Build your own stone circle

0:00When you want your spring break to feel like and your kid's pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like ooh and room service to feel like because at Hilton hospitality feels like your cabana's ready would you like fresh towels it matters where you stay book now at Hilton.com Hilton for this day Would we all be happier if we built stone circles? Would that give us a sense of communal purpose that we are lacking today? Let's find out in this episode of Life Lessons from History, where I am chatting to Dr. Susan Greeney from the University of Exeter. She is an expert in stone circles, so she is exactly the right person to talk to about this.

0:54Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

1:16So introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your area of expertise. Okay, I'm Susan Greeny and I'm a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter, as you've said. My specialist area of research is prehistoric monuments and particularly monuments that get built in the middle and the late Neolithic, so around about 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 years ago. And of course, the most famous one of those is Stonehenge that everybody knows about. But actually, I'm really interested in henge monuments, great big earthwork structures that get built and timber structures. So many, many posts and timber structures being erected.

1:49And this is something that we see in the very end of the late Neolithic, really. So the very end of the period when farming arrives in Britain and just before the arrival of the first metals and the arrival of new people from the continent. There's a bit of a frenzy of monument building happens all across Britain and Ireland at that time. These are monuments built of stone, built of timber, built of earth. And they often cluss together in what we call monument complexes. So places in the country where they attract more and more monuments in one place. and it seems to be where people were gathering in large numbers to carry out these building projects but also to take part in feasts and take part in rituals that were related to the monuments and these are extraordinary projects they're mind-boggling really when we think about it I can only kind of compare it I guess to something like building HS2 the great big high-speed rail line or something the amount of planning and equipment sourcing and people persuading and sort of organisation that has to happen at this period is really interesting.

2:49And yet from this period, we don't have really any evidence for social hierarchy. We don't have evidence that there were leaders or particularly rich people or high status people. Everything seems very egalitarian in terms of the sizes of houses, in terms of how people live. We don't have very good evidence for burials from this period. So we don't have things like rich graves with lots of grave goods. Everything seems to point to people being relatively equal. And yet they managed to achieve these great big building projects, which is what I'm quite interested in. Okay. Now you mentioned a lovely phrase there, a frenzy of monument building.

3:28I like that. Now, was that because they knew that metalworking was coming in and they needed it and that was going to change everything? Yes, that's one way of thinking about it. So one way of thinking about it is that they could see change coming on the horizon. There was quite a delay between copper, being used, for example, in modern day France and it coming across the channel into Britain. And so perhaps they are seeing that these people are around, these artifacts are around. We don't have them archaeologically, but they could be kind of floating about and people are seeing there's change, that there's this new shiny stuff, that there's other ways of living, different religion, different language, etc.

4:02And so they almost sort of knuckle down and build their temples and their monuments bigger and more elaborate and larger and more complex than they were before. That's one interpretation. Another way of looking at it is that through whatever means, whether it's to do with persuasive individuals, whether it's to do with religious fervour, whether it's to do with kind of how people are negotiating with the landscape and their religious beliefs, these monuments take up more and more time, you know, that they are dominating people's lives. And that while people are happy to go along with that for a while, they get to a point where people think, actually maybe we won't but perhaps we'll just move away or we will rebel or we will down tools and maybe that collapse or that kind of crisis in authority makes a bit of a vacuum into which these new people with their metals and different ways of life can arrive and take hold so that's two kind of polarized views it could be something much more complicated and more fluid between those kind of perspectives but that there are two ways that I quite like to think of that period So yeah, the monument building right at the end does get particularly complex and large.

5:08Okay. Now, before we get into thinking about what lessons we might learn from all this, very quickly, why did they build Stonehenge? Well, Stonehenge is a temple aligned with the movements of the sun. And in my mind, it's a reaction. It's actually a kind of culmination of timber structures. It's actually a timber structure built in stone. If anyone knows Stonehenge, it's got joints, woodworking joints that fit it together. and for prehistoric people they would have looked at it and gone oh look they've done a timber monument in stone how radical and interesting and mad for us it looks completely unique because we don't have those timber structures surviving to compare it to so it's sort of the culmination of a long you know 300 400 years of a particular architectural tradition but why they're building such an elaborate monument at that point it's so difficult to know but it must be something to do with needing to communicate with their gods, and they're presumably related to the sun.

6:03The solar alignment is crucial to understanding Stonehenge. And that they're going through some, perhaps, a climate issue, perhaps a crops and health issue, you know, something that means that they are really trying to get their gods to listen to them and do what they want. It's a kind of negotiation, it feels like, with the land and with their gods and what they believe. So in some ways you can see it as sort of a kind of reaction to something that's happening, but I don't think we quite understand what that is at the moment. And again, this is totally tangential, and you might not know the answer to this, but I often wonder, and someone did once tell me, a sort of hint that there might have been some pigments found on some of these sorts of monuments.

