Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson

perpendicular to the henge ditch. Only 0.6 meters wide and 1.8 meters deep, it was filled with chalk and must have been dug out very shortly before the major ditch digging began. This seems to have been a marker ditch, to show the boundary between the two segments. Just two meters south of it we found the cause of the strong magnetometry response: a bank of wood ash and domestic debris. We were presumably looking at a group—the mavericks—who had heaped up their rubbishagainst an outside perimeter, thereby defining their own space within the huge village before the ditch was dug.
    At the bottom of the henge bank we also found a rubbish pit that had been created by digging into a very large hole left by the falling of a huge, ancient tree. This hole had slowly filled up with soil; in the turf on top of it we found a leaf-shaped arrowhead from the fourth millennium BC. The tree had been standing perhaps a thousand years earlier, before the first farmers. Long after it had fallen, around 2500 BC, the hollow left by its toppling seems to have been used as a boundary marker between two different groups within the village.
    When examining the finds from Durrington Walls, one of the things we’ve looked for is any supporting evidence for the village, or the ditch-digging, having been divided into distinct zones, or groupings. The potshards do show a particular distribution pattern. The Grooved Ware pottery from the middens (rubbish heaps) on the south side of the avenue has an unusual style of decoration, in which the grooves form spiral patterns. Though we have found much more pottery north of the avenue, there is not a single piece of spiral decoration from that area.
    Spiral-decorated pots were also found in the lower layers of the henge ditch on the south side of the avenue, so this type of pot was in use in the area south of the avenue both before and after the ditch-digging. More intriguingly, the spiral motif is also found on pots deposited into the pits dug into the decayed posts of the Southern Circle almost two hundred years later, but only in its south quadrant. If spiral decoration was used by one particular group, this raises the possibility that a group specifically associated with one area of the village (and one segment of ditch-digging) might also have been associated with a particular segment of the monument, such as the Southern Circle. Perhaps this also happened at Stonehenge, with different groups responsible for separate sectors—a portion of the outer ring of sarsens, say, and a trilithon or two.
    If the ditch-digging was indeed done by gangs working simultaneously, then we have a window into Neolithic labor organization. This helps us think about how Stonehenge itself could have been built. At the ground level were fairly large groups, perhaps organized and coordinated by a middle level of “management.” At the top, decisions must have been taken by a council, or even by a chief and his associates.
    Choosing the right vocabulary is difficult when talking about prehistoric social organization. In normal usage in anthropology, a tribe usually numbers thousands of people, as does a clan. It is more precise to use the less familiar term “lineage group.” By this I mean a community that defines itself as the offspring of a single founding ancestor going back five or six generations (about 150 years). That is, your grandparents’ grandparents’ parent or grandparent. If the first and each subsequent generation produces four children per family, who themselves all reproduce at the same rate, numbers soon grow. The second generation has four new members, the next generation adds sixteen new members; such a lineage has over 250 members by the sixth generation.
    Considering the logistics needed to keep our own fieldwork running smoothly, we could easily see that the Neolithic builders of Durrington Walls, and those of Stonehenge, would have had to have been well-organized. We had a digging team of 160 to