ideas and information

that sometimes can get in the way.

The idea put forward by Aubrey Burl that Stonehenge was somehow

linked to death and burial was taken a step further

by another group of archaeologists in the 1990s.

Their work was part of a wider movement

which began to question some of the principles and methods

of the New Archaeology that had taken hold in the 1960s.

This new movement's followers called themselves

interpretive archaeologists.

This rejection of New Archaeology was in part due to a belief

that a scientific approach to the evidence could end up

underplaying the role of symbolism and ritual in human societies.

At a site like Stonehenge,

which surely has ceremonial significance,

this new breed of archaeologist found the perfect place

to test their philosophy.

Interpretive archaeology brings to bear a whole new set of thinking

about the past and it stands in quite a contrast

with the New Archaeology that went before it.

New Archaeology was in large measure concerned with societies,

with communities, with groups of people - cultures, if you like.

The interpretive archaeologies that have come after it

are much more concerned with the individual,

the way that people play a role, the way we do what's called agency.

We act in a responsible and active way

in thinking about how we behave in the world,

that we take, for example, meaning out of materials.

It's often dressed up as the idea of materiality,

the way that materials influence the way that we do things.

And just as Stonehenge was a fantastic site to explore

in the New Archaeology, it has become a real focus of attention

in the interpretive archaeology that comes after it

because it gives us so many opportunities

to think about stone, for example, to think about sequences,

to think about the way people could behave in a monument like this,

the way that space is structured inside the monument,

the way that we would move around within it,

and we can put ourselves, if you like,

into the shoes of Neolithic people

and think about how that place would have been experienced.

In 1998, the BBC investigated how an anthropological approach

to the monument might help to shed new light on its purpose.

As part of the programme,

an academic from Madagascar visited the site

and compared Stonehenge to monuments in his own homeland.

Unlike other circles, no leftovers of feasting,

no quantities of bone or broken pottery

had been found inside Stonehenge.

This truly was hallowed ground.

I think we're looking at a building which was actually reserved

for a completely different group of entities,

very probably not human beings at all

but effectively the spirit world in whatever form it may have been.

But can we tell what went on inside the holy of holies?

The trouble is the lack of ritual remains inside Stonehenge.

There's only really the stones.

And yet they hold the key.

Their positions, their shapes,

even their textures are all full of meaning.

It was only by chance that archaeologists spotted differences

in the surfaces of the stones.

It's the first clear confirmation that worshippers

moved inside the circle but also of how they moved.

In each trilithon, one upright is always smooth and slim,

the other rough and bulky.

This pattern is repeated right round the arc of trilithons.

It was rather like the Stations of the Cross in a church,

where you have to walk around to follow the story.

The gaps in the trilithons themselves

may also have been meant as supernatural doorways.

They are extremely narrow, they are not for humans to go through,

so I think we're definitely looking at people who have

the ability to go into trance states,

to move between...this world

and the worlds of the spirits and the dead and so forth.

I think what was important about interpretive archaeology

for understanding Stonehenge

was that it took us away from ideas of economy

and social organisation

to think about why did they build it the way they did,

why did they build it in the place that they did,

why was it related to certain natural features

and other prehistoric monuments.

So, thinking about the symbolism in part

but also ideas about human agency, human motivation,

so it took us away from some rather kind of dry aspects

of social inquiry,

and out of that, I think, came some really extraordinary answers

that we hadn't expected.

At the same time as this "place of the ancestors" theory

was taking shape, another group of archaeologists was formulating

a radically different interpretation as to why Stonehenge was built.

In 2008, Timewatch followed the first major excavation

inside Stonehenge for over 40 years.

This dig was led by Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright.

They believe that Stonehenge was a place of healing

and that the so-called bluestones held the key

to understanding the monument.

The stones we're looking at are the bluestones.

These are the ones that we see on the right of us now.

These are the small stones.

Bringing those bluestones here really made the difference.

The target of our attention is the bluestones.

-Bluestones...

-Bluestones.

-Bluestones.

The team focused their dig on one of these distinctive smaller stones.

They hope to find evidence that pilgrims were chipping off pieces

of the bluestones to take away with them as healing relics or charms.

To explore if there was any other evidence for this healing theory,

Timewatch investigated the story of a recently discovered skeleton.

In 2002, at Amesbury, just two miles from Stonehenge,

archaeologists discovered a remarkable grave.

It contained the richest collection of Early Bronze Age grave

goods ever found in Europe.

Amongst the finds were numerous arrowheads,

leading to the buried man being nicknamed the Amesbury Archer.

So is there anything in this skeleton that might support

Darvill and Wainwright's healing theory?

Now as soon as this skeleton was laid out, there was one thing

that struck us as immediately obvious.

And that was that there had been some major trauma to this left knee.

HORSE NEIGHS

HE SCREAMS

So what were the physical consequences of his injury?