6:37Did they ever paint Stonehenge? There's no evidence from Stonehenge that they painted it. When it was originally built, the stones had been really carefully hammered and worked. So the large sarsen stones would have been almost a bright white, shiny silica, and the smaller stones, the blue stones, which are the ones from Wales, would have been a dark grey blue. So the contrast between the stones would have looked really striking. So in some ways, they didn't really need to add paint to make it an even more visually arresting monument. Nowadays, of course, with the weathering and everything, everything looks a bit grey.

7:09But that contrast would have been much more obvious when it was first constructed. That's really interesting. I don't know. So when we were chatting, you said maybe there's something we could talk about in terms of how these communal projects were carried out and sort of the sense of achieving the impossible, because it does feel quite impossible that they were able to do this. When we look at this, You think, well, how do they do that? And I guess that's why people think about aliens and stuff, because you simply can't imagine how they were able to do it. So what do we think about the structure of society that would have enabled this to happen?

7:37You said it was egalitarian. There must have been some overarching force to make these things happen. There must have been some people who were in charge of planning, whether they were people who had high status all of the time, whether they just adopted that status for the purpose of building the monument. we don't know but some of the aspects of the project would have needed some planning in terms of time so for example the feasts that happened at Durrington Walls people are bringing their animals their pigs to the feast ready to be slaughtered now that means you have to have those animals ready so you have to have been organizing farrowing your pigs at the right time and having enough of them to bring from your local settlement to the feast site also they needed lots of equipment so they needed lots of antler picks to dig the stone holes they needed lots of rope and lots of timber to move the stones and to erect them.

8:28And so that would have taken quite a long time to procure and make, you know, lime bast. You have to strip it off the trees and you have to ret it, soak it in water for some days, and then you have to twist it into shape. You know, these are all tasks that take a lot of time. Baskets probably used also. So there's not just the building and the moving of the stones, but actually all the planning that goes into what you need and feeding everybody, you know, feeding everyone, looking after their children, providing places where people would sleep. All these kind of things that go into a kind of construction camp of some kind would have had to been planned out.

8:59Now, we know from the isotope evidence, so this is a chemical signature in the teeth of the pigs and the cattle that were eaten at Durrington Walls, which is the settlement where people were living at the time that they were probably building Stonehenge. We know that those come from a whole range of different geological areas of southern Britain, possibly even into northern Britain. So people were coming from some distance away to take part in this project. And I quite like to think of it as being a bit like Mecca in that you might once in your lifetime spend three months taking part in the great big communal building project and then you would go back to your local village and go back to your ordinary sort of life.

9:33But I don't know if that's the case. It could be quite different to that. But you've got to have enough people around to support that activity who are not necessarily just doing their day-to-day agriculture, living, gathering, etc. So what I find interesting is how did those people communicate with each other? How did people know it was going to start at a particular time in a particular place? How did people know that they needed to bring their pigs and the right equipment and things? And how do you persuade people that that's a useful thing for them to do rather than have an easy life? And the answer to that must be partly religious.

10:07It must have been that people really believed that this was a necessary and practical occupation or feet, and that spending their time doing this would result in better harvest, increased community, whatever it was that they were trying to achieve. And so, yeah, all those questions are really interesting about how it gets constructed. People are always fascinated about how the stones were moved. I don't really find that that interesting. What I find interesting is how do you persuade all those people to take part in the stone moving? And you don't think that the evidence suggests an element of coercion?

10:38There's no evidence for that. Some people have suggested it. And in fact, in ancient Egypt, people used to suggest that slaves were used to build the pyramids. But we now know from the hieroglyphics and various records and things that it was not slaves. It was people who were willingly giving to the project. So we've got no evidence of that. It obviously would be quite hard to find. It's not like we've got any metal where we'd find, I don't know, shackles or something like that. But we don't know that for certain. The evidence from Durrington Moors where they're feasting in large quantities, you know, they're basically chucking away meat.

11:08they've got so much of it, suggests it's quite a good time and suggests that maybe they're rewarding the people at least that come with beer, food, good kind of company and a reason to take part in the project. I mean, that sounds okay. You mentioned religion. I'm sure that's true that would have been a driving force, but couldn't it have just been that it was fun? It could have been. It could have been. In fact, last week I went to a place called the Ancient Technology Centre, which is down in Dorset in Cranbourne Chase, because we were doing some filming for a Channel 5 documentary about pulling a stone.

11:40We got together about 30 volunteers who were all very keen to spend their day pulling a stone about for TV. Now, I mean, that was because it was fun. Lots of biscuits were had and tea and coffee and things. But it is quite fun to get together and try and achieve. And the sense of achievement when you build something and when you get together is huge. And that sense of community, getting to know people, learning new skills, all those kind of things. We found this also when we built the replica Neolithic Houses at Stonehenge at the Visitor Centre. That was all done using volunteers and they had such an amazing time.

