Hengeworld by Michael Pitts, Arrow, 拢9.97, ISBN 0099278758
(paperback)
Seahenge by Francis Pryor, HarperCollins, 拢19.99, ISBN 0007101910
A PILOT in a Sopwith Camel spotted Woodhenge in Wiltshire in 1926. You read
it right. The Stonehenge we all know is just one of dozens of ancient British
ceremonial monuments marked by circular ditches with banks outside. Most of them
remain unexcavated. In separate books, archaeologists Mike Pitts and Francis
Pryor celebrate the mysterious ceremonial world of Stone Age farmers that
spawned these constructions.
Advertisement
Pitts has worked on henge monuments, including Avebury and Stonehenge, for
many years. His engrossing analysis, aimed at a popular but seriously interested
audience, is interlarded with pleasingly informal personal reminiscence and
sometimes gossipy tales of earlier investigators.
He also conveys well how complex henge archaeology can be. It鈥檚 emphatically
not a matter of find your henge and dig. In 1997, for instance, investigations
at Stanton Drew in Somerset identified a virtually invisible circular wooden
structure by measuring subtle changes in the ground鈥檚 resistance to electric
current.
Pitts deftly summarises generations鈥� worth of research. He relates how during
the 1966 excavations at Durrington Walls, also in Wiltshire, a road was
accidentally driven through the centre of a henge.
Modern archaeology has, Pitts points out, made staggering advances in recent
years, usually out of the public eye. His analysis goes well beyond the
cataloguing of things: 鈥淎t Stonehenge we have the final denouement, where the
Sun breaks the endless cycle on Earth and the near-death vision is written on
the landscape for the newly dead and dead to walk into.鈥� No other henge
monuments have yet yielded the data to allow such bold interpretations.
Francis Pryor鈥檚 Seahenge is, like Pitts鈥檚 book, as much about his
life in archaeology as it is the story of a sensational archaeological
discovery. In early 1998, John Lorimer discovered a large inverted tree trunk in
the tidal zone at Holme in northwest Norfolk. In the months that followed,
further wooden uprights appeared, forming a small circle that became an
archaeological cause c茅l猫bre. Named, perhaps inevitably, Seahenge,
it came complete with professional archaeologists, modern-day Druids, and a
small regiment of protesters. The archaeologists prevailed and Seahenge鈥檚
timbers were lifted and saved from high tide.
Pryor is an expert on waterlogged sites, famous for his Flag Fen excavations
near Peterborough, which revealed a mysterious timber alignment and part of a
Bronze Age landscape.
This experiences enabled him to place Seahenge in a much wider cultural
context. We learn that the wood circle was built on dry land in a swampy
backwater near the North Sea. Tree rings tell us that the inverted central tree
was felled between April and June in 2050 BC. The structure probably had an
entrance facing the midwinter sunset. Pryor believes the central trunk may have
been a platform for ceremonial display of an important individual鈥檚 corpse.
Pryor is a brilliant storyteller and his enthusiasm is infectious. This is
one of the best popular books on archaeology I have ever read.
With refreshing and innovative thinking, two highly respected archaeologists
have taken the study of Hengeworld, if you will, to a new level. They have done
so in literate and intelligible prose, which makes a great deal of cutting-edge
archaeology accessible to a broad readership.