In short
The episode explains the summer solstice’s astronomy (Earth’s 23.4° axial tilt, longest day/shortest night, sun highest at noon, and why sunrise timing doesn’t peak exactly on the solstice) and links it to ancient monument building. It then focuses on Stonehenge: its solstice alignments (heel stone sunrise; winter solstice sunset behind the tallest three stones), its multi-phase construction (outer ring/ditch ~5,000 years ago; cremation-related holes; major sarsen “horseshoe” stones ~4,500 years ago), and possible broader lunar/long-cycle connections (lunar standstill, ~18.5-year cycle).
Guests
Larissa Palethorpe (University of Bristol astrophysicist) and Jennifer Wexler (English Heritage prehistoric historian). Later segments add Richard Bevins (University of Aberystwyth geologist) on blue-stone/altar-stone origins (altar stone possibly from Scotland; zircon dating; human vs ice transport debate) and Vincent Gaffney (University of Bradford) on geophysics mapping of the wider Stonehenge landscape (~12–20 km²), finding hidden ceremonial structures (e.g., cursus entrances/guided access, Mesolithic sites like Blikmede).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding the Summer Solstice
0:45 to 2:52
Exploration of the summer solstice's scientific significance and its effects on day length.
“On the 21st of June, the Northern Hemisphere experiences its summer solstice, the official start of astronomical summer, and also the longest day of the year.”
The Significance of Solstice in Ancient Cultures
2:52 to 5:36
Discussion on how ancient civilizations celebrated the summer solstice and built monuments like Stonehenge.
“So it's a great way to link yourself to your ancestors through time.”
The Engineering of Stonehenge
5:36 to 8:37
Insight into the construction and evolution of Stonehenge over thousands of years.
“Larissa Pelthorpe at the University of Bristol there.”
Cultural Practices around the Solstice
8:37 to 12:46
Exploration of the cultural and religious significance of the solstice to ancient people.
“But there's a possibility that the winter solstice might have been the more important one.”
Cultural Practices around the Solstice
12:56 to 13:07
Exploration of the cultural and religious significance of the solstice to ancient people.
“and IP engineering services for UK businesses.”
Stonehenge's Stones and Their Origins
13:14 to 14:01
Discussion of the different types of stones at Stonehenge and their origins.
“and today, Stonehenge and the celebration of the summer solstice.”
Geological Origins of Stonehenge's Altar Stone
14:01 to 16:33
Learn about the geological studies that revealed the origins of Stonehenge's altar stone may trace back to Scotland, not Wales.
“But after analysing rock samples from across modern Britain scientists found that the stone's mineral composition is not Welsh.”
The Debate on Transporting the Stones
16:34 to 22:06
Explore the theories surrounding how the heavy altar stone was transported to Stonehenge, including human and natural processes.
“And he'd been mapping down in West Wales, getting to grips with understanding the geology.”
Stonehenge in a Larger Prehistoric Landscape
22:07 to 28:00
Discover how recent archaeological surveys reveal Stonehenge's significance within a broader prehistoric landscape.
“Richard Bevins at the University of Aberystwyth on the geological mysteries of Stonehenge.”
Exploring the Significance of Stonehenge's Landscape
28:00 to 29:28
Learn about the historical context and features surrounding Stonehenge.
“There are, for instance, a number of very large pits to the north of Stonehenge in the old car park.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01Vincent Gaffney:All engine running. Absolute genius.
0:04Larissa Palethorpe:Get this.
0:04Vincent Gaffney:Welcome.
0:05Larissa Palethorpe:Welcome. This is the show where we bring you science. What that essentially means is discovery. Advances. Questions. Research. Technology. Unbelievable. Without further ado, this is the Naked Scientist. Hello, welcome to the Naked Scientist podcast, the programme that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine. I'm Chris Smith and today the summer solstice and the astronomical, cultural and archaeological significance of what's regarded as one of the ancient wonders of the world, Stonehenge.
