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The Stonehenge Riverside Project> Exploring the Neolithic Landscape Of UDK 903.7(410)"634" Documenta Praehistorica XXXV (2008) The Stonehenge Riverside Project> exploring the Neolithic landscape of Stonehenge Mike Parker Pearson1, Joshua Pollard2, Colin Richards3, Julian Thomas3, Chris Tilley4 and Kate Welham5 1 Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield< 2 Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, [email protected]< 3 School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester< 4 Department of Anthropology, University College London< 5 School of Conservation Sciences, University of Bournemouth ABSTRACT Ð The Stonehenge Riverside Project is a collaborative enterprise directed by six academics from five UK universities, investigating the place of Stonehenge within its contemporary land- scape. In this contribution, a series of novel approaches being employed on the project are outlined, before the results of investigations at the Greater Stonehenge Cursus, Woodhenge, the Cuckoo Stone and Durrington Walls are discussed. IZVLE∞EK – Stonehenge Riverside Project je skupen projekt, ki ga vodi ¸est profesorjev s petih uni- verz Zdruºenega kraljestva Velike Britanije. Ukvarjamo se s poloºajem Stonehenga v takratni pokra- jini. V prispevku predstavljamo vrsto novih pristopov, ki smo jih uporabili v projektu, kot tudi rezul- tate raziskav Greater Duringhton Cursus, Woodhenge in Durrington Walls. KEY WORDS Ð Stonehenge; Durrington Walls; Southern Britain; monumentality; landscape Introduction: the landscape of Stonehenge Stonehenge is a national symbol, recognised through- argument that only agriculturalists build monuments out the world, and interpreted in different ways by (e.g. Rowley-Conwy 2004.85), but it also potentially a wide variety of constituencies, from Druids to New demonstrates the longevity of special places within Age enthusiasts (Chippindale 1990) (Fig. 1). It has this particular landscape. During the early 1980s, a served as a focus for contemporary cultural and polit- very important programme of investigation was con- ical struggles, and has a special place in popular cul- ducted by Julian Richards, under the rubric of the ture and the public imagination (Bender 1998; Stonehenge Environs Project. This combined target- Worthington 2004; 2005). Yet the attention that ed excavations with extensive field walking to iden- Stonehenge attracts sometimes occludes its place tify the surface concentration of lithics (Richards within a broader landscape, a World Heritage Site 1990). The intention of this project was to place the composed of a great many structures and deposits known field monuments into a clearer chronological that built up over dozens of generations (Darvill framework, and to identify complementary domestic 2005) (Fig. 2). This process arguably began with the and industrial activity in their immediate surround- construction of an arrangement of huge post-holes ings. dating to the eighth millennium BC (in the earlier Mesolithic), discovered when the car-park for Stone- The publication of the Stonehenge Environs Project, henge itself was constructed in 1966 (Cleal, Walker and that of the various excavations by Gowland, and Montague 1995.43). This clearly refutes the Hawley, Atkinson, Piggott, Stone, and the Vatchers 153 Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Chris Tilley and Kate Welham at Stonehenge itself during the course of the twen- New approaches to the landscape tieth century (Cleal, Walker and Montague 1995) represent an unparalleled contribution to knowl- The Stonehenge Riverside Project is a collaborative edge. However, for more than twenty years the pur- research initiative directed by six academic archaeo- suit of archaeological investigations on any scale logists from five different British universities. It within the Stonehenge landscape has been curtailed brings a series of novel approaches to bear on the by the continuing deliberations over the future of development of the Stonehenge landscape, and we the A303 trunk road (which runs immediately to the can begin this contribution by outlining each. The south of the monument). Potential options have first is a concern with what we might call the ‘mate- included the possibility of running the major road riality of monuments’: that is, an interest in the through a bored tunnel, closing the stretch of the physicality and constituent substances involved in A344 road that severs Stonehenge from the Avenue monument building. These issues animated a pio- which connects it to the River Avon, and establish- neering study by Parker Pearson and Ramilsonina ing a visitor centre to replace the present subter- (1998), who drew on a parallel with contemporary ranean structure beside the car-park. At present, it