As readers of this blog will know, I'm not a great one for speculations. I spend a lot of my time criticising fantasies and speculations, and people who dress up speculations as the truth.
But every now and then, a spot of speculation can be fun, and in reading up a bit on the Great Cursus, it seems to me that nobody has ever suggested that it might have been the place where stones were found, or the place from which stones were collected for the building of Stonehenge. They must have come from somewhere..........
Sounds crazy? Well, maybe, and my money is still on it being a sort of processional feature, along which people walked for some ceremonial or ritual (ie non-economic or "irrational") purpose currently unknown. It's a better hypothesis than the Roman race track or the spacecraft landing strip hypotheses........ and I'm not all that convinced by the ideas that the enclosed strip was either sacred or cursed, or that it was deliberately enigmatic, built by people for whom the act of building was all that mattered. Built for symbolically keeping things in, or keeping them out? Or was it not an enclosure at all, but a line between a landscape devoted to the living, on one side, and a landscape devoted to the dead, on the other. Or maybe a line between a ceremonial landscape and a "normal" landscape where people just got on with their lives? Or maybe it has an "astronomical" origin, aligned as it is towards the horizon sunrise on the equinox?
I don't like the line idea, because there are two slight embankments, more or less parallel to one another. If the Neolithic builders had wanted to demarcate a boundary or a frontier, surely they would have been happy with one embankment, maybe made even higher and more prominent?
And the processional idea is also somewhat strange, because the ends of the 3 km routeway are closed off -- so there is no entrance and no exit. Which way would people have walked? Westwards or eastwards? Probably westwards, because near the western end there is a cluster of barrows and other features -- but the round barrows are considerably younger than the Cursus embankment, and so they could not have been involved in any funerary processions heading towards the sunset. On the other hand, the long barrow called Amesbury 42 is close to the eastern end, and so maybe they walked towards that........ and that one has the advantage of being more or less the right age.
It's intriguing that the Cursus seems to be unrelated to the landscape in that it drops down across the chalklands into Stonehenge Bottom valley and up again on the other side, so topography does not seem to have determined its location.
So is there anything that might point us towards the Cursus as having something to do with stones -- either bluestones or sarsens? Or both? Well, it may or may not be significant that there are abundant records of bluestone "fragments" being found in association with the Cursus -- especially at the western (Fargo Plantation) end. The finds are mostly from field walking collections; there are only two recorded excavations running across the whole width of the Cursus, one in 1917 and the other in 1959. The other excavations have been on the embankments -- mostly concentrating on the search for materials (such as antler picks) that might permit radiocarbon dating.The researcher who seems to have been most intrigued by the Cursus was Jack Stone in 1949 -- according to some sources he cut a trench across the Cursus and was so impressed by the concentrations of bluestone fragments near Fargo Plantation and between the Cursus and the site of Stonehenge that he thought there might have been a "bluestone monument" at the former site that was dismantled, modified and then reconstructed in the monument we see today. If bluestones were at one time scattered across the landscape as an erratic trail or train aligned with the direction of ice movement, and then collected and used as building materials, we might expect to find occasional extraction pits or hollows, and maybe patches of degraded till. No such things are known -- although it has to be said that nobody has ever looked for them.
This is just a suggestion, and I am not at all sure how seriously to take it. But remember -- you saw it here first.............
Not as far to walk as Preseli!
ReplyDeleteThere - and, perhaps, also along the (uncompleted) Lesser Cursus?
ReplyDelete" It's intriguing that The Cursus seems to be unrelated to the landscape..... ".
ReplyDeleteAccording to Julian Thomas [he, who has linked up with that Cardiff professor Keith Ray who we've been discussing just now], the Greater Cursus represents a walked line across the geographic catchment area between the rivers Till and Avon, and may even be a zone along which Mesolithic folk tracked fauna such as aurochen.
re the Julian Thomas thoughts, of the Cursus is simply a walked line between A and B, why on earth bother to have embankments on either side of it? Doesn't make sense, in my view........ And tracking aurochs? the banks were not very high -- but were the aurochs beasts too feeble to jump over them and too stupid to deviate to right or left? No -- something must have been enclosed or contained.
ReplyDeleteNo, Brian, I was trying to communicate what Julian Thomas wanted to get across. To quote Parker Pearson's Stonehenge 2012 book, page 145 - 146, "Perhaps the ditches and banks of the cursuses demarcated routes that had once been used by the ancestors, moving back and forth between the settlement areas in the two valleys" [ Chapter 9, Mysterious Earthworks]. The banks weren't there before the cursuses were created to commemorate these earlier routes.
