ON ICE SHEETS AND ALTAR STONES

 

ON ICE SHEETS AND ALTAR STONES

 

The Altar Stone, half hidden beneath the massive stones of the collapsed trilithon.

(Both Photographs on this post courtesy of 'The Stones of Stonehenge' website & Simon Banton)

There have been numerous articles in the media recently about the Altar Stone, and how it might have been brought south by glacial action during the last ice age. For each and every one of these, there is a single answer. Not true! To be fair, part of the blame must lie with the writers of the original paper in the Journal of Quaternary Science (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.70080  Clarke et al 2026) who left the door open to supposition with somewhat ambiguous wording. But we should, as they say, begin at the beginning.

 Location of the Altar Stone at the heart of the stone structure (source unknown)

In 2024, Clarke and others put out  a paper in Nature (Vol 632:570-575) that analysed the Zircon and trace element signature of the Altar Stone and showed that it was not from Wales, or as suggested by preliminary results, from Orkney,  but from Old Red Sandstone outcrops in NE Scotland, probably in the area around Caithness. At that time, the consensus seemed to be that any movement of stones (erratics) by the ice sheets and glaciers during the Pleistocene would have taken them northwards or eastwards, and definitely nowhere nearer to Stonehenge, over 700km to the south.

By 2026, Clarke and his fellows had become a little less precise. They said in the Quaternary Studies paper: "However, its source location within this large basin remains unresolved and its mode of transport uncertain."

In the end, they accepted the Caithness area as the closest match, with two nearby outcrops as possibilities. These were around Inverness on the Great Glen, and a small outlier to the east at New Aberdour. They then used computer modelling to look at how any erratics from these outcrops could have been moved by glaciation. They found that in certain circumstances, especially with displacement in several stages of glacial advance and retreat, some of these stones could have been moved east and then south into the far side of the area known as Doggerland, somewhere off the coast of what is today southern Denmark — this is from the least likely of the three models, New Aberdour. From Caithness, the most likely, ice  might have transported an erratic to the sea 150km further north, where the distance to Stonehenge was almost as much as the direct route from the outcrop. And note, this would still have been around 6000 years before the construction of Stonehenge. Clarke's paper states that the New Aberdour option would have brought the erratics  c470km south, implying the distance to Stonehenge would be halved; in fact, the direction is south-east, and the reduction in distance is minimal, and a considerable land journey dragging the stone would have been needed to get it to a place safe from (as yet unforeseen) submergence.

Because, as sea levels rose during the Mesolithic, Doggerland was fairly rapidly submerged beneath what is now the North Sea and anything carried there by ice would have been many fathoms beneath the sea. So before that happened — still around 3000 years before Stonehenge — Mesolithic hunters would have had to have considered this rock so important that they moved it across the landscape to a position where, presumably by chance, it would be safe from inundation.  And that would leave it either on the northern English coast or more likely on the coast of the European mainland. From there it would still have been necessary to haul or float it  all the way to Stonehenge. Clarke et al had to admit: "The need to invoke such a long, multi-stage chain of events challenges the plausibility of Dogger Bank as an intermediate source." Yet in their conclusions, they allow that this option is "plausible" after all. This was the loophole the media needed to make headlines about glacial transport to Stonehenge.

So that soon we had articles all over the papers and online media saying things varying between the strong possibility that the stones could have been transported much closer to Stonehenge and the absolute certainty that this was how it happened. None of them relayed the evident unlikeliness of this happening (partly because Clarke's paper failed to make it at all clear in the conclusions) or the huge gaps in time between the various stages of the transport. And the impression given in the paper that the ice transport to Dogger might have shortened the journey considerably — it doesn't actually say that, but the wording does allow you to think it if you don't look too closely — does encourage such flights of fancy.

 

The reality is that any such ice transportation was very unlikely to begin with, and would not have brought an erratic closer to Stonehenge. Add to that the human action in the Mesolithic that would have been necessary to get it somewhere it could be found later and taken to Stonehenge ...

I mean, it's possible (just), but no-one could seriously call it "plausible".  Not when long journeys with large megaliths were quite evidently within the means and experience of Late Neolithic people in the British Isles. Not when there is already strong evidence that people drove livestock to Stonehenge from the north of Britain (let's not insist on Orkney, that's also far from proven) around 2500BC. We don't know whether they used sea-going boats to move the stones but that information will come eventually, as long as we are looking for the right evidence and not some proof of what is surely no more than a fantasy.

