There’s a lot to do at Stonehenge, but I’ll start with the obvious: stones. There are many, and they’re not all the same. The path up to the site takes you to a close vantage point (and a good place for photos) from which you look south east across to the monument. Many are fallen on this side, so as you move to right and left you can see into the centre of the henge.

The first thing to notice is that there are two sizes and shapes of stone. Most are large and slab-like, and include horizontal lintels: these are made from sarsen, a hard sandstone sourced from within 20 miles. The smaller more rounded pillars, with no lintels, are the bluestones. Most of these are igneous rocks brought from south-west Wales (behind you), a journey of more than 200 miles. The completed Stonehenge had a ring of 30 standing sarsens supporting a ring of 30 lintels. These surrounded five groups, each of two taller sarsens independently supporting a lintel, known as trilithons. The trilithons stood on a horseshoe plan open to the rising midsummer sun to the north-east (roughly to your left). Bluestones (many more than there are now) were arranged in a ring inside the sarsen circle, and more stood inside the horseshoe, again mirroring the plan.

A closer look

The more you look, the more you see. Every stone is different. Sarsens were heavily dressed with stone hammers, and when the light is right you can sometimes pick out effects of such work, shallow parallel grooves and smoothed surfaces. You can see many irregular hollows left from the original boulders. At the base of one large standing sarsen is a curious flat block: this is concrete, put there in the 1960s to fill a large natural hole that the authorities worried was unsafe. Look closely at the top of that stone and toward the right edge you can see a lump like an upturned bowl. This is a tenon, carefully carved, that would have fitted into a hollow or mortise in the lintel that it and its partner supported, to form a trilithon. The two missing stones are beyond in the grass, each broken into three pieces.

Continuing to the right is another stone with a tenon on top, smooth, thin and the tallest of them all, restored to a perfect vertical in 1901. This is part of the Great Trilithon, which once framed the setting midwinter sun to the right. Its partner stone and battered lintel lie on the ground behind. Just in front is a small, leaning, rounded megalith with a groove the length of one side. It’s thought that this uniquely shaped bluestone once fitted a partner with a ridged side, of which only a stump survives. Behind rise two complete trilithons, one of them with a particularly finely carved lintel.

• Want to sort your lintels from your trilithons? Mike Pitts explores the secrets of Stonehenge and how it was built

Upon arrival 

The Stonehenge visitor centre is more than a ticket office. Make sure to spend an hour there, either before you set out for the Stones or after you return.

Stonehenge today is surrounded by fields, mostly grassland. You will park your car or leave your bus on the edge of the World Heritage Site. The visitor centre, designed by Australian architects Denton Corker Marshall to have a light touch on the landscape and to avoid referencing the stones in its shapes or materials, opened in 2013. As you enter a roofed passage from the car park, you face the direction of Stonehenge, which is 1.5 miles away over the horizon. This is where you buy your ticket (free for English Heritage and National Trust members).

As well as a café, shop and toilets, the centre contains a museum-quality display about the monument and its times, with a striking CGI video, and original artefacts and human remains from excavations in the area, loaned by museums in Devizes and Salisbury (which both have their own Stonehenge displays). There is also a small gallery for changing special displays. Outside stand three reconstructed Neolithic houses, based on excavated evidence from a village at Durrington Walls, two miles beyond Stonehenge to the north-east, and two small megaliths you can handle. These were quarried recently from Stonehenge stone – sarsen and a common type of bluestone.

Listen | Mike Pitts answers listener questions on Britain’s most famous prehistoric monument, Stonehenge, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Setting out for the stones

You may have good reasons for taking the special bus from the visitor centre to the stones (postponing the moment you must step out into the rain among the possibilities) but if you can walk, I recommend doing so. Allow half an hour. A signed path will start you off, soon leading to a pedestrian gate onto National Trust land where you can roam freely. From here you can see a bank of trees on the horizon – Fargo Wood. Head for the gap where the plantation has been removed to protect a great Neolithic earthwork known as the Cursus (named by William Stukeley in the 18th century, he thought it was a Roman racetrack). It’s difficult to make out now, but when you reach the next gate, you will find an information panel on the other side which will help you understand this earliest monumental effort by people marking the landscape.

Continue walking and you will find another gate, which opens into the woodland and a round burial mound, an unusually large Bronze Age barrow known as the Monarch of the Plain. Turn left, pass another barrow and a superb view opens up which includes Stonehenge, before you reach another information panel. From here you can wander across the grass to the stones, or turn towards the road (pedestrians and Stonehenge buses only) where there is a stone cross raised in memory of Major Hewetson, killed in a flying accident in 1913 – Salisbury Plain was a scene of aerial pioneers. Stonehenge is just up the road.

Exploring the site

If by now you’ve developed a taste for the landscape, keep going! As you do so, appreciate good views of Stonehenge. Walking out from Fargo Wood you will soon reach a fine group of burial mounds known as the Cursus Barrows. Continue to the fence and follow the Cursus (turning left at the gate) or head towards Stonehenge and the Avenue earthwork (turning right). Ahead of you in the distance is King Barrow Ridge, with more trees and more barrows. There are more good views from this ridge, and from here you can walk north and east, away from Stonehenge, to reach Woodhenge and Durrington Walls, two important parts of the Stonehenge ceremonial world.

There are two excellent aids to finding your way around this countryside. English Heritage publishes a large-scale annotated walking map, and you can downland a variety of guided walks from the National Trust’s Stonehenge Landscape website.

• Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

A final bit of Stonehenge magic

There remains just one more trick. For one of the world’s great heritage experiences, you can walk among the stones with no more than 30 people outside normal opening hours, in early morning or late afternoon. Book well ahead with English Heritage (look online for Stone Circle Experience), or join a commercial tour.

As an archaeologist, an intense interest in Stonehenge is supposed to be a given. It must surely be my favourite site, a place I regularly visit to hug standing stones? And yet, I can’t bring myself to love Stonehenge. My relationship with this monument is, as I am sure is the case for many archaeologists, complicated. This is because it means so much to so many people, and it exists in so many contexts outside of archaeology, that is has ceased to simply be an archaeological site, a thing of the past alone. In fact, it is much easier to make sense of what Stonehenge was four or five thousand years ago than pin down exactly what it means today, and I think that makes (some) archaeologists uncomfortable.

Taken purely on its archaeological merits, there is no doubt that it is impossible for a prehistorian like me to ignore Stonehenge. I need add nothing to the countless books and articles that have been written about it and the complex prehistoric landscape it sits within, rightly designated a World Heritage Site. The ever-increasing volume of radiocarbon dates, excavation results, and geophysical surveys, inform how the monument is now displayed to the public, what we are able to write about it, and how the site developed from the Mesolithic period onwards. Each new theory is presented as finally sorting Stonehenge out, until another excavation or idea comes along. There is also no doubt that Stonehenge and the landscape that it sits within is internationally significant. The stone circle itself is spectacular and unique (another way of saying this is that it is weird and anomalous).

But Stonehenge is much more than just a fantastic archaeological site. Unlike hundreds of stone circles in the UK, it has escaped the specialist world of archaeologists to belong to millions across the world. Stonehenge has transcended the genre of megalith and is now a celebrity stone circle. It is only because it consists of mute standing stones that it has not been asked to appear on The Masked Singer or head to the jungle with Ant and Dec. This is no longer a Neolithic monument – it is a pop culture phenomenon, and not just in Britain.

Stonehenge is known the world over, to the extent that there are almost 100 replica Stonehenges globally, from Australia to China, and from Indonesia to America. Only Elvis has more tribute acts. Lovingly documented in the Clonehenge website, 20th and 21st century versions of Stonehenge almost always replicate the famous trilithons of the sarsen phase of Stonehenge. This is also a place that like many celebs has had some work done; in fact, by the 19th century many standing stones had fallen over. Concrete and cranes were used to put the site back together between 1901 and the late 1950s. These facelifts kept Stonehenge looking younger than ever, and most visitors don’t even know about it. This is a monument that is as much a product of modern ingenuity as ancient building skills, a replica, perhaps even a parody, of itself.

It is difficult to escape from Stonehenge sometimes. Stories about the monument crop up seemingly monthly in print and social media, reporting on new research, the latest controversy, or just rehashing old stories to fill up column inches and live newsfeeds. Stonehenge is the perfect archaeological site for the 24-hour media world that we now live in. Even the most modest academic piece of research is relayed across the world in hours, while weird and wild theories can easily fill a two-page spread in a tabloid. Stonehenge stories are not immune to fake news either, with over-interpretation, political spin, hyperbole, and sometimes downright nonsense feeding the Stonehenge news cycle.

Stonehenge also has so many film and TV credits that I am surprised it does not have its own page on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). It has appeared (for real, or in replica form) in films as diverse as Curse of the Demon (1957), Halloween 3 (1982), National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985) and Transformers: the Last Knight (2017). Stonehenge has been blown up on multiple occasions, notably in the film Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010) but also in bouncy castle form in Jeremy Deller’s inflatable Stonehenge artwork Sacrilege (2012). Bands have become obsessed with Stonehenge, from Hawkwind to Spinal Tap to The KLF, while the stones are now viewed as an essential photo opportunity for British prime ministers and US presidents, and a host of others: Spongebob Squarepants, Miley Cyrus, Buzz Aldrin, Janet Jackson, Christopher Walken, to name but a few.

