Unfinished Late Neolithic monuments: Silbury Hill and Stonehenge?

The many faces of Silbury Hill
Posted by CA
August 8, 2014
This article appeared in issue 293 of  Current Archaeology.

https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/the-many-faces-of-silbury-hill.htm


Unravelling the evolution of Europe’s largest prehistoric mound

When a tunnel into Silbury Hill was opened for the first time in almost 40 years to allow emergency conservation work, a team of English Heritage archaeologists seized the opportunity to enter the mound. Their recently published work has revolutionised our view of this magnificent prehistoric monument, as Jim Leary told Matthew Symonds.

".............we found clear evidence that the mound evolved gradually, year after year, almost like a continuous project. I do not think that a year would have passed without some kind of work or activity on the hill. But we shouldn’t see this as a concerted attempt to create a massive, imposing monument, because the early phases were very, very small. One of them was a knee-high gravel mound. So if someone was trying to make a statement, you have to wonder what it could be. I think we need to look beyond this notion that Silbury Hill was all about showing off power.’

"It is not only the mound’s convoluted construction that challenges the traditional model of a powerful leader pursuing a developed master-plan, but also the refined dating evidence the English Heritage team secured. This reveals that work on Silbury Hill began around 2,450 BC, and continued for between 55 and 155 years. ‘This has important implications for how we interpret the monument,’ says Jim. ‘If you take the midpoint, which is a little over a century, we are looking at about four or five generations of people to go from nothing, to the mound itself. So this does not fit notions of a single figure acting as a driving force. Equally, raising the mound didn’t take centuries and centuries. As dating techniques improve, we’re finding that these Late Neolithic monuments have lives that span generations. Nearby, Stonehenge provides an especially enduring example, and its great sarsen trilithons were being raised at around the time Silbury Hill was built.’ "

"................If Jim is right, and the communal act of building was more important than the final form of the monument, was it ever completed? ‘I think rather than being finished, people just stopped working on it,’ says Jim. ‘There was no end, as such — the world just moved on and no one added to it any more. This period in time coincides with when the first Beaker pottery, Beakerstyle burials, and copper arrive. So it is a period of very great change."

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The evidence does appear quite strong that Silbury Hill was built over many generations, that it evolved in rather piecemeal fashion without any "grand design" enforced by a powerful leader, and that it was never finished.  As Jim Leary says, people just seem to have stopped working on it.  Were they bored, or exhausted, or was it simply that the world had moved on?

Stonehenge -- half of the stones are missing.  They were probably 

never there in the first place......

I'm intrigued that that narrative seems quite acceptable at Silbury Hill, but not at Stonehenge, where the myth of the "Immaculate Stonehenge" is promoted at every opportunity by EH and the archaeology establishment.  One sometimes gets the feeling that it is somehow disrespectful, and even sacreligious, to suggest that our heroic ancestors were incapable of finishing off the mighty task once it had been started.........

Anthony Johnson's beautiful model of "the immaculate Stonehenge" -- still, for many, an

icon and an article of faith

As I have said many times on this blog, there appears to be no good evidence that Stonehenge was ever "finished" or "completed".  After all, only about half of the stones (both sarsens and bluestones) that are supposed to be there are actually present, and in places the chalk surface is so pitted with intersecting sockets and pits that there seem to have been multiple attempts to make the best use of the monoliths (pillars, slabs and boulders) that were available.  Simply put, the builders always were short of stones, and eventually gave up on the project.  Quite a few archaeologists agree, while not making much noise about it, but in 2014 Pro Ronald Hutton caused a bit of a stir by claiming that Stonehenge was a disaster, built by "cowboys" who had ambition but who were seriously lacking in technical expertise.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2671664/Stonehenge-built-cowboys-lasted-well.html#ixzz35vIIym1Z

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.se/2012/01/stonehenge-and-importance-of-heroic.html

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.se/2013/08/stonehenge-complete-or-incomplete.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f4c3F9iEaY

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.se/2013/03/how-smart-were-our-neolithic-ancestors.html

http://www.thedolectures.com/brian-john-dispelling-the-stonehenge-myth/#.U66JR6jT_LI

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.se/2012/01/stonehenge-breeding-ground-for.html

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.se/2009/11/stonehenge-disloyalty.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wEvLWkTBEc&feature=channel

So how many of the great Late Neolithic monuments of the British Isles were actually completed?  Because so many of them have "missing stones" or irregular shapes, we can suggest that many -- if not all -- of them were abandoned before completion.  That's a reasonable hypothesis.  As far as we know, Callanish was unfinished, as was Wildshaw Burn; Cultoon; Priddy Circles (Somerset); Sillagh Ring, Naas, Ireland; Ring of Brodgar; Rollright Stones; Mitchell's Fold; Arbor Low; Hurlers Stone circle; Studfold Gate; Gamelands; Lacra...... and so on and so on.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2011/11/unfinished-business.html

Indeed, in the current trend for arguing (as Colin Richards has done) that the great thing with all these massive enterprises was the corporate act of sourcing and collecting stones and assembling them in some holy place, rather in the admiration of a completed structure, there is an implicit acceptance that most of the great projects were rather more chaotic than some would like to believe!

http://www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/dhl/papers/cr/index.html

We have already done this topic to death on this blog, but it's relevant again all of a sudden because in the recent paper by Nash et al (2020) there is an assumption that around 80 sarsens were needed for the construction of the immaculate Stonehenge: "Today, only 52 of the original ~80 sarsen stones remain at the monument."  Further, there is an assumption that because so many monoliths were needed, the stones would have been taken from a location where they were abundant and easy to collect-- such as Totterdown Wood, Piggledene, Lockeridge Dene or West Woods.  Other locations were not sampled because they did not fit into that narrative.

I think that the default hypothesis now has to be that virtually ALL of the famous Late Neolithic monuments were unfinished, and rather less perfect that people would like them to have been....... and that utilitarian considerations (including stone availability) always trumped ritual or "political" ones.  Archaeologists like Colin Richards may continue to argue that for our ancestors "the act of quarrying and hauling stones and then using them was of far greater importance than the end product" -- but as far as I can see that's just a beautiful fantasy.

PS

I have just remembered that ten years ago I put this little video onto YouTube.  It's still rather relevant........

https://youtu.be/7wEvLWkTBEc