0:47Larissa Palethorpe:On the 21st of June, the Northern Hemisphere experiences its summer solstice, the official start of astronomical summer, and also the longest day of the year. The term solstice comes from the Latin word sol, which means sun, and sistere, which is to stand still. This represents the brief pause in the sun's apparent north-south rise and set locations. It is an astronomical wonder, but what actually is the science behind it? Well, Larissa Palethorpe is an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol, and she's been telling me.
1:20Jennifer Wexler:So the summer solstice is the moment when the northern hemisphere is tilted most directly towards the sun. And it marks the longest day of the year, the shortest night of the year, and the sun's highest noon altitude of the year. So it's our longest day of the year.
1:34Larissa Palethorpe:Why is the planet tilted and why does that have that effect on day length?
1:38Jennifer Wexler:The Earth isn't spinning perfectly straight up. It's on about a 23.4 degree tilt. and it stays tilted in that direction the entire year. But as it moves around the sun, this means that some areas of the tilt experience more sunlight than others. So during the summer solstice, that's when kind of the northern part of the planet is tilted towards the sun. And so places like the North Pole, they experience the sun continuously for a few months, but it means we get our longest period of sunlight in the year, which is when we have our summer.
2:08Larissa Palethorpe:And once it gets around the other side of the sun, And now that tilt means that the northern hemisphere is pointing away. So you get shorter days, sun lower in the sky.
2:17Jennifer Wexler:Yes, unfortunately, it's the bleakest part of the year. It's our winter. But for the southern hemisphere, that means they will obviously have the most amount of light. Because the top of that spinning top is then pointed away from the sun, when the Earth is in the period around its orbit around the sun, it will be the darkest point. It's not receiving any sunlight, the northern most part of our planet at that point.
2:38Larissa Palethorpe:So in other words, historical times, because this is set in stone in terms of it's a function of the planet, that us today are going to see this effect in the same way that they would have done for thousands of years.
2:52Jennifer Wexler:Yeah, essentially. So it's a great way to link yourself to your ancestors through time. And what's also very interesting, I think, is that our earliest sunrise isn't necessarily on the solstice. And this is all to do with the fact that kind of the sun, where it rises on the horizon does move throughout the year. So on things like the equinoxes, spring equinoxes late March and the autumn equinoxes late September, that is when the sun will rise due east. But if you were to stand in the same spot every day of the year and watch where the sun rises, it would slide slightly north or slightly south across the horizon.
3:24Jennifer Wexler:So during the summer solstice, this is kind of when the sun rises most north to the east, if that makes sense. This has been a key thing of our ancestors throughout time. And I think around the world, they've built monuments to kind of honour when this has happened.
3:40Larissa Palethorpe:And that change in day length, the fact that because we're tilted, we get longer days in summer, that's going to affect the energy flow into the planet, which is what drives seasons.
3:50Jennifer Wexler:Yeah, so we get our kind of most amount of solar energy hitting the ground in the northern hemisphere anyway, during the summer solstice times. And that's because the sun is kind of on a higher arc through the sky because of where it rises and sets. And this means on the summer solstice, that's when the sun is highest in the sky at June noon. And this means the shadows are also their shortest. But that's essentially what makes these days longer. It's the fact that the sun is higher in the sky and it's got this higher arc across the horizon than it does in winter.
4:21Larissa Palethorpe:And you mentioned that the Earth doesn't go around the sun in a nice circle. It's a bit elliptical. Why is that?
4:27Jennifer Wexler:Yeah, it's all kind of to do with the way our solar system forms. planets in the solar system are on this ellipsis and it's all to do with this gravitational pull um so i study exoplanets quite a lot so planets orbiting other stars and we find this is quite common throughout kind of our galaxy uh the planets don't form in this perfect circle and it's so that everything's in balance right everything has a gravitational pull on each other and everything all the planets in our solar system have to be in balance as well as in balance in orbit around the sun it's not quite unique quite a lot of planets kind of orbit in ellipses but our ellipsis is unique to our planet.