These photoshoots and associated media attention and clicks are welcomed by English Heritage, the agency responsible for the conveyor belt of visitors who turn up each year, many of them on day trips from cruise ships. The stone circle even has its own marketing manager – in effect, an agent. Stonehenge is on millions of bucket lists across the world. Pre-pandemic, well over 1 million people visited Stonehenge per annum, and in their 2019/20 annual report, English Heritage called the monument “our most financially important site”. They sell a lot of Stonehenge merchandise, from dish cloths to Christmas jumpers. English Heritage also offer visitors a VIP experience, a chance to cross the ropes and get inside the stone circle, at a cost of £53 including a guidebook. This is the equivalent of an ‘access all areas’ backstage pass for superfans with the means to make their dream come true, returning home with photos, memories, and a programme. But if Stonehenge really is roll as well as rocks, it is very much an Establishment monument, more Elton John than the Sex Pistols.

A Stonehenge obsession?

Like many celebrities these days, Stonehenge has become an influencer. It is a meme, beloved by instagrammers, advertisers and creative types. My attempt to quantify this by using the hashtag #StonehengeAnything proved astonishing; there are almost no nouns or verbs that have not been connected to Stonehenge by someone somewhere, whether that be in photos, photoshopped images, corporate branding, cartoons, merchandise or in food form. There is an obsession with Stonehenge across the world that cannot be replicated by any other prehistoric monument, except perhaps Egypt’s great pyramids.

Yet this is worrying as the only information most people get about the Neolithic period is via Stonehenge, whether through visiting the site, reading media stories, liking a cartoon of Stonehenge with a vampire standing beside it, or sharing a photo of Stonehenge made of sausages and beans on Twitter. This means that Stonehenge is now increasingly being viewed by some archaeologists as a sneaky way of imparting information about prehistoric people and lifeways to the public, the archaeological equivalent of blitzing soup to hide the vegetables from children. Last Christmas, English Heritage promoted a story suggesting that the builders of Stonehenge ate something approximating to mince pies and energy bars; misleading in terms of Neolithic diet, but it got a lot of impressions.

The fact that Stonehenge has become clickbait fodder even for archaeologists and the site’s managers suggests that celebrity Stonehenge might actually be a problem. Viewing all of Neolithic Britain through the lens of one monument and its surrounding landscape shuts down an understanding of the diversity of lives lived in that period, and uses up bandwidth that could be used to share stories about other amazing (and equally informative and significant) Stone and Bronze Age sites up and down the country. There has historically been, and continues to be a disproportionate quantity of money, time, resources, and archaeologists’ brain cells spent on Stonehenge and its surrounding landscape, which diminishes our understanding of, and ability to appreciate, contemporary sites and monuments across Britain. Sadly this imbalance is now also ingrained in the public consciousness.

In the 1980s, running battles were fought over access to Stonehenge, and since then arguments and tensions around the monument have only increased. Should there be a tunnel or not? How much access should the public get? How can we manage solstice and equinox events equitably? Which type of archaeologist is best placed to carry out excavation in the World Heritage Site? Who owns Stonehenge? Energy and money wasted on planning disputes and security is energy and money that could be better spent in other ways in heritage and beyond; angry letters, emails and social media campaigns are another needless waste of time.

• Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

Celebrity culture can be toxic, and Stonehenge is no different. But this should not deflect from the breakout success of this stone circle to become much more than the sum of its megalithic parts; Stonehenge has been on a journey. This is a monument that brings happiness to many people, often in relation to their own mental health and wellbeing as has been so ably demonstrated by the collaborative Human Henge project. English Heritage’s Your Stonehenge initiative has gathered together 150 years of personal photographs of the monument. The resultant exhibition draws on the fact that “for millions of people around the world, Stonehenge holds special memories,” and I can’t think of any other stone circle that could come anywhere close to this.

The world of Stonehenge exhibition in the British Museum is another good news story. My hope is that it will rebalance our relationship with Stonehenge, expose misleading interpretations of the Neolithic world through this site, encourage a broader understanding of prehistoric places and peoples beyond the Wiltshire bubble, and provide a platform for a future for Stonehenge that benefits us all.

Dr Kenny Brophy is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and writes about prehistoric sites and monuments at The Urban Prehistorian. You can find him on Twitter @urbanprehisto

Stonehenge is, for many of us, the one place that represents Britain’s prehistory. The celebrated stone circle standing proud on Salisbury Plain with its trademark lintel-topped sarsens has been an enduring source of fascination for millennia. The first monument there, a circular ditch and bank, was dug in c2900 BC, and a timber or stone circle erected inside it. Then, much later, in c2400 BC, the first monoliths of local rock were brought in. Over the course of the next several hundred years, stones were put up, taken down, moved around, added to, and then finally re-erected to the shape we see today.

Stonehenge is undeniably a stone circle, but it’s not a henge, even though it has lent its name to the group of monuments that go under that title. The concept of the ‘henge’ was introduced by a man called Thomas Kendrick in 1932 and technically, a henge is a circular earthen bank with a ditch inside it and one or more entrances through the bank. At Stonehenge, there is a circular bank, but it is inside a ditch, so these elements are the wrong way round. Nevertheless, stone circles and henges do appear to be connected parts of a tradition that developed in Britain from around 3000 to 2000 BC – in other words, during the later Neolithic period (when agriculture began here) and moving into the earlier Bronze Age (when we see the first use of metals, from about 2400 BC).

Stone circles are often positioned within henges, sometimes in replacement for earlier timber circles, so there is a link between the two types of monument, though it’s not an absolutely clear one, as Richard Bradley explains: “Henges and stone circles are separate things that often coalesce. You’ve got plenty of stone circles that don’t have henges, and plenty of henges that don’t have stone circles. They each can pursue an independent existence but they are both different expressions of a more basic idea that special places ought to be circular, which seems quite natural to us, but large parts of Europe don’t have circular monuments in prehistory.”

• Stonehenge: a prehistoric tourist trap
• 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain 

It’s possible that the tradition has its origins in northern Britain, perhaps in Orkney, and spread south from there. Stone circles number 1,000 across the country, while there are around 120 henges known. Given the large size of some of these places, the construction of these monuments would have required a considerable number of people to build them. They indicate a “massive control of labour” in the view of Richard Bradley, and what’s particularly odd is that we don’t know where these labourers lived. Their monuments survive, but their houses (rare exceptions aside, particularly in Orkney) are lost to us, so in the later Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age, these henges and stones circles seem to have been the prime concerns of the people who built them.

What we do know is people were coming from a distance to these places. Settlements are not always found in their immediate vicinity. Combined with finds of exotic objects in and around the circles, the evidence from isotope analysis of the bones of animals eaten at these sites points to the fact that people were travelling to get to them. “I think we can start to talk about pilgrimage,” says Richard Bradley. What were they coming to do? Well, eating seems to have been a big thing. Feasting, particularly on pork, is attested by excavated remains of animal bones.

Similarly, archaeological finds indicate that burial and commemoration of the dead also appears to have been going on. There was the deliberate deposition of unusual objects in the ground. Also, the observation of basic astronomical events would appear to have been practised, as many of the monuments have alignments that lend themselves to the solstices. Those are the main things that we can talk about with any sense of certainty, but of course that hasn’t stopped archaeologists and others from coming up with a multitude of theories about the purpose of these places.

What’s interesting is that their role seems to shift over time, notes Richard Bradley: “There’s a gradual change from public buildings – big houses I call them – where we see wooden structures with a lot of animal bone and a lot of debris, to stone settings usually with cremation burials. Then there’s a very last phase of use at stone circles which is perhaps more northern than southern. They were used all over again in the late Bronze Age (1200–800 BC) as cremation cemeteries and cremation pyres.”

So these circular monuments have had a long life and no doubt have meant different things to different people. That’s an attribute they maintain to this day, as anyone passing Stonehenge on a solstice will be able to confirm.

9 places to visit

Where you can see how stone circles sat within ritual landscapes

One of the interesting points about henges and stone circles is that they don’t exist in isolation. They are often surrounded by burial mounds, to create wider ritual landscapes. At The Hurlers, on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, there are three well-preserved stone circles arranged over open ground in a line, a grouping which is unusual in itself.

As with many of these sites, we don’t have definite dates for their construction, but they are assumed to be late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. Not far away at Rillaton was an early Bronze Age burial mound, which was dug into in the 19th century. It turned out to be one of the richest early Bronze Age burials discovered.

A skeleton was found along with a fabulous gold cup, the Rillaton Cup, and numerous other objects. Curiously this cup found its way into the royal household where it was used to store the collar studs of King George V, before it was passed on to the British Museum, where it can still be seen today.

Visit www.english-heritage.org.uk

Where stones replaced timber circles

In and around this small village south of Bristol, there are three stone circles grouped together, along with a three-stone cove (a cove being a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of stones) in a pub garden, plus some bits of avenues of paired stones leading into the circles. It adds up to one of the largest collections of prehistoric standing stones in the country.

There doesn’t seem to have been a substantial earthwork here, but geophysical survey
has suggested that the stones replaced timber structures, one of which is probably the biggest timber setting that we know of from the Neolithic. The process of replacing timber with stone is repeated elsewhere across the country and might be associated with the idea of moving away from the use of public places linked with the living to more private sites of the dead. Interestingly, the stones used here come from a number of different local sources, so it may be that different groups of people were contributing labour and materials.

Visit www.english-heritage.org.uk

Where the tradition of henge building may have begun

Orkney is a paradise for Neolithic enthusiasts, so much so that a large part of it has been designated as a World Heritage Site. Aside from the astonishingly well-preserved Neolithic village at Skara Brae and the magnificently atmospheric chambered tomb of Maes Howe, there’s a stunning pair of stone circles – the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness – opposing each other across an isthmus. The sharp, sometimes triangular, standing stones are set in breathtaking scenery and are worth visiting for that alone.