12:08They wanted to carry on at the end of it. You know, they wanted to do more and they built a really strong community. So part of building these monuments must have been a major change in the way that people were connected to each other and that you can imagine people found marriage partners or, you know, all kinds of different exchanges of ideas and things went on at these events. So yeah, perhaps it was just fun. So hang on, you worked on those experimental houses at Stonehenge. So anyone who's listening, so Stonehenge, you've got the visitor centre, the really cool new visitor centre and then there's these roundhouses next to it before you get on the bus or walk up to the stones and you were involved yeah i was the project manager for that yeah i used to work for english heritage and i was involved in delivering the exhibition and interpretation on site for visitors and part of that was we'd always planned that we wanted to have a kind of immersive experience to try and show people what life was like at the time of stonehenge and actually that contrast between the kind of permanent stone monument and the fairly small ephemeral houses that people were living in at that time.

13:05Yeah, no, brilliant. Okay, so other than being sort of amazed and perhaps inspired by what these people were able to do with presumably limited resources, well, definitely limited technological resources, what can we take from that today, do you think? How can we sort of live better lives by seeing what they did? I think for me, the modern day, at least here in the West, in Britain, is really individual. You know, everybody's really striving to get ahead in their career or their personal life or their social lives and everything comes down to the individual how you can do better how you can improve your life how you can you know exercise eat whatever sleep better we don't really focus on how we can be a better society you know a few years ago was in political thing wasn't the big society and things but actually how we improve our lives to me must be more to do with how we connect with our local society with the communities that we live in, with the workplaces we're in, and how we kind of behave in those situations.

14:06And I don't know what it was about prehistory that made people, there was violence as well. We know that there's evidence for unhappy times. But on the whole, in the late Neolithic, they seem to have achieved really extraordinary things by working together. And you kind of think, well, if they were able to do that in the late Neolithic with limited resources, limited people, we could achieve so much more than what we do currently in the world there are so many issues and so many wars and things it just is quite inspiring I thought I think I don't know whether this has got anything really concrete for people to kind of adopt in their their everyday lives but it does seem that reaching out and you know I think during the COVID pandemic people found this didn't they they found their neighbours needed help or they volunteered to do things and that sense of kind of selflessness and being part of something much bigger I think is something we can probably learn from that period.

14:57I suppose our problem is that we lack that collective mission which feels like these monuments kind of, well they must have required because otherwise they wouldn't have happened would they? We don't have that same sort of community imperative because we all live these individualistic lives I suppose so we would need to come up with something to make that work. Yeah that's a good point actually we're fairly fragmented in what we think is important and we have lots of different religious beliefs or not or we have lots of different priorities in our lives, don't we, in terms of what we're passionate about.

15:29So, yeah, you're right. It's finding something that joins us together and galvanises people into actually taking action. Actually, I think things like the climate change crisis are one of the few things like that that are fairly universal, global, and do galvanise a lot of people to action. It's just how we manage to, I guess, coordinate that and feel like we're making a difference rather than the more kind of divisive sort of politics and actions that tend to take place. But yeah, I mean, I guess in the Neolithic it was a lot simpler. They didn't have quite so many things on their minds, I imagine.

16:02And they didn't have quite so many multiple kind of social relationships and online relationships and things like that that we have in the modern day. But yeah, it would be nice to think that somehow we could still do amazing things. So do you broadly advocate then that we should all start building stone circles? I will. Well, that would be quite fun. Well, I think building is actually one of those things that does bring people something practical and with a really concrete result does help people to get involved in things. I'm actually thinking of things like the Amish communities in North America where people get together and build barns and things in a few days and amazing kind of coordination and things.

16:41I think also we all have so many desk-based jobs and we don't really do practical things. There's something about working on something practically with other people, learning and collaborating, that is part of being human, I think. And maybe we've lost some of that as well in our modern lives. Now I do, I mean, just talking about how these tasks were achieved, it does make you reflect that it must have gone wrong. Because, you know, whenever you get a bunch of people together, there's always going to be a clash of personalities. there's always going to be somebody who is overbearing and wants to take charge and if you are trying to be egalitarian and there isn't some coercive leader from the top it's going to go wrong i think you do you remember that program i think it was at butzer farm the the the famous people who lived on a prehistoric farm in the 80s i think and it sounded it all started off quite utopian and i think it went wrong and people started having quite a lot of uh disputes i mean that would happen wouldn't it yeah and actually we have the evidence from stonehenge it did go wrong because we know that they built this rather spectacular monument and then immediately after that we have huge societal changes.