4:59Jennifer Wexler:Generally, planets only tend to have circular orbits if they're very close to their host stars. We wouldn't want to be too close to our sun because it'd be far too hot and far too much radiation for us to live. So kind of at this distance where an ellipsis is the best case for the mass of our planet.
5:12Larissa Palethorpe:Do other planets have a solstice like we do though?
5:15Jennifer Wexler:That's a good question. Well, yes, if they're on an axial tilt, then they will. Depending on how extreme a planet you're looking at, there are some planets where they're so close to their host star that only one side of the planet faces the sun the whole year round. They don't spin. So the fact that we rotate on our axis and the fact that we're on an axial tilt, those are the two reasons that we have solstices.
5:36Larissa Palethorpe:Larissa Pelthorpe at the University of Bristol there. The summer solstice has deep significance in many ancient civilisations and the most famous monument connected to the summer solstice is arguably Stonehenge. It was constructed in what's now Wiltshire in the UK and it was designed to align with the movements of the sun. In particular, the sunrise matches perfectly with the so-called heel stone, a large standing stone located outside the main monument. This alignment is so precise that many archaeologists believe it must have been intentional. Each year, thousands of tourists gather on site in Midsummer to see it.
6:19Larissa Palethorpe:But what do we know about Stonehenge? And what did it mean to those who built it? Jennifer Wexler is an historian of prehistoric sites at English Heritage.
6:29Vincent Gaffney:It's a really interesting monument because it dates back to around 4 ,500 years ago. But one thing that is really compelling about it is the way it's been engineered so that the stones actually fit together. So we have a kind of outer ring of basically two upright stones and a top stone that connects up, so a lintel at the top. And then we have a kind of inner horseshoe, which is different than any stone circle in the world. And it's also massively big. So the tallest stone is around seven meters tall, so over 14 feet. Some people say it's one of the wonders of the ancient world, I guess you could say.
7:04Larissa Palethorpe:When you say 4 ,500 years, has it always looked like that, though? Or is it that it started 4 ,500 years ago and it's been re-engineered a few times since? What do we know about how it's evolved?
7:16Vincent Gaffney:Often we think about Stonehenge as this kind of like just these big stones in a field by themselves, but actually it's part of a whole massive landscape of monuments. And some of those monuments go back over a thousand years before Stonehenge. And the monument itself had multiple phases of development. So it has an earlier element, which is the outer ring and ditch. And that's around 5 ,000 years old. And just inside of that, there's 56 kind of holes in this kind of outer circumference, which we know were used for cremation burials, but also possibly had some kind of earlier version of a circle, maybe with wooden posts.
7:51Vincent Gaffney:And then 500 years later, people come back and they put up the really big stones, the stones that we're familiar with today that come from the westwoods about 20 miles away. And because the big stones, the big sarsens have been engineered to fit together, we know that those, once they're in place, probably stay in place. So that has stayed the same since 4 ,500 years ago.
8:14Larissa Palethorpe:And when do we think the association with the solstice dates from? Do you think it was built that way from the get-go, or is that a feature, in inverted commas, added later?
8:24Vincent Gaffney:It's really built as a temple of the sun. The central axis of the monument is the solstice axis, and it has both alignments with the winter and the summer solstice, so the shortest and the longest days of the year. The summer one is the most famous because it's the one people really show up to and they come all night and celebrate at, which is coming up this week. But there's a possibility that the winter solstice might have been the more important one. And the reason we think that is because there's been a huge amount of work on a site called Durrington Walls, which is a few miles from Stonehenge, where people were living at the time of constructing Stonehenge, but they're also feasting on like massive scale.
9:01Vincent Gaffney:And doing analysis of the animal bones showed us that a lot of this feasting was happening in the winter. So possibly the winter solstice alignment might have been the more important of the two. And actually at the winter solstice, the sun sets behind the tallest three stones at the heart of the circle. so it's kind of the holy spot if that makes sense.
9:21Larissa Palethorpe:Is it just the solstice that it documents or are there other clever things engineered into Stonehenge so it captures other times of the year or works to capture other times or seasons etc?