Their significance in this story is great. The radiocarbon dates from excavated material at the Stones of Stenness suggest that it’s towards the beginnings of both the henge and stone circle traditions. The site is also associated with a style of pottery – grooved ware – that seems to originate in Orkney and travel south with henges and stone circles. As Richard Bradley notes: “The odds are that the henge idea originates in the north and the west.” Even more interesting however is that these henges and circles lie within a much larger Neolithic landscape including several Neolithic settlements (they survive here because the paucity of timber meant that house construction was in stone rather than wood).

The late Neolithic village of Barnhouse is completely contemporary with the nearby Stones of Stenness, and another settlement near the Ring of Brodgar is under excavation now. It’s very unusual to see settlements so close to these types of monuments and the fact that the evidence survives in Orkney adds an extra dimension to the stone circles and henges here.

Visit www.historic-scotland.gov.uk

Where you can consider how a henge might have altered reality

One of the largest, and most famous, henge and stone circles in Britain, Avebury has one major circle, with a horseshoe-shaped cove setting inside it, and two further circles as well. There is also likely evidence of a timber circle. It had two avenues of paired stones, one of which leads to another stone circle known as The Sanctuary. The dating is not good but the site was probably created around 2400 BC.

The henge is a very substantial earthwork and there’s a great day to be had wandering around the place, being towered over by the great lumpen stones in their settings.

It’s an excellent place to consider just how much labour the creation of some of these sites would have consumed, and of course to ponder why they were built. The huge size of the henge earthworks here might get you thinking about one of Richard Bradley’s theories:

“These earthworks of henges are great screens: they make a completely excluded space, you can’t see in if you’re not a participant and you can’t see out if you are a participant. One of the things that’s very odd with henges is the internal ditch. One argument is that it’s a defence in reverse to stop something powerful escaping. Another is that in most societies, in social anthropology, rites of passage involve a phase of seclusion where the norms of normal existence are explicitly reversed, and I do wonder if we’re talking about something like that.”

The village of Avebury is not an inversion of reality – though it is partly encompassed by the stone circle – and there you’ll find the Alexander Keiller Museum, which displays finds from excavations at this World Heritage Site.

Visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Where the prehistoric builders seem to be leading you on a journey

This is a large henge monument boasting a substantial bank and ditch with two entrances, inside which is a circle of some 50 white limestone slabs, now lying on their sides, and a central horseshoe-shaped cove. The setting is in the high moorland of the Peak District, and Richard Bradley describes how Arbor Low might be designed with the power of the Peaks in mind: “It has one narrow entrance and one wide one. If you go in through the narrow entrance, you enter from a fairly undifferentiated landscape; then if you go across the monument you get to the wide entrance on the other side which affords you a spectacular view of a large part of the Peak District.” Whether that’s a journey the prehistoric builders wanted you to take, we cannot know, but it’s interesting to speculate on the mental voyage that might have lain behind this apparently leading layout.

The henge is, in the view of Richard Bradley, later than the stone circle, and he suspects that the recumbent position of the stones is due to later Christian iconoclasm rather than incompetence on the part of the prehistoric builders in setting them originally.

Visit www.english-heritage.org.uk

Where you can think about how stones were transported

This is a very small stone circle, which is nevertheless impressive and handily just beside the road. Its location is interesting as it sits just below the Preseli Mountains, which is where the famous bluestones of Stonehenge come from. Gors Fawr is also made of bluestones and while you’re looking at this site, you might well be drawn to dwelling on the much-discussed question of how the 80 or so stones were moved the 150 miles or so east, from this part of Pembrokeshire to Wiltshire.

Henges and stone circles tend to be sited in places that were easily accessible, often in river valleys. Richard Bradley notes that this “may be metaphysical but it’s probably more to do with access”, as waterways would have served as useful transport arteries for people, and perhaps stones, in prehistory.

Visit www.megalithic.co.uk

Where the circular landscape perhaps inspired the builders

This is a very well-preserved stone circle, probably of an early date, with a peculiar inner enclosure that has never been convincingly explained, and no surrounding henge. It occupies a spectacular location, completely surrounded by a circular landscape of Lake District hills. Richard Bradley thinks this is significant: “Henges and early stone circles tend to be located in basins so that you have the optical illusion that you’ve got a circle which is built within a circle taken from nature.”

Castlerigg stands at one of the entrances to the uplands of the Lake District and it’s noteworthy this area was the biggest supplier of stone axes in Neolithic Britain, which, along with the circular landscape theory, might go some way to explaining the location of this stone circle. It certainly makes it one of the most photogenic of monuments to visit today.

Visit www.english-heritage.org.uk

Where you can track the changing purpose of a circular monument

This henge is similar to Arbor Low, in that it’s on a hill and has a narrow and wide entrance, providing the same effect of a dramatic view from the wide entrance. The place has a long history – there was some sort of stone setting before 3000 BC – and the interior is complicated. Along with the henge, it had either a stone or timber circle, and it also had a cove. What is interesting is that increasingly the interior was taken up by a burial cairn. It was begun in the early Bronze Age and, as time went by, it got bigger and bigger until it occupied quite a lot of the interior, changing it from an open area to something that’s congested.

Richard Bradley sees that as an indication that here “people are taking over and appropriating a monument that was originally conceived as communal”. This is something that seems to happen elsewhere too, perhaps in association with the arrival of metal technology. If you visit today, you can see the henge, and the burial chamber of the cairn (it has been removed), which is now displayed under a concrete dome (summer opening only). Guided tours are offered and you’ll also get good views over central Scotland, assuming you’ve come on a day when the weather is kind.

Visit www.historic-scotland.gov.uk

Where a stone circle has been raised up once more

This is a stone circle that Richard Bradley excavated, and it’s one of the rare places where we have a good date. It’s a rubble platform on a low hilltop, which was enclosed by a stone circle about 2300 BC. There is no henge and it’s got a tremendous all-round view, with an illusion of an entrance on the south-west side. It’s illusory as it is blocked by a huge stone. This false entrance is aligned exactly on a mountaintop some 20 miles away. The circle was reused in the late Bronze Age as a cremation site.

In the early part of the 20th century, the site was threatened by quarrying. Alexander Keiller, who went on to dig at Avebury, stopped its destruction, but not before the quarry workers had taken most of the stones out of their sockets and laid them flat. Following Richard Bradley’s excavations, the stones were refitted back into their sockets. Apparently it was quite obvious which hole each stone should go in as they had a very snug fit.

Visit www.historic-scotland.gov.uk

Richard Bradley is professor of archaeology at Reading University and author of The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland (Cambridge UP, 2007)

This article was first published in the January 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine

I usually start my week sat at an office desk in the heart of a busy city. Not today. This morning I find myself in the middle of a field, admiring the largest man-made mound in Europe, one that has adorned the Wiltshire countryside for 4,500 years. I’m craving coffee, my feet are soggy and it looks like it might rain. But, as Monday mornings go, a visit to Silbury Hill takes some beating.

Rising 31 metres into the sky, Silbury Hill is a seriously impressive piece of engineering, one of the most enigmatic of all the edifices left to us by Britain’s Stone Age inhabitants. But, better still, it is just one jewel in a treasure trove of Neolithic (literally meaning ‘New Stone Age’) monuments clustered around the Wiltshire village of Avebury – and, on this particular Monday morning, I’m getting a guided tour.

Dollop of guesswork

If I find myself wondering how on earth Silbury Hill got here, then I’m far from alone. It seems that people have been coming here to ponder its provenance since the arrival of the Romans 2,000 years ago. The first tourists could only employ their imaginations – and a healthy dollop of guesswork – to try to solve Silbury’s riddle.

I, on the other hand, have Dr Jim Leary, director of the Archaeological Field School at the University of Reading, to help me get to the bottom of its mysteries.

“In some ways you can compare Silbury to the early Egyptian pyramids,” says Jim. “It is roughly contemporary and it is of a comparable height and volume.”

But there the comparisons end. While the pyramids were grand statements designed to achieve maximum impact, Silbury is a lot more self-effacing. “Sure, it’s big,” says Jim. “In fact, if you plonked it in the middle of Trafalgar Square it would reach three-quarters of the way up Nelson’s Column. But come and look at the place and you’ll soon notice that it’s surrounded by hills, almost hidden in the countryside. Whoever built Silbury wasn’t trying to achieve shock and awe.”

And whoever built Silbury didn’t do so in one go, throwing it up in a few short months before sitting back and admiring their work.

“Excavations have revealed that building Silbury was a process,” says Jim. “It contains lots of layers, and these were added, little and often, over many, many years. And that’s reflected in what’s contained within the hill. There are no grandiose burials of high-status individuals here, as is the case with the pyramids. Instead, the people who built this place seem to have deposited everyday items here such as stone and antlers.”

But why? To answer this question, Jim and I leave Silbury Hill behind and make the 10-minute walk to a site that’s of equal importance to historians of Neolithic Britain – Avebury henge monument (henges are circular areas enclosed by a bank or ditch, often featuring standing stones). Approaching the henge along an ancient avenue flanked by enormous sarsen megaliths is amazing enough in itself. Yet, when you reach the henge, a huge earthen bank containing three stone circles, it becomes more evident still why the 17th‑century antiquarian John Aubrey described Avebury as a cathedral to Stonehenge’s parish church.

“We are now looking at the largest stone circle in the world,” says Jim, as we stand atop the henge looking down at the sarsen megaliths. “We think that it was constructed at about the same time as Silbury, about 2,500 BC – and that the massive bank and ditch possibly predate the stones. As to why it’s here, we have to employ some educated guesswork.”

Avebury henge clearly wasn’t built for defensive purposes. If the intention was to repel external aggressors, the ditch would have been on the outside of the henge, whereas here it is on the inside. There’s clearly something else going on entirely.