PUBLISHED: THE HEART OF THE WORLD

PUBLISHED: THE HEART OF THE WORLD

 

Stonehenge at the dawn of the Bronze Age.

Son of the greatest shaman of the age, Ulrac has a momentous legacy to uphold. But with his family falling apart as rivals threaten his leadership, he still has a lot to learn. The seer will need all his supernatural strength to battle wild beasts, warriors, plots and plagues if he is to save his family and his people from disaster — but are the spirits really with him this time?

 

Available through:  https://mybook.to/hotw

MORE ON MEASURING TIME

 

MORE ON MEASURING TIME

 

After my post last year deconstructing Darvill's Stonehenge Calendar theory, I thought I might expand a little on my ideas concerning Neolithic calendars. The starting point has to be that a calendar is pointless if it is more complex or more precise than it needs to be. I would argue that one that fixes the length of the week, perhaps even naming the days, and squeezes the months to fit into the solar year so that you need a chart or a book to keep track of it all, would have been totally superfluous in rural, small-scale societies such as existed in Northern Europe in the Neolithic.

At the end of the Pleistocene, around 12 000 years ago, humans living in the Near East began to settle into smaller territories and even perhaps experiment with sedentary village life. Once they could watch the sun and moon rise and set from a single spot all year round, they would soon have realised that there were patterns to the variation in where the celestial orbs rose and set. A few years of observation would have shown the regularity of the sun's movement around the horizon and I'm sure they worked out very quickly that as the sunrise and sunset moved northward, the days grew longer (and why) and that the opposite was true as it tracked south again. They would equally soon have noticed the movement coming to a halt for several days at each end of the swing. From here it was a short step to picking one of these nodes as the start and end of the annual cycle, the 'New Year'.

Admittedly, the absence of movement at the solstices would have made it hard to judge precisely when the turning point occurred, but on the plus side it gave you several days from which to pick the best for outdoor community celebrations. And what could it possibly matter if one year was 362 days and the next was 369? Day by day accuracy was not required for planting and harvesting schedules, so why complicate things? The system was, in any case, self-correcting both through the year and over longer periods. There was no call to set leap years, because any inaccuracy disappeared within the mobility of the chosen turning point.

I would argue that for early farmers such as these, the summer solstice comes in the middle of the growing season, and that the quiet time of midwinter was the more obvious choice for the turning of the years. If they were then to calculate the mid-points between the solstices, our farmers would have a useful aid to their activities which was perhaps more reliable than the weather alone. You could mark the four points on the horizon with posts around the village, and everyone knew to plant around the spring equinox, harvest around or after the summer solstice, and pick your fruits and make preserves by the autumn mid-point. Or you could do it in a coded way and introduce an 'enlightened' cabal into your society.

 

Anyone could gauge the passage of time between these four points with reference to the moon and its phases. The lunar cycle is about 29 days, so if you make a few one day adjustments through the year you can predict the moon phase quite accurately. That means you can easily judge the passage of time to within a few days, for task management or recording the length of journeys, without ever counting as high as ten. Effectively, you have created weeks and months. And if you were a Neolithic farmer, who needs greater accuracy than that?

THE YIN AND YANG OF AVEBURY

 

THE YIN AND YANG OF AVEBURY

 

 When I talk about Stonehenge as a symbolic centre of the cosmos, an Axis Mundi to beat all Axes Mundi, I am expounding an interpretation I proposed more than a year before I began planning "The Eye of Time". In fact, it was having that vision without enough solid evidence to write an archaeological paper, that led me to publish it in a novel. But the interpretation I put forward in my books and stories of Avebury as 'the Place of Balance' was constructed for the novel alone, to explain its differences to Stonehenge in both location and architecture. And yet, the more I use this imagined interpretation, the more it fits the monument. I wouldn't (outside the novels) go so far as to say that Avebury is all about balance, but it certainly seems to have been a significant factor in the design. First, let me explain what I mean by 'balance' (please excuse me mansplaining if you've got this already).

At the core of most, if not all, shamanic religions is the concept that everything in the cosmos has an opposite. Stability is maintained by the way in which these opposites balance or cancel each other out. If someone or some force messes with anything, they risk creating an imbalance, which can lead to a range of consequences for living creatures (although most importantly for humans, from our perspective). These maladjustments can cause illness, or social malaise, or famine, or some natural disaster. When you put it in those terms, it is not so far from the truth, although science tends to see the cosmos as being in a constant state of flux, shifting balance  all the time and forever on the brink of natural disasters. And we (most of us, anyway) believe that human intervention has led to exaggerated imbalances which may now be causing global warming, unstable climates and a mass extinction of frightening proportions.