ReplyDeleteJulian Thomas, according to MPP (page 144) has dug in 7 of the 150 plus cursuses in Britain, probably knows more about them [at least as of 2012] than anyone else.
I simply used the Auroch as an example of the type of beast that was in the Salisbury Plain landscape in Mesolithic and early Neolithic times. David Jacques excavated Blick Mead, the Mesolithic meeting place 2 kilometres south west of Stonehenge, where he found remnants of the auroch, for example.
Interestingly, archaeologist David Jacques may well have his own views on all matters to do with the later Stonehenge monument and wider landscape. and I would include in this the schism about how the Stonehenge Bluestones arrived from Preseli.
I recommend you have a good look at the whole of that " Mysterious Earthworks " chapter.
Correction, Blick Mead is about 2.5 kilometres east - south - east of Stonehenge and just South of the A303.
ReplyDeleteI recommend, for an environmental overview of this part of the Greater Stonehenge landscape:-
https://the-past.com/feature/life-before-Stonehenge...
My last reference is taken from a feature article in Current Archaeology, August 1st 2022.
ReplyDeleteThe most plausible explanation I have come across for the Cursus is derived from similar constructions in North America which were used by the natives to herd wild animals for eventual slaughter. I don't have any links to hand but I will look later if I have time. The animals were NOT aurochs - more like reindeer from memory. The size of the cursus would be explained by the idea of having several tribes coming together for meetings and each herding their own dinners.
ReplyDeleteI've come across a very thorough examination of various cursuses in an excellent book by David Field and David McOmish - Neolithic Horizons: Monuments and Changing Communities in the Wessex Environment, Fonthill, 2016. Much consideration is given to the very long Dorset Cursus, for example.
ReplyDeleteHave I really got to buy another book to tell me what I and others should already know?
ReplyDeleteThere are hunting drive lanes, constructed of lines of stones some only a single course high, across the world. These drive lanes would direct ungulates towards waiting hunters or would control migrating herds. Even though only very low the animals from Caribou to Bison would not cross them. Examples can be found in the middle east in the form of desert kites, in North America at the Rollins Pass and at the "Head Smashed In" Buffalo drop. Even though they are only low, the banks of the cursus are more than capable of directing a migrating herd, especially if the banks were covered in chalk.
ReplyDeleteA problem for Cursuses is that a few may have served a specific purpose, but some may just be replicas of that general form made for an entirely different purpose (assuming the original form had some sort of credibility that could be borrowed by copying).
ReplyDeleteSame for stone circles I think. For instance, we have tons of copies of Stonehenge. All of them took less effort than the original (relative to the means of each society); but it's quite likely that most, perhaps all, of the copies did not understand the original form. The same might be true of Neolithic stone circles.
The Mustatil structures in Saudi Arabia are also worth a look.
ReplyDeleteTom, no, of course not, but I venture to suggest there may be a few kernels of truth you do not know within this particular book. And anyway, as a former librarian I encourage you to BORROW the book!
ReplyDeleteIt's all a bit like, allegorically speaking, Jon, the varying forms, ages and mannerisms of those archaeologists whose work for English Heritage has included involvement with Stonehenge. We can go back at least to Julian Richards (who still writes the English Heritage Guidebook on Stonehenge). Others have come along such as Mike Parker Pearson and Susan Greaney. Each has laid his or her hand upon the trilithons, bluestones, and even extended their reach as far as both Greater and Lesser Cursuses. None has been brave enough to even raise a quizzical eyebrow at the claims of that Herbert, H.H. Thomas, regarding the distance that glaciation reached towards Salisbury Plain. They've all swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, all just for the sake of a jolly good story, Max Bygraves style.....
ReplyDeleteAnd Tom, I borrowed it from the local library several times, then I asked my wife borrow it for me for Christmas!
ReplyDeleteWhoops! My last comment should have ended "........to buy it for me for Christmas!"
ReplyDeleteI purchased the book and quickly skimmed through it, but unfortunately, I did not learn anything useful from it. Either Field and McOmish do not possess any valuable knowledge about the Dorset Cursus, or they are unwilling to share its hypothesis with the rest of us. With Stonehenge being set up to make money at the expense of the truth, am I surprised by this? No, of course not.
ReplyDeletePity it doesn't have an index either.
ReplyDelete