“One theory has it that it was built to welcome outsiders in – the exact opposite, as it were, of the traditional defensive ditch,” says Jim. “Another, slightly more sinister theory proposes that it was actually designed to defend people outside from something dangerous or powerful on the inside of the henge. We’ll probably never know the true reason for these stones’ existence – but it seems likely they had a spiritual purpose.”

Massive undertaking

Whatever the reason the Neolithic inhabitants of Avebury chose to build the henge, there’s one thing we can be sure of: it was one hell of an undertaking.

“The stones here are absolutely massive – the largest must be almost 100 tonnes,” says Jim. “Many of them would have lain underground, so the people here would have had to probe them, excavate them and move them into position. The level of engineering required to achieve that was extraordinary.” And that achievement speaks volumes for the complexity of the society that produced Avebury henge. “If ever you needed proof that life in the Neolithic wasn’t nasty and brutish, come to Avebury,” says Jim. “The henge is a wonderful work of human ingenuity – one that would tax even modern people. Whoever produced it were clearly capable of complex geometric artwork laden with symbolism. Sure, they had different belief systems and technologies at their disposal, but in many ways they were very similar to you and me.”

But what led these people to produce monuments such as those at Avebury and Silbury when, as far as we know, they’d never done so before? To answer this question, we have to rewind the clock 1,500 years to 4,000 BC and the dawn of the Neolithic era in the British Isles. It was around this point that the residents of these islands forsook millennia of hunting and gathering and adopted farming and sedentary living.

“We’re still not entirely sure why Britons suddenly turned to agriculture,” says Jim. “Farming is a far more work-intensive way of life. Instead of moving around taking advantage of the environment’s larder, your whole existence is dependent on what one area can – or cannot – provide. In some ways, it was a counterintuitive move.”

Counterintuitive or not, the transition to farming utterly transformed the way Britons lived. By the end of the Neolithic, they were expert woodworkers, and employed tools such as antler picks and modified cows’ shoulder blades as shovels. They were eating domesticated cows and pigs – Jim says there is evidence for some communities feasting on two dozen pigs in one sitting. And, last but not least, they had developed a very strong connection to their surroundings.

That sense of ‘place’ could well be the key to the construction of Silbury and Avebury in the third millennia BC. Containing not just these two sites but also West Kennet Long Barrow (a Neolithic chambered tomb) and Stonehenge, these few square miles in Wiltshire are to Neolithic monuments what Rome and Athens are to classical architecture. Neolithic Britons evidently attached great significance to this particular area and, says Jim, whatever it was may have flowed from Wiltshire’s water.

“There’s a congregation of rivers and springs in this area – you’ve got, for example, the nearby Swallowhead Springs forming the start of the river Kennet, which is itself fed by a winterbourne (a stream that dries up in summer) running through Avebury.

Further downstream, people were depositing items such as axes in these waters from at least the Middle Stone Age – and the best explanation we’ve got for them doing so is that they attributed some sort of spiritual significance to them.”

And that spiritual significance, says Jim, may well have extended to the sarsen stones themselves. “In the Neolithic, this area would have been littered with sarsens. The early antiquarians described how you could walk from one settlement to another on such stones without touching the ground. Those stones would have provided the huge trilithons found at Stonehenge, and we’ve also found them in the core of Silbury Hill.

I think there’s every reason to believe that our ancestors regarded them as sacred.”

The end of an era

We don’t know how many people lived in the Avebury area in the Neolithic, nor can we be sure how much communication they had with other residents of the British Isles, though the fact that there are other henges dotted around the British Isles suggests that there was probably some.

What we do know is that around the time that the monuments at Avebury and Silbury appeared, the Neolithic was coming to an end. This period witnessed the rise of the Bell-Beakers, a cultural group (originating from continental Europe) who produced elaborate pottery vessels that they buried in their graves. As Britain’s first metal-workers, they ushered in the Bronze Age.

Soon after, it appears that Avebury was abandoned and may well have remained so for centuries. All that changed during the Roman occupation of Britain, when a Roman road and a cluster of buildings (possibly including a temple) appeared in the area.

But while the Romans ushered in a brief revival for Avebury, its fortunes were to take a plunge in the Middle Ages.

“In the 14th century, Avebury’s stones were subjected to a sustained attack,” says Jim. “Many of them were pulled down, broken up and used as material in buildings. The destruction has often been framed as an act of Christian vandalism against ancient symbols of paganism. I suspect, however, that the motivation might have been more prosaic. In an era when the price of wool was booming, people needed the land on which the stones stood to graze their sheep. They may have pulled the stones down for no other reason than they got in the way.”

Whatever the reason, the stones’ future hung in the balance until the 20th century when archaeologist Alexander Keiller – the heir to a mighty marmalade business – set about restoring them to their former glories. In that, he more than succeeded. Today, 350,000 visitors make the pilgrimage to Avebury stones and henge each year. It’s a fitting tribute to what is, alongside Silbury Hill, one of the most remarkable and enduringly enigmatic monuments in the British Isles.

Jim Leary is director of the Archaeological Field School at the University of Reading

This article was first published in the November 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine

Standing proud on Salisbury Plain in southern England, Stonehenge is one of the most iconic monuments in the world. Well over a million people visit the site every year and numbers are on the rise, especially since the opening of a new visitor centre. Yet very little is really known about the structure; a complete absence of written material means that we can only speculate about its creation and significance. As a result, Stonehenge has been a constant source of conjecture, from the earliest recorded tourists to the present-day archaeologists and academics who work there.

The site, as we see it, comprises a confusing jumble of stone uprights, some capped with lintels, together with their fallen compatriots, all set within a low, circular earthwork. You can’t enter the stone circle during normal opening hours (that’s only possible on special tours), so for most visitors the site is visible only from afar: tantalising, enigmatic and out of reach.

Follow the links below to jump to each section:

• Why was Stonehenge built?
• How old is Stonehenge?
• How many stones were used to build Stonehenge?
• Where do the stones for Stonehenge come from?
• What have been the biggest threats to Stonehenge?
• 12 fascinating facts about Stonehenge

In 2018, historian Miles Russell – who was part of a team excavating within the central uprights of Stonehenge in the first archaeological investigation there for 70 years – took on the top questions about Stonehenge for BBC History Revealed…

Q: Why was Stonehenge built?

Over the years there have been many suggestions as to why the stones were set up on Salisbury Plain. The earliest interpretation was provided by Geoffrey of Monmouth who, in 1136, suggested that the stones had been erected as a memorial to commemorate British leaders treacherously murdered by their Saxon foes in the years immediately following the end of Roman Britain. The stones were, Geoffrey wrote, part of an Irish stone circle, called the Giant’s Dance, which were brought to Salisbury Plain under the direction of the wizard Merlin.

The first detailed study of the stones, conducted by the architect Inigo Jones early in the 1620s, concluded that the monument could not have been the work of the primitive Britons who “squatted in caves” and lived “on milk, roots and fruits”, but had to have been designed by the Romans, probably being a temple dedicated to Apollo.

In 1740, antiquarian William Stukeley published his history of Stonehenge, subtitled ‘A temple restored to the British druids’. Stukeley suggested that the circle had been built by a pre-Roman Celtic priesthood of Sun-worshippers descended from the Phoenicians, who had travelled to Britain from the eastern Mediterranean “before the time of Abraham”.

The first official custodian of Stonehenge, Henry Browne, wrote and privately published the first guidebook, which he sold direct to visitors in 1823. Browne’s theories, however, were shaped by the Old Testament; he postulated that the structure was antediluvian, meaning it was one of the few monuments that had survived the Biblical flood.

A popular theory within the 1960s counter-culture was that Stonehenge was an advanced form of computer or calculating device. In his 1965 book Stonehenge Decoded, astronomer Gerald Hawkins suggests that the stones had been positioned to accurately predict major astronomical events. Many of Hawkins’ ideas concerning Stonehenge as prehistoric observatory have now been dismissed, although the summer and winter equinoxes remain popular times of the year to visit the monument today.

• Your guide to Britain’s prehistoric stone circles

Listen: Mike Pitts considers how and why the monument was created, more than 4,000 years ago, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Q: How old is Stonehenge?

Damaged and distant though it undoubtedly is, Stonehenge remains awe inspiring, especially when one considers it was put together 4,500 years ago by a pre-industrial farming society using tools made of bone and stone.

As far as can be determined, work at the site began somewhere after 3000 BC, with the construction of a circular, externally ditched earthwork enclosure. Quite why this particular part of Salisbury Plain was considered important, we will never know, but the new enclosure, which contained cremation burials and settings for timber and stone uprights, including a number of bluestones from Wales, possibly acted as a form of communal cemetery.

A major change came at around 2500 BC with the addition of a horseshoe of sarsen (sandstone) trilithons surrounded by an outer circle of sarsens, all joined with lintels. The bluestones were, at this time, repositioned in a double circle between the larger sarsen settings. The Station Stones, a series of sarsens placed within the inner edge of the surrounding earthwork, may also belong to this phase, as indeed does the rearrangement of stones within the main, northeast-facing entrance to the enclosure.

The third stage of modification came between 2400 and 2300 BC with the construction of the Avenue, the recutting of the main enclosure ditch, and the reorganisation of the entrance stones. Around 2200 BC, the bluestone circle was disassembled and rearranged into two oval settings, one inside the horseshoe of sarsens and one between this and the outer sarsen uprights.

By 1800 BC, the stones were being broken and carvings were being etched into the sarsens. At some point in the late- or post-Roman period, during the 4th or 5th century AD, the bluestones were again modified, but the full extent of this alteration is unknown.