9:35Vincent Gaffney:There is some questions around things like moon alignments so we've been doing work over the last couple years around the lunar standstill which is a cycle of the moon where it goes to the furthest points on our horizons every 18 and a half years, essentially. And so we've done a lot of work with specialist astronomers to see if there's potentially alignments with these kind of longer cycles, these longer moon cycles. We're still trying to work out if that is the case or not, but they're not as obvious as this kind of main solstice alignment. One thing we know is that we have seen solstice connections across different monuments from this period of time.
10:11Vincent Gaffney:There's a site called Woodhenge, which is a wooden monument. It's kind of like the sister monument of Stonehenge in wood. It's a similar size and it's a series of concentric wooden circles. It had very similar kind of solstice alignments as well as Stonehenge. So we think they're marking this possibly in multiple places. And one thing that's also really interesting about Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is, is that after the last ice age, which is about 10 ,000 years ago, it kind of remained a more open area, kind of a grassland with trees along the edges. A lot of Britain at that time became heavily wooded.
10:44Vincent Gaffney:So it was this kind of more naturally open landscape and it sort of lends itself to, you know, watching the sky, I guess you could say.
10:51Larissa Palethorpe:But who were the people who were there four and a half thousand years ago? What do we know about the architects of Stonehenge?
10:58Vincent Gaffney:The people who built Stonehenge and a lot of the other monuments in that area are from a time called the Neolithic, what we call the end of the Stone Age. These are early farmers. These are people who originated from Europe and had traveled across Europe with this sort of farming culture. So for the first time, using domesticated crops and animals. So it's a huge transition in human life. It's probably the biggest change we ever had in human existence to go from a lifestyle of hunter-gathering to a more subtle farming existence. And these people arrived in Britain around 6 ,000 years ago, they're there for quite a long time before they start building monuments like Stonehenge.
11:39Vincent Gaffney:Stonehenge is about 1 ,500 years later. And there's a period of time where they just do really start building all these large monuments. So there's definitely something going on in society at this period of time. And I think one thing that's interesting is these people, even though they're farmers, they're herding animals. They're moving around a lot seasonally with large herds of animals. So these monuments, you know, can act as anchors in landscape, you know, places people are returning to on a seasonal basis, trade goods, have feasts, have celebrations, maybe helping people understand the calendar or also if the sun didn't return and do its job, especially in the winter, when you have these dying days, you know, essentially where the light is literally dying, you need to kind of maybe do something, something religious to evoke that return of the sun to make you feel okay, that things are going to be okay, the spring's going to come, the summer's going to come, you're going to thrive as a society.
12:34Vincent Gaffney:Perhaps there's some religious belief around that return of the light, which I think in some ways we still have today with our own, you know, sort of winter holidays. We all are looking for that kind of bit of light at that time of year.
12:46Larissa Palethorpe:Jennifer Wexler there from English Heritage.
12:56Richard Bevins:and IP engineering services for UK businesses. Find out how Spitfire can empower your company
13:02Larissa Palethorpe:at spitfire.co.uk.
Read the full transcript
13:07Jennifer Wexler:Music in the programme is sponsored by Epidemic Sound, perfect music for audio and video productions.
13:13Larissa Palethorpe:This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith, and today, Stonehenge and the celebration of the summer solstice. in a minute why stonehenge doesn't stand alone and in fact appears to be part of a much bigger development over that part of the country but first stonehenge is composed of 93 visible stones a mixture of massive sarsen megaliths and smaller so-called foreign or blue stones for decades their origins have been a mystery which a team at the university of aberystwyth have been trying to crack. For more than a century archaeologists believed that the altar stone, the famous six tonne sandstone slab at the centre of Stonehenge, was transported from West Wales and they grouped it in with Stonehenge's other blue stones.
14:03Larissa Palethorpe:But after analysing rock samples from across modern Britain scientists found that the stone's mineral composition is not Welsh. In 2024 researchers then concluded that the altar stone may in fact have been brought from Scotland instead. But did humans drag it there or did the Ice Age do some of the work for them? Richard Bivins has studied Stonehenge for over 15 years.
