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.

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?

A LOOK AT NEOLITHIC BELIEFS

 

A LOOK AT NEOLITHIC BELIEFS

Across all the Late Neolithic tribes and clans in "The Eye of Time", there is a very similar set of religious beliefs. Their universe is populated - and influenced, if not controlled, by spirits who inhabit both animate and inanimate objects (animism) and with whom humans must deal in order to have a say in the way their world unfolds around them. The way they do this is through part time religious practitioners called "seers" (shamans, witch doctors, 'clever men', & medicine men in various recent tribal societies), and they achieve  this through trance visions and spirit journeys in which they can talk with both natural and ancestral spirits to heal or understand both medical and social illness. Behind all this there would be a cosmic life-force or energy that powers existence (animatism) and which both seers and spirits use to enhance their powers and abilities  (yes, this is exactly 'the Force' in Star Wars).  

Anthropologists have recorded this belief system among hunter-gatherer and agricultural tribal societies across the world from Siberia and the Canadian Arctic to the southern tips of Africa, South America and Australia. The question is, how far back can it be traced? Despite localised practices and the unstructured nature of the religion, the core beliefs and cosmology are remarkably similar across the globe, which might suggest a very ancient origin for the concepts.  But finding clear evidence for particular religious beliefs in prehistory has never been easy.

In the late 1960s, an archaeologist in South Africa, David Lewis-Williams, put forward a theory that the stone age rock art of the region was a representation of shamanic trance experience among the San hunter-gatherers who had painted it. It took him more than a decade to persuade his contemporaries that his was a valid approach, at which point he began to offer a similar interpretation for European Palaeolithic cave art. I'm not sure he ever really won that round, but his theory is at least now considered along with longer established interpretations by many European archaeologists.

According to Lewis-Williams, religion is the way in which we interpret, through our cultural filters, the neurological signals our minds create when we enter altered states of consciousness (asc). Our brains are "hard-wired" to produce these signals that include dots, hatching, zig-zags, and spirals. We all experience these in dream states, daydreams, migraines and sometimes in fevers, but some people are able to bring on an intense asc, including hallucinations, through mind-bending drugs, sensory deprivation, or rhythmic self-mesmerism (i.e. trancing). In small-scale hunting societies these people can become shamans – religious practitioners who journey through the asc into a separate reality (the same one Castaneda was on about, whether or not he actually experienced it) which they interpret as the spirit world.

He suggested that there are several intermediate stages between full consciousness and full trance: The lightest asc brings out the geometrics listed above, with sounds such as buzzing and the swishing of wind or water. As the consciousness slips further towards trance, the mind begins to interpret these designs as more familiar objects: bees, snakes, fishing nets, animals, and ladders. Then comes a significant transition, accompanied often by the sensation of passing through a vortex or tunnel (as in near-death experiences, another form of asc) before emerging on the "other side", where the images have become real. Lewis Williams reckoned that almost all prehistoric art in Europe, America, Australia and Africa could be seen as images representing these transformations. He further cited the illustration  of a limited range of animal species in the art of any region as evidence that these were not simply hunting scenes or pictures of everyday events. He held that the artwork depicted these asc experiences, either to share them with other shamans, to explain them to other people, and/or to aid the shamans to find their way to the correct mind-set and enter the spirit world on subsequent occasions. In many traditions, the shift into other realities is accompanied by physical changes, in which the shaman 'becomes' a spirit animal for the journey (Figs 1 & 2). The shift is also sometimes likened to 'dying' or 'drowning' and Lewis Williams has frequently drawn attention to examples of  these scenarios in prehistoric art.

Fig 1: Therianthrope (half animal/ half human) in Game Pass, Natal Drakensberg. The figure is seen as a shaman transforming to an antelope - the head & hooves are already gone. His hair stands on end as an indicator of trance.

Fig 2: European cave painting generally accepted as a shaman: is he wearing a 

skin or is he a therianthrope too? Note he is also "bleeding from the nose" (DLW) 

a common side effect of trance.

Unlike Castaneda, he never says (or denies) that these other 'realities' exist, but simply posits that they were very real to the people of the time. These beliefs would have formed an integral part of their cosmos, the parts and totality of which were often reflected in art, architecture (the symbolic organisation of space) and ritual activity (such as burials).

Finally, Lewis-Williams turned his attention to more complex societies. In 2005 he published “Inside the Neolithic Mind” with David Pearce. In this work the authors took as examples sites in the Near East (Nevali Cori, Jericho, Catal Hoyuk, and Gobekli Tepe) and in the British Isles (Bru na Boinne, including Newgrange,  and Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales) to show how the art and architecture reflected a continuation of similar beliefs beyond hunting societies.