The first attempt to resolve the date of Stonehenge occurred in the 1620s during an excavation commissioned by the Duke of Buckingham. Unfortunately we know little about the work, other than it exposed at least two large pits, together with “stagges hornes and bulls hornes” and “pieces of armour eaten out with rust”. None of these finds survive. Further exploration took place in the early 19th century, work which may have contributed to the overall instability of the stones. On New Year’s Eve 1900, part of the outer circle of sarsen stones collapsed, taking down a lintel with it.

Concerns about the security of the stones led to a renewed phase of excavation and stone straightening. Between 1919 and 1926, excavations centred on the site’s southeastern quadrant. Another campaign of excavation took between 1950 and 1964, together with a programme of stabilisation, repair and stone re-erection. Although reconstruction of the monument has helped ensure the long-term survival of Stonehenge, the results of these excavations were not published until 1995.

In 2008, two smaller, targeted archaeological excavations took place within the circle. The first (which I took part in), designed to investigate the date, nature and settings of the internal smaller stones, recovered significant evidence for late- and post-Roman use of the monument. The second, which focused on retrieving cremation burials from the earliest phase of the site, demonstrated that men, women and children had all been buried there between 3000 and 2500 BC. Research published in August 2018 revealed that some of the prehistoric cremations recovered were of individuals who were not local to the monument, possibly – although this is yet to be confirmed – originating from western Wales, Ireland or northern Scotland

Archaeological investigation, limited although it has been to date, has proved helpful in establishing a building chronology for Stonehenge. No single phase of the monument, it is fair to say, was probably ever completed; it is likely that it was an ongoing building project throughout much of its existence.

Q: How many stones were used to build Stonehenge?

We don’t know for sure, as certain phases of the monument may never actually have been completed. If we assume that the outer ring of sarsens was finished, then it would have contained 30 uprights and 30 lintels. Add to this the five trilithons in the central horseshoe, that gives us 75 sarsens in total. Beyond the centre there are four additional sarsens standing today, but there are recorded holes, for those moved or taken away, for at least another ten.

In addition to the sarsens, there is the large sandstone monolith (now fallen) known as the Altar Stone, and an unknown number of bluestones. The outer circle of bluestones may originally have contained 60 uprights, although there is only certain evidence for 28 and, of those, only seven are still standing. The inner bluestone horseshoe may have contained 19, of which only six still stand. A conservative guess would suggest something in the region of 169 stones on the site at any one time.

Q:Where do the stones for Stonehenge come from?

Geologically speaking, two discrete sources can be identified for the stones used in the construction of Stonehenge. The most impressive uprights, the sarsens, were sourced locally, possibly from somewhere near the Marlborough Downs, approximately 20 miles to the north. Here, naturally occurring sarsen can still be found and, although none are today as big as those recorded from Stonehenge, it was probably from here that they were originally dug out of the ground – quite an effort considering most weigh between 30 and 40 tonnes. [In July 2020, archaeologists confirmed that the origin of the giant sarsen stones at Stonehenge has finally been discovered, pinpointing the source of the stones to an area 15 miles (25km) north of the site near Marlborough].

From Marlborough, it is likely that the roughly shaped blocks were transported across the undulating landscape of Wiltshire to their resting place on Salisbury Plain. Quite how this was achieved, given the technology and resources available to Neolithic people, continues to perplex, intrigue and annoy academics to this day.

The smaller bluestone (dolerite and rhyolite) pillars are of volcanic and igneous origin. The most likely source of them are outcrops in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, 155 miles to the west, where recent archaeological work suggests the presence of prehistoric quarries. It is possible that the stones were cut direct to order; alternatively, they may have been part of a Welsh stone circle, moved wholesale to Salisbury Plain.

Q: What have been the biggest threats to Stonehenge?

The military | Salisbury Plain has been a training ground for more than a century. Today the army is mindful of the monument, but it was not always so. Mine tests during World War I, together with tank and artillery firing practice, caused some stones to move and fracture. Then came the arrival of the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, whose aircraft skimmed the tops of the lintels as they came in to land.

Hands-on tourists | Until the late 19th century, visitors regularly chipped off pieces to take home and engraved their initials into the monument. Campers set up within the circle, digging fire pits that undermined the stability of the stones.

• In pictures: Stonehenge tourism

Human-made eyesores | Unrestricted access to the interior of Stonehenge in the mid-20th century resulted in significant erosion and an increase in picnic-related litter. Fences, paths and custodians’ huts helped to reduce the damage, but added unsightly new elements. The removal of a car park and the huts, and moving the visitor centre, has started to bring a more ‘natural’ feel to the site.

Festivalgoers | The Stonehenge Free Festival, timed to coincide with the summer solstice, brought thousands to Salisbury Plain in the 1970s and 1980s, causing significant damage to the landscape. It came to and end in 1985 after the so-called Battle of the Beanfield, in which riot police prevented travellers from entering Stonehenge to set up the festival.

Increasing traffic | To the north, the A344 passed within a few metres of the site, whilst the A303 – a main route between London and several popular holiday destinations – is close by to the south. Together, they generated ground vibration. The removal of the A344 has reduced the threat, although the A303 remains.

12 fascinating facts about Stonehenge

Here are 12 of the most important quick-fire facts about Stonehenge and its mysterious origins – from the story of its construction to its fascinating links with astronomy, and why earthworms once posed the biggest threat to its future…

Built in several stages, Stonehenge began about 5,000 years ago as a simple earthwork enclosure where prehistoric people buried their cremated dead. The stone circle was erected in the centre of the monument in the late Neolithic period, around 2500 BC.

Two types of stone are used at Stonehenge: the larger sarsens, and the smaller bluestones. Most archaeologists believe that the sarsens were brought from Marlborough Downs (20 miles away), while the bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales (140 miles). The exact method is not known, but the stones were probably hauled across the land or carried to the site using water networks.

There are many henges in Britain, but you can’t count Stonehenge among them. The term describes a raised earthwork with an internal ditch; Stonehenge’s ditch is outside its earthwork, meaning it isn’t a true henge. Avebury, several miles to the north, is probably the most famous real henge.

The sarsen stones at Stonehenge may look big (they are) but around a quarter of their bulk is buried underground for support. Stone 56, the largest surviving upright of the inner sarsen trilithon, stands 6.58 metres above ground, with 2.13 metres out of sight, giving it an overall height of 8.71 metres.

The earliest depiction of Stonehenge appears in the Scala Mundi (Chronicle of the World), compiled around 1340. The monument is drawn rather unrealistically, appearing rectangular (rather than circular) in plan.

There were originally only two entrances to the enclosure, English Heritage explains – a wide one to the north east, and a smaller one on the southern side. Today there are many more gaps – this is mainly the result of later tracks that once crossed the monument.

A circle of 56 pits, known as the Aubrey Holes (named after John Aubrey, who identified them in 1666), sits inside the enclosure. Its purpose remains unknown, but some believe the pits once held stones or posts.

The stone settings at Stonehenge were built at a time of “great change in prehistory,” says English Heritage, “just as new styles of ‘Beaker’ pottery and the knowledge of metalworking, together with a transition to the burial of individuals with grave goods, were arriving from Europe. From about 2400 BC, well furnished Beaker graves such as that of the Amesbury Arche are found nearby”.

Roman pottery, stone, metal items and coins have been found during various excavations at Stonehenge. An English Heritage report in 2010 said that considerably fewer medieval artefacts have been discovered, which suggests the site was used more sporadically during the period.

Stonehenge has a long relationship with astronomers, the 2010 English Heritage report explains. In 1720, Dr Halley used magnetic deviation and the position of the rising sun to estimate the age of Stonehenge. He concluded the date was 460 BC. And, in 1771, John Smith mused that the estimated total of 30 sarsen stones multiplied by 12 astrological signs equalled 360 days of the year, while the inner circle represented the lunar month.

In the 1880s, after carrying out some of the first scientifically recorded excavations at the site, Charles Darwin concluded that earthworms were largely to blame for the Stonehenge stones sinking through the soil.

By the beginning of the 20th century there had been more than 10 recorded excavations, and the site was considered to be in a “sorry state”, says English Heritage – several sarsens were leaning. Consequently the Society of Antiquaries lobbied the site’s owner, Sir Edmond Antrobus, and offered to assist with conservation.

Find out more about how to visit Stonehenge and book tickets with English Heritage

This article was originally published by HistoryExtra in September 2014 and updated with information from BBC History Revealed in July 2020

What kind of things might you find in a prehistoric grave, and what could they reveal about the past?

Prehistory is intensely interesting to me because the only way that we can approach it is through archaeology. You are left to piece together the story through traces left in the ground – the material objects of ancient cultures, remnants of constructions and buildings, and the remains of our own ancestors.

There’s an often forensic process that goes on when you’re trying to reconstruct what life was like in the prehistoric era, and burial sites represent a treasure trove of information. Graves such as that of the [early Bronze Age] Amesbury Archer or the “Red Lady of Paviland” [actually a young man who died 33-34,000 years ago] are absolutely stuffed with cultural artefacts. They essentially act as time capsules – little microcosms of the culture of the time.

As well as the objects we find in graves, we’re able to extract ever more information from the bones themselves. For me, as a biological anthropologist, it’s been astonishing how the science around this has developed over the past 20 to 30 years.

What kind of information can we glean from bones?

If I’m presented with a skeleton, I can tell quite a lot just by looking at the bones with the naked eye. I have a background as a medical doctor and before I started learning the business of osteoarchaeology, I would have thought: “It’s just a skeleton. How much can you really tell? You can’t ask it about symptoms, you can’t do blood tests.” But I was astonished at how much you could work out. First, bone responds to disease. Some infections, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, affect bone in very distinctive ways. Osteoarthritis is also easy to identify from tiny holes on the surface of a joint.