14:28Richard Bevins:So when you're standing at a distance looking at Stonehenge there are some very very large stones. Those stones are called the sarsens and they're sandstones and they're derived relatively locally, perhaps 25, 30 kilometres away. Then there's a set of smaller stones, and those were referred to in the early days as the foreign stones, because early geologists realised they didn't come from that area. So you've got this mix of two different rock types.
15:00Larissa Palethorpe:What processes can a geologist go through then to work out where a rock comes from?
15:04Richard Bevins:So fortunately, these days, we have a whole range of analytical equipment. It's a bit like forensic science. So we actually x-ray the rock. If we've got fragments, there's material in museum collections that has been collected from the 1800s. And we can look at that material and use these investigative techniques.
15:28Larissa Palethorpe:So what did people, before you had those techniques, what did they think were the origins of the foreign stones? Did they sort of look at them and say, well, they look like rocks that we find in place X, Y and Z, therefore they could have come from there?
15:40Richard Bevins:That's very much the case, Chris. Yeah, so some of the early geologists, this is going back to the 1840s, 1850s, when travelling around the country wasn't necessarily simple and many areas hadn't been geologically surveyed. They were looking at samples, passing them to other geologists, and they're saying, well, this looks as though it could come from North Wales, or this could come from Devon. So there was lots of that kind of rather loose speculation. Then along came the advent of looking at rocks under a microscope, so a very thin wafer, and passing light through that and looking down the microscope and identifying the minerals present.
16:22Richard Bevins:So that was where the science of petrography came from. And that was applied to the stones at Stonehenge in the 1920s by a geologist called H. H. Thomas, who worked for the Geological Survey. And he'd been mapping down in West Wales, getting to grips with understanding the geology. And he made that link for these foreign stones to come from West Wales.
16:46Larissa Palethorpe:So he said they look like the ones from south West Wales, therefore they probably are. That was an extraordinary idea in and of itself, because that's still a very long way. when we're talking about moving literally tons of rock over what must be hundreds of miles, that's still a feat in and of itself.
17:00Richard Bevins:Very much, Chris, and some of the early thinking stemmed from one observation that Thomas made that there was one very odd stone in amongst this bluestone assemblage at Stonehenge, the so-called altar stone towards the centre of the stone circle. and that he couldn't match confidently to the particular area he thought the rest of the blue stones came from the hills of the presele the man of presele and he almost not in desperation but he didn't know quite what to do and then he thought well where's the nearest sandstone of this type the altar stone type and he saw a match to milford haven so he speculated that the stones were brought down from the Presellers to Milford Haven.
17:47Richard Bevins:They were put on rafts and they added a stone at that point, the altar stone, and then they rafted them up the Bristol Channel. So it drove that thinking about transporting them by water up the Bristol Channel.
18:02Larissa Palethorpe:But when did it become apparent that actually that altar stone may have come from even farther afield? Because that's the hypothesis, isn't it? That it's actually come from Scotland.
18:11Richard Bevins:That hypothesis went unchallenged. And there's a bit of circular thinking. The foreign stones were called bluestones. And so you've got stones from West Wales, which are all of a particular type. You can match them up to outcrops in the Presellers. And you've got this odd one. But because it had been put in with the bluestones, and called a bluestone, then Thomas wanted it to come from the same area. And it wasn't until about four or five years ago that we'd researched trying to find the source of the altar stone in West Wales. And we thought it was going to be a stone of the, broadly, the Devonian age, somewhere around 400, 395 million years old.
18:52Richard Bevins:And we got to the Welsh borderlands, and effectively, that's where the geology stopped of that type. And we still hadn't found a source for it. And at that point, we took a step back and said, right, well, it might not come from Wales. And in fact, why are we calling it a bluestone? They're calling it a bluestone because Thomas called it a bluestone, and we've just followed that. So if we separate it out, then we can broaden our horizons. So what led you to Scotland? We've got certain areas of the British Isles where we get that particular type of geology in northern Britain, right the way up to Orkney and Shetland.