17:45People come in from continental Europe, there's new metals, new religion, people switch away completely from building these communal monuments into much more individual burials and things like that. So we know it didn't work and it was probably a very short-lived way of ordering society and way of doing things. The other side to that is kind of just thinking about it on a more small-scale basis in that the people building Stonehenge were doing it for religious reasons. And there's an element of negotiation there and they were doing something because they thought they would get something back. You know, they're doing it because they're trying to achieve better harvests or a better relationship with their sun god or something.

18:20So in some ways, you know, how we think about our relationships with other people, you know, we negotiate with other people. Don't worry, I'll do something for you and you do it back for me. You know, in our work relationships or in, I mean, I'm an academic, we're constantly trying to juggle our workload and share things out and volunteer or not volunteer for things. So that give and take is sometimes interesting. But we do have also societies around the world who are egalitarian for millennia and they really carefully organise themselves so that nobody does get too powerful or too big for their boots.

18:50You know, they use humour or they use different ways of kind of making sure that they have chiefs but they don't actually have any power and all kinds of ways of organising society. I don't know if you've seen the book by David Wengro and David Graeber, Dawn of Everything, which is all about how there are so many different ways of organising societies around the world. And actually, our modern Western way is probably very unusual in the general scope of human history. But yeah, for the Neolithic people, it worked for a while, but not forever. Was this a patriarchal society that built Stonehenge?

19:20Have we got any evidence for that sort of thing? We don't have any evidence from the Neolithic period. but from the early Neolithic period we have a tomb called Hazleton North which is in the Cotswolds in southern Britain and some recent DNA work has been done on the 36 individuals that were buried in that tomb and they're all descended from basically this one head most people actually I should say are descended from this one chap and so you think oh well patriarchal society yeah actually he's got four wives and the people are buried in different chambers according to who their mother is. So actually that suggests that the mother and your matriarchal line is much more important in terms of deciding where you get buried.

19:59And there are lots of people in that tomb who are not related to anyone who must be adoptees or friends or incomers who also end up being part of the kin, this kin group. So it's a bit more complicated than that. We also have evidence from the Iron Age, obviously much, much later now from Dorset and from Yorkshire, not yet published, but basically showing that women are the ones who are staying in one place and who seem to be landowning or in charge. And it's the men who move around quite a lot. So we shouldn't assume that, you know, the patriarchy is something that's been around forever. I do think we need a few more women in politics to make the world better.

20:34But yeah, it's interesting to think who was in charge when Stonehenge was being built. Yeah, no, absolutely. Right, brilliant. That's been fascinating. To finish, you're a prehistorian. You're obviously suffused in prehistory. I imagine you really like it. You probably enjoy the period. When you're sort of going about your day-to-day life, Do you do anything which is informed by your knowledge of prehistory? Do you have any life hacks that are built upon what you know about the past? I think not hugely, really. But one of the things that inspired me when I was a teenager was I was part of an archaeological excavation.

21:05And obviously, as an archaeologist, excavation is one of those things we do. We train our students how to do. And an excavation is a bit like a building project in that you're doing something practical. You're all working together. You might have a hierarchy, but you have to really work together and collaborate and have a single goal to get to where you want to get to. I was involved in a project in Norfolk, Sedgford, which was run on a very egalitarian, deliberately egalitarian basis, where everybody's views were valid, that students or teenagers who turned up would be listened to as much as the older, more experienced archaeologists.

21:37And you were supposed to get involved in interpretation. It was great. It was a really good kind of first dig to go on to make me realise how it could work. It didn't always work, but it was an interesting model. And I do think that in my work life and when I run excavations and things, I do try and adopt that idea that everybody has some part to play. And that involving everybody and making sure that people feel like they can contribute and that they're not just at the bottom of a hierarchical pile is really important for the good working of an archaeological site or maybe an academic department.

22:10and so yeah I'm not sure whether that's directly kind of inspired by prehistory but it's it's something that um I think I can see reflected a little bit and I'd like you know to think that people in prehistory were had had as much kind of agency and kind of power to do what they wanted or not to just walk off and not be part of the building project but that's how they managed to achieve so much yeah I mean subconsciously I imagine that is driven by your knowledge of the nihilistic and the fact that they appear to have an egalitarian society that is probably filtering through to the way you run an excavation.

22:41Try to, anyway. It doesn't always work. I am in charge, so that doesn't really... At the moment, with our field school, I'm in charge, so that doesn't really go against the whole... Somebody does still need to be... And I think for things like Stonehenge, there must have been a group of people who had a little bit more say on the planning and designing things. That was Dr. Susan Greeney from the University of Exeter. If you want to hear more about neighbourliness, particularly in the ancient Roman world, why not check out my chat with Dr. Jess Venner on this Life Lessons from History feed as well.

23:09Thanks for listening.