Part of the shaman's job is to identify what is out of balance in his or her little world and to propose ways to restore the balance. Since it is often the spirit world that is seen as the origin of these changes, it is natural to commune with them, or other friendly spirits, to find out what is going on. The shaman must therefore be familiar with the oppositions in the cosmos, and at what level their effects may be felt, and what parallel opposites can be employed to help restore the balance.

I have talked about these oppositions before (see "A Look At Neolithic Beliefs" below), including the idea that they can be grouped together so that a single symbol may, at different levels, represent more than one pair of opposites. So a tall monolith associated with a stone circle may represent a male phallus, or the masculine aspect in general, or the exterior world, or a pointer to the stars (or the sun or moon), and by association light, life, growth, and sometimes even goodness. In the same way, the 'cove' represents an interior, a cave, and by extension an entrance to the underworld. It may also represent a womb, and thus femininity, birth and of course death. I'm not talking here about different interpretations in different cultures/societies, although this is bound to happen; I refer to levels of significance of the same symbol in a single society. It always worries me when I read that an arrangement of stones means this or that and authors argue between themselves about whose belief is more likely to be correct. The truth may be that most of them are 'true' (in the sense of being useful for understanding) on different occasions, and that more than one projection of the symbolic meaning may be active at any given time.

                        The Cove at Avebury.
 

So how does Avebury fit with this view of the world? Well, almost everything about the site is paired with an opposite. There were two avenues, one leading towards a burial mound (darkness, the underworld, death), the other to another circular monument on a ridge (light, the heavens, and life, perhaps). The upright stones that lined the avenues are also paired off, broad and slim (suggestions have included male/slim/phallic and female/plump/ fertility, but other  interpretations may be equally valid). There are four entrances to the henge and the outer circle, placed opposite one another as if to create an internal balance rather than to align with some celestial activity like some other monuments, such as Stonehenge.

The circle of the bank and ditch and the outer ring of stones may be seen to symbolise a totality, perhaps even the whole medial level of the cosmos, as well as continuity (the cycle of the seasons) and/or stability (continuity within the totality). At the same time, the barriers of the bank and ditch serve to separate the symbolic totality within from the world outside, a principal opposition between sacred and profane. Like Stonehenge, the boundaries separate the microcosm from the macrocosm, and it is hoped that what happens in the microcosm has a corresponding effect in the greater reality outside.

 

                                                Reconstruction of Avebury from the South

Within the main circle there are two smaller rings of stones. One contains a cove, the other once held an obelisk. The latter, it now appears, was erected on the site of an earlier structure, perhaps a building or house. The significance of this is not known, nor do we know if there is anything older beneath the other, northern circle. Finally, the two inner circles are not placed along a diameter of the outer ring; they are almost entirely contained within the north-eastern half of the monument, which they fill, leaving the other half empty. The entrances are positioned to emphasise this bifurcation of the sacred space within the banks. Again, we may not know quite what this opposition symbolised, but it was clearly of some significance. There are probably others, too, but from these few it seems plain that here is a site at which the nature of opposition is demonstrated visually, and that significant oppositions may be worked on, perhaps to restore the balance between them in any given situation.

The inference in the novels and stories that the inner circles were used for initiation ceremonies is, of course, just part of the narrative, as is the idea Weyllan proposes that whilst Stonehenge sits at the Heart of the World, the symbolic centre of the cosmos, Avebury is the fulcrum, the point of balance of the totality, a position which gives it a power almost as pervasive as that of its rival on the Plain. There is no evidence at Avebury to support either hypothesis, and they are included only as illustrations of the sort of practical applications and meanings that our Neolithic and Bronze Age forebears might have put on them.

As the title suggests, this coming together of the symbolism of natural oppositions to create a harmonic whole is often represented today by the forces of Yin & Yang and the eponymous symbol that represents their interplay. In a way, it's a shame the inner circles aren't along a central alignment, so that the monument as a whole could be seen as an embodiment of yin/yang. But then, we can hardly expect an identical rationalisation of the forces of disharmony and balance from such different places, cultures, and times. It is still possible, however, that the circles within represent light and dark forces in their own way, still placed within dark and light elements of the totality in the same way the inner circles of the Yin/Yang symbol are paired with their opposites: the concepts are (or were) universal, even if the visualisation differs across the globe.

 

Yin-Yang: Yin is dark and negative, Yang is light and positive. Importantly, there is Yin within Yang, and vice versa, to create the balance.