19:31Richard Bevins:And we joined with a team from Curtin University in Australia who have got labs that can do age dating and look at the age of minerals in the sandstone. And we can date crystals that are in the sandstone. And we suddenly got very, very, very, very old ages on a mineral type called zircon. And that precluded anything from Southern Britain. You only find them in Northern Britain and in particular in Northern Scotland.
20:02Larissa Palethorpe:And for people unfamiliar with the anatomy of the UK, how many miles is that?
20:09Richard Bevins:Up to about 700 kilometres. In the debates about Stonehenge and the Blue Stones and the Altarstone, the two schools of thought, were they transported by humans or were they transported by ice during the last glaciation or even earlier glaciations? And so the material was moved under natural processes. There's also a sort of middle ground. Was the stone, the Altarstone moved part way, and this is work that's just been published by our colleagues in Australia who have proposed a sort of midway point where the altar stone was transported by ice and then the last part by humans. The difficulty is there's no strong geological evidence either way.
20:59Larissa Palethorpe:And the weight of that rock? Six tonnes? Quite an effort, isn't it? Quite an effort. You can see why a geological argument is quite attractive. But what would have attracted those people to that rock? Is there anything special about it? Or would it have in some way got their attention that meant that they wanted that one and made it the centrepiece? Or was it already there and or nearby and just convenient and it just fitted the bill because it was right shape, right size. Let's just use that.
21:28Richard Bevins:That's quite tempting. The one thing we don't know about the altar stone is when it actually arrived at Stonehenge. It's much heavier than the other blue stones. It's a distinctive rock type. There's no evidence that that altar stone was ever put into vertical position. It's now flat lying and it may have been flat lying the whole time. So there's lots of anomalies about the altar stone, which our archaeology colleagues are well into considering the significance of it and if it was human transport, how did they transport it that distance?
22:06Larissa Palethorpe:How indeed. Richard Bevins at the University of Aberystwyth on the geological mysteries of Stonehenge. Now finally today, we're going to examine where the Stonehenge is in fact part of a much larger prehistoric landscape in its locale. Vincent Gaffney at the University of Bradford has been using cutting-edge geophysical and remote sensing technology to create a detailed archaeological map of the hidden ancient landscape around the site. It's found many hidden structures such as ceremonial enclosures, burial mounds and ditches and showed that Stonehenge did not stand in isolation. On the contrary, this was an area of major ceremonial significance.
22:45Richard Bevins:Most of the work had been concentrated on the bits you could see, all the lumps and bumps, the monuments which were known about, but it left large areas of the landscape in which there appeared to be nothing. And the consequence of that was we started to write histories and archaeologies on the basis of what we didn't know about the majority of the landscape.
23:09Larissa Palethorpe:So your suspicion was the Stonehenge is there as one very visible thing, but there's a lot there that just hadn't been taken into account and that might be distorting our interpretation
23:20Richard Bevins:the monuments of course are very impressive they're very well known but the area around stonehenge for instance it begun to be interpreted as an area where people did not go and it was surrounded by round barrows cordon of the illustrious dead beyond which it was presumed that people did not enter and probably that the area around was in some sense taboo. That only stood up on the basis of what we didn't know about the landscape rather than anything else.
23:54Larissa Palethorpe:How did you approach it then? How did you say, well, look, we need a more comprehensive analysis. We need to build the big picture. What was your approach?
24:02Richard Bevins:Clearly, excavation wasn't the answer. You can do excavation. You can only generally do small parts of any site, if we're lucky. And in a World Heritage Site, you don't want to dig up everything. We turned to geophysics. We decided to apply a magnetometers, radars, various imaging devices, and try and create a sweep across the landscape, left to right, top to bottom, to investigate those areas we knew nothing about.
24:33Larissa Palethorpe:How big is the area you considered?