The most obvious effect of this trauma

is evident at the end of the femur or the thigh bone.

What you've got is a groove,

running down there towards the knee joint, and a hole.

Now that hole is evidence of infection within the bone itself,

the pus from which is draining through this hole.

I mean, it would have been excruciatingly painful.

Professor Tim Darvill believes that this is what brought

the Amesbury Archer to Stonehenge.

This is a man who was not awfully well

when he got to this part of southern England.

This is a man who was probably motivated

in his travels to find some relief, to find some way of getting better.

After 12 days of digging, the team uncovered evidence which

suggested that in the past, people had indeed been chipping

away at the bluestones, adding weight to their healing theory.

They also found some crucial organic remains.

By using radiocarbon dating, they hope to reveal

when the bluestones had first arrived on site.

And what they discovered was striking.

It was previously thought that the bluestones

arrived at Stonehenge around 2,600 BC.

But that was essentially an educated guess.

The new accurate date from the Stonehenge dig shows that the

bluestones actually arrived in 2,300 BC -

300 years later than was thought.

And what's even more remarkable is that the new

date for the arrival of the bluestones at Stonehenge coincides

exactly with the date of the burial of the Amesbury Archer.

Our new date for Stonehenge actually gives us, if you like,

a glimpse of the moment in prehistory

when things are happening at and around Stonehenge,

and it's quite extraordinary that the date of the Amesbury Archer

is identical with our new date for the bluestones at Stonehenge.

The healing theory is still hotly debated

and doesn't convince some archaeologists.

In parallel with Darvill and Wainwright's work,

another major project was launched that would add weight to the

idea that Stonehenge was in fact a place of the ancestors.

This project focuses not on Stonehenge itself,

but on the ceremonial landscape that surrounds it.

In 2011, the archaeologist

and broadcaster Neil Oliver investigated its findings,

concentrating on the settlement of Durrington Walls,

which lies some two miles from the monument itself.

Stonehenge is not alone.

Nearby, this field contains all that remains

of an ancient site of winter gathering.

Have a look at these. Animal bones and teeth.

Just a sample, really,

of the thousands of animal remains found scattered all across the site.

These are pig bones.

Piglets are usually born in the springtime,

and the vast majority of the pig remains at Durrington Walls

show that the adult animals were slaughtered at around nine months.

That's in midwinter.

Also, the teeth reveal that the animals had been specifically

fattened up prior to the feasting and we can tell this

because the teeth are rotten.

What we have here isn't just casual feasting.

This is one final commemoration.

It's one big celebration of life before the ancestors

commenced their journey to Stonehenge and the land of the dead.

It's thought that each winter, people would come here from hundreds

of miles around to commemorate the lives of their ancestors...

..and to ensure the souls of the recently dead reached

the safety of the afterlife at Stonehenge itself.

The coldness of the stones, the open landscape -

it's not hard to believe that this place

is somewhere that belongs to the dead.

This idea that Stonehenge was built as a shrine to the dead will

continue to be refined as more evidence is collected.

But it's not the end of the story.

And it takes its place alongside all of the other theories,

none of which can yet be discounted.

Our greatest ancient monument remains as enigmatic as ever.

Stonehenge stands at the middle of a great archaeological problem,

the problem of understanding what was going on during the fourth

and third and second millennia BC in southern Britain,

and Stonehenge not so much holds the key

but it provides the pivot on which those understandings can be built.

When you look at the attempts people have made over

the centuries to understand Stonehenge, you can always see

that those ideas come from the times in which those thinkers were living,

you know, so in a century's time, if we're still here,

people will look back on 21st-century archaeology and say,

"Well, you know, the ideas that they come up with, of course, they came from their own societies.

"They had nothing to do with Stonehenge, but we have the answer." And that's always going to continue.

In some ways, the mystery of Stonehenge will not be solved,

but every theory gets us that little bit closer towards it.

We'll never know the names of the people who put it up, for example,

but we'll know an awful lot about what their lives were like

and their motivations for building such an extraordinary edifice.

Over the centuries, our understanding of Stonehenge

has been in constant flux, and from the antiquarians of the 18th century

through to the archaeologists of today, every generation

views this iconic monument through their own particular prism.

But in the past century, many of the myths have been exploded

through the tireless efforts of archaeologists.

Thanks to their work, we now know when the monument was built

and how it evolved over time.

Over the 70 years that the BBC has been following the Stonehenge

story, this iconic structure has been portrayed as a myriad

different things - an astronomical calculator, a temple of healing

and as evidence that the ancient Greeks influenced our ancestors.

But despite all the competing theories,

innovative experiments and new discoveries,

Stonehenge still holds on to some of its most precious secrets.

And in the end, perhaps it's that enduring mystery which keeps

Stonehenge alive in our collective imaginations.