Next you can look at teeth. People suffered from dental disease in the past, just as we do today, but most prehistoric people actually had much better teeth than ours because they didn’t have such a starchy, sugary diet. They didn’t brush their teeth as fastidiously as we do, but their teeth are nevertheless usually in surprisingly good condition.

Employing radiography techniques, such as using X-rays, allows us to uncover more clues – hidden features of the bones. And with a micro CT [computed tomography] scanner we’re able to slice up the bones virtually, allowing us to analyse them without incurring any damage.

Then there are chemical techniques that allow us to analyse the ratios of different elements in bones and teeth. Our bodies are built from what we consume, so we are essentially made out of our surroundings. That means that the signatures of the landscapes in which we grew up are written into our bodies – particularly into teeth, because tooth enamel is laid down in childhood.

For instance, your body is constantly incorporating different stable isotopes of oxygen and strontium in various ratios. We can analyse isotopes in ancient human remains, and see how these elemental ratios match those found in the geology of places in Britain or farther afield. This can be really useful for telling where somebody grew up, for instance, or where they spent the last decade of their life.

Finally, we can extract DNA from ancient bones and sequence it. That technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years.

Alice Roberts is the author of Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now on Waterstones
• Buy now on Bookshop.org

What can we learn about ancient bodies from DNA studies?

The human genome was fully sequenced in 2003. Since then we’ve developed the ability to extract DNA from very ancient bones, and to work out how to combine separate fragments of DNA into a complete genome. By doing that, we’re able to look for rare variants that might give us clues indicating when particular groups of people moved in or out of Britain. Sometimes we’re able to reconstruct more detailed information about individuals, too. One of the prehistoric skeletons I discuss in the book is known as Cheddar Man, who was discovered in Somerset in 1903, and lived around 10,000 years ago. By analysing his genome, geneticists have revealed that he probably had an unusual combination of dark skin and bright blue eyes. Being able to work that out from just a skeleton is utterly extraordinary.

DNA can also reveal information about kinship and relationships between individuals. That’s been quite profound when it comes to looking at the communal burials found inside Neolithic chamber tombs, for instance. One theory about these chamber tombs is that they were intended to anonymise the dead, and therefore contain people from across the whole community. Another theory is that they effectively acted as family vaults – and some recent genetic analyses provide hints that this may indeed have been the case. For example, it’s been revealed that two bodies buried together in a Neolithic monument at Primrose Grange in County Sligo, Ireland are those of a father and his daughter.

Elsewhere in Ireland, DNA analysis of a man buried at Newgrange Stone Age tomb in the Boyne valley has revealed that he was the son of an incestuous union between either a parent and a child or two siblings. So we’re finding out some quite extraordinary details, some of which may not even have been public knowledge at the time of those people’s deaths.

Does genetic science have the potential to settle some major archaeological debates?

Genetic science is not a panacea. It’s not as though DNA technology somehow supersedes archaeology – in fact, it could actually leave us with more questions than answers. But it does provide important strands of new evidence with the potential to answer some big questions, especially about mobility and migration. We should view it more as a tool for archaeologists to use – one that will hopefully help us see the picture more clearly.

Genetics can certainly be disruptive. In fact, it’s probably as disruptive as radiocarbon dating was when that emerged, from the late 1940s – suddenly, archaeologists were able to pin absolute dates on organic material. I think you can see a similar effect playing out with DNA analysis at the moment.

There have been some instances of geneticists treading on archaeologists’ toes. There’s been a perception by some archaeologists that geneticists have waded into long-standing archaeological debates and simply said: “You’ve been arguing about this for ages. Well, now we’ve got the answer.” Not surprisingly, archaeologists have responded: “Hang on a minute – first you need to learn a bit about archaeology and the kinds of questions we’re asking.”

But we’ve got to capitalise on the power of genetics to help us solve archaeological conundrums. In the book, I talk about a cutting-edge new project called 1,000 Ancient British Genomes, led by Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute. This is a brilliant example of the power of collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists. Skoglund is engaging with archaeologists up and down the UK, asking them to identify questions that genetics might be able to help solve.

Your book is as much about the development of archaeological thinking as about the discoveries themselves. Which archaeologists most intrigue you?

One of the people I became quite obsessed with is Augustus Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900). He’s best known as a collector, but he also came up with some really interesting ideas about how cultures change and evolve over time, and how these transitions happened. Pitt-Rivers was very influenced by 19th-century evolutionary theory and biology, and wondered how these ideas could apply to culture. He also started to think about whether the origins of new cultures might be linked to the movement of people.

For instance, Bronze Age people in Britain obviously had a different culture from the Neolithic people who preceded them. But where did they pick up this culture from? Pitt-Rivers suggested that there had effectively been a population replacement – that Bronze Age culture was actually brought in by a whole load of new people. He tried to back up this theory by measuring skulls, arguing that there were detectable differences between the shapes of Neolithic and Bronze Age skulls. He was trying to use the study of skulls in a similar way to how we would now use DNA studies.

What’s astonishing is that DNA evidence now emerging suggests that Pitt-Rivers may have been right – that a lot of people may have arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age, largely replacing Neolithic populations. Those earlier people didn’t completely disappear, but there was a really profound turnover of population. It’s really interesting to think about the contact between these two groups, and about the ways in which their different cultures may have merged.

How did the preconceptions of archaeologists in the past influence their understanding of the discoveries they made?

Archaeology is a very introspective, self-aware discipline, which I think is extremely useful. We’ve long been aware that every archaeologist always has ideas from their own time in the back of their mind whenever they approach a set of observations.

That can impact ideas about gender, for example. Take Iron Age chariot burials: not all of them contain men – we know that some, such as the site at Wetwang in East Yorkshire, definitely contain women. I think that in the past antiquarians would have very quickly jumped to a conclusion that the body was male, based on the style of the burial or perhaps artefacts that were buried with the body. This is similar to what Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) did when he discovered the oldest skeleton yet found in Britain, on the Gower peninsula in south Wales, which he called the “Red Lady of Paviland”. The remains are clearly male, but Buckland didn’t think it could possibly be a man because the individual was buried with what looked to him like ivory jewellery. As a 19th-century antiquarian, he couldn’t stomach the idea that a man might be buried with jewellery.

And these ideas still persist. When we find an Iron Age burial with a sword, there’s often an assumption that it’s a man. Or if a mirror is excavated from a burial, there’s an assumption that the remains are that of a woman. In the book, I talk about the need to avoid seeing discoveries through our own current cultural lens – to accept that there may have been many more diverse identities in the past than perhaps we understand today, for example. We think that our society and culture is normal in the way that it defines two genders, but perhaps in the past there was a much more diverse approach to identity. Certainly, if you find an Iron Age burial with both a sword and a mirror (and one such site has been excavated), that might be telling us something quite interesting about ancient identities.

I think that new scientific technologies encourage us to move away from our current preconceptions – to look at the evidence in isolation to begin with and then to build up a bigger picture.

One of the burials you discuss is that of the Amesbury Archer, found in Wiltshire and dating to around 2,300 BC. What does his grave tell us about the early Bronze Age?

It’s a stunning discovery – the most richly furnished Copper Age burial yet found in Britain. This man was buried with almost 100 objects in his timber-lined grave, so he was certainly high status or special in some way. All sorts of things were buried with him: lots of flints and arrowheads, and stone items that we presume are wrist guards for archery – hence his name – as well as copper knives and five bell-shaped beakers. There were also gold ornaments, thought to be hair wraps or possibly earrings – the oldest gold found in Britain.

Because the Amesbury Archer was found only about three miles from Stonehenge, some have suggested that he may have had a link with that site. That may be true, but we’ll never be able to prove it. You can also speculate about who he was – his position in that society: are we looking at some kind of Bronze Age shaman or magician? And, connected with that idea, what did people think of those who first developed the ability to extract metal out of stone? It must have been amazing to see a completely new material being produced.

What I find particularly interesting about the Amesbury Archer is that analysis of the stable isotopes in his remains shows that he wasn’t a local – in fact, he grew up in or near the Alps. Graves such as his show just how far these connections stretched, and the distances that people were travelling. There’s this popular idea that in the ancient past people never travelled farther than the next village, but now we have evidence of some, such as the Amesbury Archer, travelling hundreds of miles in a lifetime.

Another of the discoveries you discuss is the Pocklington chariot burial in East Yorkshire. Why was that such an exciting find?

That burial, found in 2017, is absolutely spectacular. I was lucky enough to visit it with the team that discovered it. We don’t see many Iron Age burials across most of Britain, but in Yorkshire several very characteristic chariot burials have been found. These belonged to the Arras culture, which had connections to the near continent and possibly brought this very distinctive funerary style with them.

That Pocklington grave contains the body of a man buried within a chariot. In other similar burials, the chariots tend to have been dismantled before being put in the grave – flatpacked, essentially. This one, though, was standing up and intact, with the man placed inside in a crouching position.

Along with the grave, there’s evidence of a funeral feast. You get the impression that this funeral was a great spectacle, intended to show off the status of the deceased individual but also that of the surviving family. There are animal bones in the grave, including a rack of ribs, so it looks as if dishes from the feast were being shared with the deceased individual.

The other utterly extraordinary thing is that two pony skeletons were found standing up in the grave. That was just unbelievable. We spent quite a long time scratching our heads, wondering how on earth they got those ponies in there upright. Did they winch dead animals into the grave and then somehow support them, maybe piling up the soil underneath to hold them in a standing position? Or were the ponies led into the grave and then killed? I don’t know if we’ll ever quite get to the bottom of how it was achieved, but obviously it was extremely important to the design of the grave to have the chariot looking as though it was ready to depart, taking the dead man off, possibly to the afterlife. That is, of course, if they believed in the afterlife – we don’t know!