24:36Richard Bevins:Around 12 square kilometres. That at the time was pretty much the largest survey of its type. Actually, though, we probably surveyed about 20 square kilometres, taking into account the different technologies that we applied. When you took all that data, what was the big picture? It certainly wasn't all empty. Almost immediately, in fact, we started finding new monuments in areas which had previously been blank. And equally importantly, monuments that we thought we knew about when we resurveyed them, we found that they often overlaid other monuments or had different structures that we'd never suspected.
25:20Larissa Palethorpe:I'm thinking Stonehenge is a circle, so there must be some significance to having a circular shape. Were there concentric circles or was there evidence of a wider format where one thing flowed into another? Could you get kind of usage patterns or how it might have worked as an important ceremonial significant site based on the structures that you began to find?
25:42Richard Bevins:Everything in British prehistory seems to be circular. However, things were a bit different when we started looking at this. There was, for instance, the suggestion that there was something called the Stonehenge Envelope. This is the area of visibility from Stonehenge. And around the edges of it, large numbers of barrows accumulated. The King Barrow Ridge, the Cursus Barrows, Normanton Down Group, things like that. However, we found something a bit different. To the north of Stonehenge, there is the Cursus. It's an immense monument, several kilometers long, 100 plus meters wide. Great big enclosure.
26:24Richard Bevins:Frequently, this was viewed in the past as a bit of a barrier to the north around which people would have to come to approach Stonehenge. In fact, one of the big things that we found when we surveyed the Cursus is that there is a fair number of small gaps, entrances in the south of the Cursus monument and a large entrance to the north. Instead of blocking, this seems to suggest that people were being guided through the monument to the area where Stonehenge was going to be built about a thousand years later. Now, that's a bit different. This suggests that this wasn't an area within which people were not allowed to come.
27:08Richard Bevins:In fact, it rather suggests that people were being directed into it. It wasn't an empty area. Probably large numbers of people were gathering here at certain times of the year. They may not have been allowed into Stonehenge or along the ceremonial avenue, which leads to it from the Avon. But I suspect there were a lot more people there than we realised in the past. So the people came and Stonehenge came later.
27:35Larissa Palethorpe:Do we know why they liked or favoured that geography so much? Why was it so significant?
27:41Richard Bevins:The area was becoming significant before Stonehenge is actually built. We have evidence for a number of sites from the Mesolithic, the hunter-gatherer period, before the Neolithic, during which Stonehenge is built, which is obviously associated with agriculture. There are, for instance, a number of very large pits to the north of Stonehenge in the old car park. There's a very big pit, which may be something about pit trapping or something similar. And to the north of Vespasian's camp, there is one of the largest Mesolithic sites in the country, Blikmede. It's associated with the spring as well.
28:22Richard Bevins:So there may have been many things which attracted people to the area. But why it became quite so significant, we can't actually say. But when that happened, what occurred was an increasing elaboration of the site over time, perhaps more and more people being attracted to it, and the monumentalisation of the whole landscape, not just the area of Stonehenge itself, proceeded with a pace.
28:49Larissa Palethorpe:Jennifer was saying to us earlier in the programme that there's evidence that people might have had a practice using other materials before they built Stonehenge proper. Do you see any evidence of that in the wider landscape where people were having trial runs or building smaller versions that then perhaps informed how they were going to approach Stonehenge?
29:10Richard Bevins:There's evidence for numbers of enclosures. I'm not so sure that we could derive that from the evidence we've got. It's just important to realise that the landscape becomes more and more elaborate as time goes by and Stonehenge becomes the focus of that work.
29:28Larissa Palethorpe:I always think it must have been an absolutely awe-inspiring and amazing place to see for the prehistoric people who visited it back in the day. That was Vincent Gaffney. He's at the University of Bradford. And that is it for this episode. But we will have the latest science news for you on Friday when we'll hear how antibodies can even work inside our cells to fight infections. We'll also have our usual updates on LinkedIn, on X and on Instagram. And if you'd like to support our work, we would be extremely grateful. You can do that at nakedscientist.com forward slash donate. I'm Chris Smith. Thanks for listening.
30:06Larissa Palethorpe:If you'd like to drop me a line, it's chris at thenakedscientist.com. Until next time, thank you for your company and goodbye.