Madagascar to suggest that monuments constructed appears that only the improvements to visitor facil- of timber and stone respectively may have been un- ities are likely to proceed in the foreseeable future derstood in different ways by Neolithic people. For (Harris 2007). Irrespective of the view that one many Malagasy communities, the human body is might take of this outcome, the effective hiatus considered to be soft and wet at birth, maturing to affecting archaeological research in the Stonehenge greater hardness and dryness, and culminating in landscape has coincided with a period of heightened the exceptionally hard and dry character of the debate over the character of social archaeology, bones of the ancestral dead. Consequentially, while particularly as it relates to the British Neolithic (e.g. the living inhabit houses made of wood, whose or- Barrett 1994; Bradley 1998; Whittle 2003). As a re- ganic character has much in common with human sult, until now the opportunity has not arisen to flesh, stone tombs and standing stones are the exclu- ‘field trial’ a variety of new ideas and approaches in sive prerogative of the dead. In a similar way, Par- the immediate context of Stonehenge. While hypo- ker Pearson and Ramilsonina noted that while Stone- theses and arguments concerning Stonehenge have henge is distinguished by its multiple stone settings, continued to be constructed, they have had to rely the presence of numerous cremation burials, and a on existing evidence, often collected according to general paucity of ceramics and human remains, the the research agendas of past generations. much larger henge monument at Durrington Walls, Fig. 1. Stonehenge, seen from the north-east (photo: Aerial-Cam). 154 The Stonehenge Riverside Project> exploring the Neolithic landscape of Stonehenge understood as separate struc- tures may form parts of a sin- gle complex, and to the axial role of the River Avon within the Stonehenge landscape. This emphasis on the materi- al substance of monumental constructions is complement- ed by a concern with the con- struction of monuments as a collective social practice (Ri- chards 2004). Rather than a simple exercise in ergonom- ics, the creation of elaborate works like Stonehenge and Durrington Walls involved Fig. 2. Map of prehistoric monuments in the Stonehenge area (drawing: the mobilization of large Anne Leaver). numbers of people, materials, animals and food, in an en- 3 kilometres to the north-east, showed a very diffe- terprise that could generate prestige and fame for rent pattern. Here, there were multiple settings of the builders, but which also risked shame and fail- upright timbers inside a massive earthwork enclo- ure if the desired outcome was not achieved. More- sure, and colossal quantities of animal bones and over, addressing the physical composition of mon- Grooved Ware pottery (Wainwright and Longworth uments encourages us to think about their varying 1971). On this basis, Parker Pearson and Ramilso- temporal qualities: the way that their decay, de- nina hypothesised that the two monuments might struction or endurance conditions and contributes have been focal to two distinct areas of the land- to quite different histories or biographies of place scape, reserved for the living and the dead, and (Thomas 2004). linked by the River Avon. The transformation of the newly dead into ancestors might then be physically A second theme is provided by a new attentiveness expressed through the passage downriver, from Dur- to the disposition of materials in the archaeological rington Walls to Stonehenge. Such an argument at record, informed by the concept of ‘structured depo- once draws our attention to the complementarity of sition’. This originated in work undertaken by two the two monuments, to the way that what are often of the authors in the 1980s, re-assessing the evi- dence from Geoffrey Wainwright’s exca- vations at the Durrington Walls henge, and suggesting that many of the depo- sits at the site had been deliberately pla- ced, as one aspect of ritual activity (Ri- chards and Thomas 1984). More recent- ly, increasingly sophisticated analyses have drawn attention to the important role of depositional practice in transfor- ming the meaning of place, and in en- gendering memory (Pollard 1995; 2001). Both within monumental struc- tures and in isolated pits dispersed across the landscape, the placement of artefacts and other materials appears to have been one of the key means by which people expressed their connec- Fig. 3. The Greater Stonehenge Cursus under excavation, sum- tion with specific locations during the mer 2007 east (photo: Aerial-Cam). British Neolithic (Garrow 2006). 155 Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Chris Tilley and Kate Welham Fig. 4. Section
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