Do you think we learn anything about ourselves by looking at prehistoric Britain?

I think that exploring prehistory shows us just how multicultural Britain has always been. What we’ve seen is that many different groups of people have crossed the North Sea and the Channel in both directions over time, and that those cultures all enriched the others.

Although I write a lot about the power of genetics, I don’t think we should be trying to trace direct genetic links between us and people in the ancient past because, once you get back into prehistory, these connections aren’t terribly meaningful. You don’t need to have a direct genetic link with the Red Lady of Paviland or the Amesbury Archer to think about what the lives of these individuals might have been like. I’m aiming for an egalitarian approach to ancestry in the landscape. The “ancestors” I look at in the book belong to everybody.

Alice Roberts is the author of Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org

This article was first published in the July 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

Royal incest is always going to grab the headlines. And so it proved last week when a fascinating study was published in Nature revealing the results of a project, whose first author is Dr Lara Cassidy at Trinity College Dublin, sampling human bone remains from Neolithic Irish sites.

The most eye-catching of several interesting results came from analysis of an adult male, whose cranial remains were found inside the famous 5,000-year-old Newgrange passage grave in Brú na Bóinne, the world heritage site in Ireland’s Boyne valley. His genome indicated that he was “the offspring of a first-order incestuous union” (born to parents who were either siblings, or parent and offspring). The bones of this individual were found in what is assumed to be a prestigious position in the inner chamber of the Newgrange monument.

Dr Cassidy and her co-authors observed that sibling-to-sibling incest has been recorded among elites in other societies (including the Inca Empire and ancient Egypt), and that “this behaviour co-occurs with the deification of political leaders and is typically limited to ruling families”. Thus the headline of the story in the Daily Mail began “Ireland’s ancient kings married their sisters and fathered inbred children to maintain dynastic bloodlines”.

Medieval mythology

That is a pretty newsworthy story in itself, but in addition, Dr Cassidy and her team also noted that:

“The Brú na Bóinne passage tombs appear in medieval mythology that relates their construction to magical manipulations of the solar cycle by a tribe of gods, which has led to unresolved speculation about the durability of oral traditions across millennia. Although such longevity seems unlikely, our results strongly resonate with mythology that was first recorded in the 11th century, in which a builder-king restarts the daily solar cycle by copulating with his sister. Fertae Chuile, a Middle Irish placename for the Dowth passage tomb (which neighbours Newgrange), is based on this lore, and can be translated as ‘Hill of Sin’ or ‘Hill of Incest’.”

I’ve been in touch with Dr Cassidy, and she additionally notes:

“As we are clear in our paper, it is always going to be controversial when you suggest oral longevity across millennia. However, it is not unprecedented. Some Indo-European fairytales are estimated to be 2,500-6,000 years old. Aboriginal Australians have stories of exploding mountains concerning volcanoes that haven’t erupted for thousands of years. Importantly, there was already a prior discussion of this myth in this context and it is entirely reasonable for us to add our result to this. Note we make no strong conclusion in this regard.”

Stories to explain places

Nonetheless, that apparent piece of documentary corroboration from medieval mythology drew some criticism on social media from Dr Elizabeth Boyle, Head of the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University. The story in question here is found in the Metrical Dindshenchas, a compilation of stories that dates to the 11th century AD concerned with the origins of place-names in the Irish landscape. Composed by learned scholars within a Christian context, these stories look back to pre-Christian times to explain how places got their names. I called Dr Boyle to find out about her reservations about the usefulness of this source to the argument in the paper.

“This is the story of the placename Dowth, one of the three Neolithic monuments in Brú na Bóinne [along with Newgrange and Knowth]. In Old Irish, the place-name Dowth is dubad, which would literally mean ‘darkness’. The story says that the king of Ireland at that time is called Bresal. In his reign Ireland is struck down by a cattle murrain [disease], and the cattle die. So everyone gathers at the court of the king and they decide that they are going to build a tower to heaven, like the Tower of Babel [the Old Testament origin story in the Book of Genesis]. Presumably the aim is to ask God to stop killing the cattle. They decide that they will spend the length of one day building this tower up to heaven. And they start building. The king’s sister is a sorceress. And she’s going to create some magic in order to stop the sun from moving so that the day will last long enough for them to build the tower.

“The story says that she goes off somewhere to do her magic. And her brother follows her. He has sex with her, and because she’s now committed incest, her magic fails. And the place where they’re building falls into darkness. And so it is called dubad. Further, we’re told that wherever they went to go and have sex with each other, that place gets called Fertae Chuile, the burial mound of sin or the burial mound of violation or incest. And that’s what they’re seizing on in the article, that wherever the brother and sister have sex in the narrative is called the burial mound or the mound of sin or incest. But, as I say, it explicitly says in the story that they are trying to build a new Tower of Babel. They’re trying to build a tower to heaven. And so that even in itself is enough to say that this isn’t a story that goes back to the Neolithic period because it’s borrowing directly from the Bible. And in any case, it’s not clear where this place, Fertae Chuile, is located, because wherever they’re having sex, it’s not in Dowth itself, because that is where the tower was.”

So, given that the story in question here appears to be derived from Biblical stories, it’s unlikely, in the view of Dr Boyle, to correlate with any sort of cultural practices that may or may not have been ongoing in the Neolithic, several millennia previously. Whatever fascinating cultural practices are implied by the scientific analysis, an early medieval literary source, composed within a Christian milieu, does not add weight to the argument. The problem is compounded by the actual language used in the source in question.

“The key thing that wound me up about the article is that the people who built Newgrange and built those nearby monuments were not Celtic-speaking people. The Celtic language and Celtic-speaking peoples were only introduced into Ireland probably in the early Iron Age, maybe around 500 BC, so thousands of years after Newgrange was built,” notes Dr Boyle. “Almost all of the place names in Ireland in the Old and Middle Irish periods are clearly identifiable as Irish place names. Every place name in Ireland had therefore been renamed since the Neolithic period in the Celtic-speaking period because the place names are all in a different language: they are all in Irish. There were no Celtic-speakers on the island of Ireland when Newgrange was being built. I think it’s improbable enough to have something like a folk memory that lasts for four thousand years, but it would also have to last across a language change, the introduction of a new culture into Ireland, and this very clear renaming of the Irish landscape, because all of these place names in the Dindshenchas are Irish place names and not whatever language preceded Irish in Ireland.”

A fuzzy, vague Celtic past

So, if the Dindshenchas do not provide a viable witness to Neolithic practices, why do they get employed here? “For me, it’s flagging up a problem with perceptions of Irish history, where everything prior to the arrival of the Normans in the 12th century is often seen as some fuzzy, vague Celtic past where it’s all the same,” comments Dr Boyle. “And it doesn’t matter if it was something built in 4000 BC or something written in AD 1100, it’s all perceived as being kind of the same.

She continues:

“But there is so much radical social transformation continually underway in Ireland. There are technological developments. There are language shifts and language changes. There is conversion to Christianity. There is introduction of literacy. A lot has changed in that period. This misconception reflects, I think, a wider perception that Ireland doesn’t really have any ‘history’ until the English turn up and everything else before that is just some vague, ahistorical, stuff about druids and warriors.”

This isn’t to say that the people alive in the 11th century AD weren’t interested in these prehistoric monuments, as shown by the very documentary sources that we’re talking about here. “In medieval Ireland there is a very complex awareness of landscape as a whole, both manmade features on the landscape and the natural landscape in general. And this is reflected in the Metrical Dindshenchas,” suggests Dr Boyle.

“This is a genre of learned literature, but it’s a very dynamic tradition and you can see them creating new stories for places that are interacting with the landscape. They know that these monuments are incredibly old. They don’t have any connection with the Neolithic culture that built them. But they know that this is something the construction of which could be projected into their prehistory. Oftentimes they’re not projecting it that far into prehistory. To take an example of one Neolithic tomb at Knocknarea, the story around it is that it’s the tomb of a queen, Maeve (Medb), who is depicted in literature as having lived maybe only about a thousand years before they are writing, when actually the tombs themselves are about 5,000 years old. So they’re projecting them back into a past, but not a past that’s as old as the monuments actually are.”

Whose afraid of the prehistoric past?

We ran a feature on this site on Anglo-Saxon fear of prehistoric barrows and I’ve blogged previously about early medieval attitudes to prehistory. Thinking about all this did remind me of the work of Professor Sarah Semple at the University of Durham, who has done much work on changing perceptions of the prehistoric in early medieval society before and after the conversion to Christianity.

For example, in a paper in the journal World Archaeology in 1998, Professor Semple noted that:

“The late Anglo-Saxon attitude to prehistoric barrows was one of superstitious wariness; emotions also connected with boundaries. Both places were portrayed as the haunt of monsters, spirits and evil creatures in the eighth century and after. The poetic sources are the product of a Christian world and represent a Christian perception of the landscape. The root of this perception may be the remembrance of early Anglo- Saxon pagan activity which took place at barrows.”

Now, of course, I wanted to check in with Dr Cassidy to get her take on Dr Boyle’s thoughts. She replied as follows:

“I need to stress that the mythology did not feed into our conclusions on the political form of these societies. That was based on the son of a first degree union interred within one of the most prestigious burial structures known for prehistoric Europe, the long distance patterns of relatedness with other passage tomb sites, the diet and the material culture of passage tomb cemeteries, which shows high investment in public ritual and monumentalism.