The idea was that, as with the earlier cave art, the entoptic (mind-created) images at tombs like Newgrange and Bryn Celli Ddu were used by shamans to focus their minds on achieving trance states to commune with the ancestors in the tomb. Not all tombs had this artistic element, but the dark interior, like the darkness of a cave, would add to the sensory deprivation used to boost asc transformations and communication with the spirit world. Lewis-Williams and Pearce's work is a pretty academic thesis, well supported by ethnographic observations throughout, and too long to deal with in detail here, but I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject as essential reading, whether you end up believing it or not.

 In Neolithic Britain there was a widespread tradition of communal burial for a selected elite of the population. These people were buried in Long Barrows, Portal Dolmens, or Passage Graves (in different parts of the country) that were regularly revisited and where the ancestral bones were handled or moved around during rituals at key times of the year (summer & winter solstice etc). There were no grave goods to indicate status or power, and the bones were often mixed up, or stored by bone type rather than together as skeletons. It seems that what was important was not the individuals, but the group they belonged to.

Around some of these tombs – the Passage Graves in Scotland and Eire especially – is some wonderful abstract art (Figs 3 & 4). This shows zigzag lines, diamonds, chequer patterns, concentric rings and spirals. The long barrows of Western England tend to be art free zones, but one, Stoney Littleton, has a large spiral ammonite set into the wall next to the entrance to the burial chamber. All these images may be interpreted in terms of the neurological effects of asc: they are the geometric shapes that people see in migraines, the early stages of trances, near-death experiences and drug-induced trips. Spirals may often also metamorphose into the tunnels and vortices seen in these states (with the light at the end), the transitional phase into a full hallucinatory state, death, or, in the minds of our Neolithic ancestors, the spirit world. So entering a passage grave or barrow may have been seen as entering the vortex or tunnel that leads through into the spirit worlds - where the dead ancestors reside (as they do indeed in tombs).

 

Fig 3: The kerbstone opposite the entrance at Newgrange Passage Grave.

 We simply don’t know what became of the rest of the population on death. Some were evidently cremated, but there simply are not enough bodies in the communal graves to be the surviving sample of the whole Neolithic population. Estimates vary as to the proportion of the population treated in this way, but centre round 5%; a significantly small number. These chosen few continued to interact with the living through the use of their bones in religious ceremonies, and the probable reburial of some of those ancestral bones in special places such as deep pits or the ends of ditches; places where the boundary with the underworld has been physically thinned.

It is thought by an increasing number of archaeologists that the bones and burial sites were being revisited as representatives of the ancestral spirit community, who could be approached to mediate with the rest of the spirit world on behalf of their living descendants. If this were the case, it would make sense to pick for this task people who in life had had experience of these same negotiations: the shamans or "seers".

Lewis Williams deliberately avoided using Stonehenge as an example because of the controversy he thought it would arouse, so that we may never know how he saw it fitting into his overall pattern. I think it fits very well (see other articles on this blog), both with the cosmology as a whole, and as a place for (and physical aid to) shamanic trancing. I have dealt with the cosmology/ heart of the world aspect elsewhere; here consider for a moment the idea that Stonehenge worked as a physical aid to asc.

 The ditch provides a symbolic separation and distancing from the outside world, a sensation further enhanced by the ring of close set stones in the circle, which experiments have shown to block and alter sound travelling in and out of the monument whilst at the same time creating an effective visual barrier. Drumming or chanting in the circle would be amplified by the stones, enhancing both rhythmic and sensory routes into trance. The sheltered inner area, with the impassable "gates" of the trilithons and the focus created by the tallest  trilithon and the Altar Stone provides a doubly segregated zone where direct contact with the spirit world is possible, either to the underworld through the stones themselves or to the heavens through the open air above them. Added to this, let's not forget that Stonehenge also functioned as a burial ground: the ancestors were on hand within the bounds of the monument to come when needed.

  

Fig 4: Newgrange front entrance: with "courtyard" where we believe rituals involving the ancestors inside were performed. Is the decorated kerbstone here original, or put there to close the tomb off?

This interpretation is without any direct archaeological support at this stage, but it shows that such a functionality would work. And there is some evidence of art on the stones. Apart from the famous axe-heads and daggers, there are several other 'faces' - mostly natural, and two or three low-relief  shapes that could be pecked. One of these, on Stone 16, is a crude spiral. So perhaps., after all, there is something in the stones and the structure that gives an indication of the way the building may have functioned. It makes you think, doesn't it?