Unfinished business

When I suggested a while back that Stonehenge was never finished, and that the builders simply ran out of stones, there were howls or rage from some quarters -- as if I was committing sacrilege against the prevailing belief in the immaculate conception.  Since then, of course, Field and Pearson have said virtually the same thing with respect to Stonehenge, and I suspect that more and more people will come to accept that the builders of Stonehenge ran out of ideas and ran out of stones -- and eventually walked away from something that looked a bit of a shambles.

I was reminded of this when looking at the material relating to the Stones of Stenness.  This is what Graham Ritchie says:

The Stones of Stenness, Orkney

ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-352-1/.../107_001_060.pdf
The Stones of Stenness, Orkney
by J N Graham Ritchie

In the Discussion:    "............although there is little doubt that the builders of the circle originally planned a ring of twelve stones, the fact that only six stones or stumps now survive in situ (nos 2, 3, 4, 8, 10 and 11) makes the geometrical elucidation of the plan unclear. The evidence suggests, however, that an ellipse was intended.
It is impossible to be certain whether the complete plan was ever carried out, for, although
there is no doubt where there are existing stones or stumps or clear historical evidence of the
existence of a stone (no. 6), in the case of two holes there is no clear evidence that the hole or
space was ever filled (nos 9 and 12). The interpretation of the stone no. 7 is also a problem;
in the case of no. 9 it is perhaps unlikely that the removal of an upright would be accompanied
by the total withdrawal of the packing stones. There is of course even less evidence for the
presence of stone no. 12. Rather similar problems have faced MacKie in the interpretation of
the circle at Cultoon on Islay (1976a). Here some fallen stones were without adjacent sockets,
and a number of stone holes had no adjacent stone; MacKie suggests that, because of a change
of plan, the site had been abandoned in the course of construction, one socket having been
deliberately filled up (comparable perhaps to stone hole no. 9 at Stenness).

I wondered, on the basis of this, how many other UK stone circles might have been abandoned in an unfinished state, and in no time at all, I uncovered the following.  Also incomplete:  Priddy Circles (Somerset), Sillagh Ring, Naas, Ireland;  Ring of Brodgar;  Rollright Stones;  Callanish;  Mitchell's Fold;  Arbor Low;  Hurlers Stone circle;  Studfold Gate;  Gamelands;  Lacra...........etc etc.....

Now the obvious interpretation of all this incompleteness is that in every case the builders have run out of stones, or else had incomplete technical skills or manpower for finishing the job they they set themselves.  And again, a logical conclusion has to be that they did NOT want to look for stones beyond the immediate neighbourhood, but simply used what was at hand.  Another logical conclusion is that the circles or alignments were simply put up in the places where the stones were.

Reacting to all this incompleteness, Colin Richards and Mike Parker Pearson and others have turned this problem on its head, and are now arguing that the builders of these circles may not have even WANTED to complete them;  and that the real point of what was going on was the ACT of quarrying and moving the stones, as part of some ritual or other.  So the circle (whether completed or not) becomes something insignificant -- the really significant place is the QUARRY from which the stones were taken.  That's where the magic was.  And if the stones have come from multiple sources, then by definition there must have been multiple magical sites .... and the stones have probably been collected up as tokens, tributes, totems,  or as symbols in a cult of ancestor worship.

This is what's called "covering all your bases" --  brilliant!  However much of a shambles a ruinous stone circle or other megalithic monument might be, you can still interpret it as a work of genius, built by people with incredibly sophisticated belief systems and highly developed rituals.

So you think I'm being a bit ungenerous and cynical here?  How right you are......

Colin Richards:   
"Rather than being built solely as ritual or ceremonial centres it may have been the actual acts of construction that provided the main social focus. This effectively shifts attention from the completed entity (the stone circle) to the process of building and the events that surrounded this process. It is suggested that these great monuments are actually composite in nature and rather than being built to be used they were used in their building. Certainly, with the great stone circles each stone quarried, moved and erected constituted a huge amount of effort on the part of large numbers of people.
Just imagine the gathering of hundreds of people to both watch and participate in the dragging of a massive single stone. Undoubtedly, this would have been a great social event in its own right because we have to realise that these stones were, in many cases, larger than had ever been moved before.
But could the 'circle' be a place where over considerable time many different groups brought stones, with each completing sections or adding to those of others? If so, the stone circle could truly be described as a microcosm (see Bradley 2000 for a variation on this theme).
By thinking about stone circles in this way the 'finished' or 'completed' form diminishes in importance. Instead, prominence is attached to the types of stones forming the circle, from where these were derived and how they were quarried and transported."

(Rethinking the great stone circles of Northwest Britain)
http://www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/dhl/papers/cr/index.html