“It is well accepted that biblical narratives and local pagan mythology were woven together in works like the Dindshenchas. Untangling the two is a complex task. I would avoid speaking in certainties about it and we were sure not to in the paper. Unfortunately, we can’t control the tabloids.”

The Celtic question

With regards to the question of language, Dr Cassidy has this to say:

“Our team is very aware that Ireland has undergone radical transformation since the Neolithic. In fact, in 2016 we were the first to demonstrate a transformative population migration to the island in the Early Bronze Age (~2,200 BC). Another result in that paper challenged the outdated paradigm that Dr Boyle repeats ‘Iron Age Celtic-speaking people arrived in Ireland 500 BC’. There has never been any substantial archaeological evidence for this transition and there is also no current genetic evidence.

“In fact, we see very strong genetic continuity between the modern Irish people and the Early Bronze Age population. This feeds into a growing body of work called “Celtic from the West”  (a set of volumes by Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch), which argues that precursors to Celtic arose in the Late Bronze Age across Atlantic sea networks from an Indo-European substratum [this is a topic explored by Professor Barry Cunliffe on this site]. Indo-European languages are now widely believed to have been introduced to western Europe by the continent-wide migrations in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age. although a small contingent argue that they were already there in the Neolithic. I would advocate the former, but the debate is not fully closed. Either way, it is very probable that some form of Celtic Language was in Ireland long before the Iron Age imaginings of romanticists in the late 19th and early 20th century.

“The next phase of our research will actually be focussed on the Neolithic to Bronze Age transition in Ireland and how these two different peoples consolidated with one another over time with respect to their genes and cultures. For example, we see continued use of older megalithic sites and the construction of a new megalithic tomb type (wedge tombs) for many centuries after the end of the Neolithic. There is potential at this interface for the exchange of folklore.”

The question of how far back you can project values or attitudes from early medieval documentary sources onto prehistoric societies is no doubt one that will continue to drive debate. Dr Boyle has one last comment, for now, on the question of language: “I reject the idea that the Celtic language arriving in Ireland c500-c.100 BC is ‘outdated’. Rather, it represents the best accepted consensus of the situation on the part of experts in the history of the Irish language and the ‘Celtic from the West’ model is at best a fringe opinion.”

Linking literature and science

Finally, although Dr Boyle did note on Twitter that “if a medievalist had cast their eye over the paper pre-publication, this unfortunate methodological error could have been avoided”, she did conclude to me by saying “I’m not blaming the scientists. Science-wise, it’s a really good paper. It’s a really important paper telling us all sorts of things about the Neolithic period. I just don’t think 11th-century Irish literature tells us anything about the prehistoric period.”

Just adding my Facebook response to *that* Nature paper here for anyone who is interested. A bit fuller than my bad-tempered tweet which has unexpectedly gained a bit of traction! pic.twitter.com/pGYZVjBHfV

— Elizabeth Boyle (@thecelticist) June 19, 2020

So, clearly this conversation has some way to run. I’ll leave the last word on it for now to Dr Cassidy:

“Overall, my take home would be that the question of oral and linguistic continuity in Ireland is very much an open one. It will require an interdisciplinary effort to address. In that spirit, it would have been remiss of us not to highlight a potential new piece of evidence in the paper, especially given the previous speculation regards Brú na Bóinne itself. We did not start the debate and I do not believe it is anywhere near finished! It’s an exciting time to be in the field. Dr. Boyle’s point about a ‘fuzzy Celtic past’ is very apt, with ancient genomes we are hoping to do some defuzzing!”

David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. If you’ve got any subjects you’d like him to try to defuzz in this blog, drop him a tweet to tell him what he should cover. Read the latest in his medieval matters blog series here

What’s new in the Middle Ages? As the most medievally-inclined member of the HistoryExtra team, I’m going to start a weekly round-up of what I’ve been enjoying in the world of medieval history. I’m going to take a broad view of what medieval means, so anything from late Roman up to the late 15th century will be fair game. And actually, I’ll probably allow myself an occasional interlude into prehistory too. If anyone reads this, I’m going to cajole my colleagues to do similar round-ups for later periods and genres of history.

My plan is to highlight what’s been happening on HistoryExtra from a medieval perspective, on our podcast, and in our print magazines BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed. Plus, I’ll generally be keeping an eye open for anything else that’s going on medieval-wise.

So, first up, it’s been a big week for Anglo-Saxon and Viking aficionados because Netflix has dropped the entire 10 episodes of the fourth season of the Bernard Cornwell-penned The Last Kingdom. King Alfred is dead and we’ve got Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed front and centre in the action. I don’t know what viewer figures have been like but I’m guessing a lot of people have been bingeing, given the state of the world right now. Certainly a lot of you have been enjoying our The Last Kingdom content on the site – if you’ve not seen it yet, this page is a good place to start. Ryan Lavelle, historical advisor to the series, has been blogging his way through all ten episodes for us too, giving us the lowdown on what to look out for from a historian’s perspective. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, pandemics are unsurprisingly still big news, and we’ve seen lots of people reading over our Black Death content on the site.

In the current issue of BBC History Magazine, there’s loads of great stuff, including a feature by Catherine Rider on medieval magic. She did a great piece for the site at the start of the year on medieval ways to look ahead to the new year.  I’m not sure anyone would have predicted 2020 would have shaped up quite as it has though.

I’ve been having fun recording lectures over Zoom with speakers from our sadly Corona-cancelled Medieval Life and Death Day. We’re going to run the event virtually in the next couple of weeks, so I’ve already had a preview of Hannah Skoda’s talk on medieval violence (see here for a piece she did for us a while back on the topic), and Chris Woolgar’s on medieval food. We’ll have the rest of them recording by the end of this week I hope, so keep checking the site for when we put them live.

There are a couple of podcasts I’ve been working on to mark your diaries for. I’ve had a fascinating chat with Dr Remy Ambuhl about prisoners of war in the Hundred Years’ War, and today I’ve been talking to Professor Judith Jesch about the Viking Age for our lockdown ‘Everything you want to know’ podcast series. I had some great questions to put to her from our social media followers, but I didn’t quiz her on Viking warrior women, because she’s already written about it for us . Those are for the future, but we’ve had some podcasts go out over the last week that might pique your interest: Sam Willis and James Daybell on The Unexpected Vikings (it’s been quite a Viking-y few days), and last Sunday’s ‘Everything you want to know’ episode on British prehistory (I warned you I’d allow myself to dip back earlier than the Middle Ages).

What else? I watched Robin Hood (the Kevin Costner) version with my kids last weekend. They hated it, and I didn’t find it as gripping as first time round, but it sparked a bit of a debate about the best Robin Hood film when I mentioned it on Twitter. I’m reminded that we picked some great Robin Hood films to watch here, and we’ve separately explored cultural representations of Robin Hood too.

Just watched Kevin Costner robin hood for the first time in like 30 years. It's not aged well, or I haven't

— David Musgrove (@DJMusgrove) April 24, 2020

The latest medieval news

In other news, researchers in Portugal have been trying to replicate medieval monastic inks and in Scotland, plans are afoot to try to build a replica Iron Age broch (prehistoric again, but they were sometimes reused in the Viking period). Brochs are brilliant. If you have a chance to visit one ever (after lockdown obviously), the Broch of Gurness is spellbinding. I’ve been chatting to the people behind the Broch replica project on twitter and might well come back to this story in the future. Everyone should have a browse around the British Museum’s newly launched Online Collection  – it’s a fabulous resource with loads of great images of medieval artefacts and beyond. Check out the Lewis Chessmen close-up.

Finally, I’ve decided to have a crack at learning how to read Old Norse while in lockdown. I’ve got a beginner’s guide that’s been glowering unopened at me from my bookshelf for a while now, so it seems like a good time to give it a go.

Right. This book has been on my shelf for too long so I'm going in. How hard can Old Norse be? (quite hard I expect) pic.twitter.com/xnYRkVPSXV

— David Musgrove (@DJMusgrove) April 26, 2020

I glibly put out a tweet announcing my intentions and Old Norse scholars Dr Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (who inspired me to try after I chatted to her on the podcast about her book on Viking women a while back) and Chris Callow offered some words of encouragement. Chris pointed me to some very useful resources on the website of the Viking Society for Northern Research  with a free downloadable textbook there too, along with a very helpful quick chart to basic grammar here  So suddenly I’ve got a wealth of resources at my fingertips, and no excuses really. I’ll report back on how that’s going next week. I’ve also been trying to learn how to do a handstand, but that’s not going too well either.

David Musgrove is content director of HistoryExtra, plus its sister print magazines BBC History Magazine, BBC World Histories and BBC History Revealed

In August 55 BC, Julius Caesar invaded southern England, officially in order to teach the Britons a lesson (he argued that they had helped his enemies in France).

Things did not all go Caesar’s way, however, his heavily armoured Roman legionaries having to jump from their ships and wade through the sea towards a well-prepared, and drier, foe. Using ship-mounted artillery, Caesar was able to clear a part of the beach and, with Roman soldiers rallying around their standard bearer, a beachhead was finally established.

We don’t know exactly where all this happened, but it is traditionally thought to have occured somewhere near Walmer in Kent.

Archaeologically speaking, the earliest battle evidence from the British Isles comes from the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when the farmers were first competing for limited resources. At Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire and Hambledon Hill in Dorset, the earthen ramparts of two settlements were attacked, some time around 3300 BC, and their defences partially levelled.

Large numbers of flint arrowheads have been found at the entrances to both sites, probably where the fighting was fiercest. Unfortunately, in the absence of written accounts, we have no way of knowing who was fighting whom (nor why).

This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine

• Read more about the history of tourists at Stonehenge