December 31, 2014 • 23 mins
When news about new findings at the Stonehenge site broke late in 2014, it seemed like time to update the original Stonehenge episode. But then it turned out, there wasn't an existing episode about this famous ruin. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. When news broke this September, this is
that we're recording that there is a whole lot of
(00:23):
stuff we never knew about buried in and around Stonehenge.
I thought, great, when it's the end of the year
and we do all our unearthed episodes, I'll update our
Stonehenge episode. And I filed that away in my brain,
and once I got started planning out how we were
going to cover our holiday schedule, I penciled it in there.
(00:44):
And I also remember at some point double checking to
make sure we actually had a Stonehenge episode. But in
a very twilight zone development, when December actually rolled around
and it was time to really start recording our unearthed
stuff this year, ill and there was no Stonehenge episode
in the archive. Uh. I was so sure that we
(01:05):
had one that I actually wondered if something had happened
to our RSS feed and the disappeared or something. So
I m I opened up that spreadsheet that you and
I got when we very first started that had every
episode on it, and it was not on there either.
And so I just disc decided that I don't know,
maybe I've been body snatched or something. Um. I expressed
(01:28):
my bafflement on Twitter, and we got way more people
asking us if we were going to have a Stonehenge
episode or telling us to please do it. Then we
got from people who were like, mat, no big loss.
So now also the archive feels like it's missing something
because it doesn't have the Stonehenge episode that I wish
sure had had. So we're gonna take a little page
(01:51):
from the Sarah and Holly playbook from back when they
found Richard the Third under that car park, and we're
gonna have an unearthed episode is actually a whole new thing,
but about one specific topic. So next week we're going
to have the Unearthed episodes that have become traditional in
the year end Time, where we talk about all kinds
of things that were dug up in some way or
(02:13):
another this year. But this episode is going to be
a whole new thing on Stonehenge, both past and what
was just discovered about it this year. So here's what
we knew about Stonehenge before September. Uh. Stonehenge is most
famously a prehistoric monument north of Salisbury Wiltshire in southern England.
It's most recognizable features are these immense stones in post
(02:37):
and lintel formations known as trilithons. It's thousands of years
old and it was also built over thousands of years
at the end of the Neolithic period and the beginning
of the Bronze Age in England. Stonehenge is just one
of many Neolithic hinges. These are all earthworks that include
both a circular bank and a ditch, and many of them,
(02:58):
but not all allso so include stone works. So even
though those stones are what you think of probably when
someone says Stonehenge, what makes a hinge is the earthword part,
the earthwork part. Stonehenge is also the only prehistoric stonework
that includes a lentil atop the posts, so there are
lots of upright stones, but Stonehenge is the only one
(03:19):
from the prehistoric period that has that crossbar over the top.
Along with more than three hundred hinges and other nearby sites,
Stonehenge was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in six
and the stones themselves come in two main varieties. There
are sarsen stones, which are made of sandstone that can
be found in southern England. The Sarsen stones were probably
(03:42):
core quarried at Marlborough Downs. Then there are the blue stones,
and this is a catch all term for a lot
of the smaller stones at Stonehenge. They're not all necessarily
the same type exactly of stone. These stones came from
a range of places, and some of them were from
as far away as what is now Ales. Many of
the stones that were once part of Stonehenge are now gone,
(04:04):
taken away and repurposed for centuries up through the medieval period.
Some of the stones are still on the site but
have fallen down from their original position. The ground around
the area was also dug up over the centuries for
all kinds of reasons, sometimes for vaguely archaeological purposes, sometimes
for straight up treasure hunting. One of these diggers was
(04:26):
actually Charles Darwin, who dug who dug two holes at
Stonehenge to study earthworms in eighteen seventy seven. The first
official archaeological dig started there in nineteen o one, and
over the centuries people have come up with a lot
of possible explanations for what Stonehenge means. It's been studied
(04:46):
from every possible angle anthropologically, archaeologically, mathematically, geometrically, astronomically, just
on and on every point of view you can analyze
it from. It's been done. I think that's one of
the reasons that there was at least some talk on Twitter,
like nobody lost everybody. Everybody knows about Stonehenge. Legend has
(05:06):
tied Stonehenge to Merlin and King Arthur. So, according to legend,
Merlin brought the stones from Ireland with the help of
a giant from Africa. In this story, King Ambrosius are
Lean is buried at Stonehenge along with his brother Uther Pendragon,
who was the father of King Arthur, and for centuries
the academic world generally thought Stonehenge was some kind of
(05:28):
Druidic temple. This idea goes back to at least the
seventeenth century, and one of the reasons it had so
much staying power was that people thought a civilization would
have had to advance at least to the Iron Age
to pull off such a feat. That's when we have
the evidence of the Druids in Britain, largely thanks to
the Roman records. It's also not a far hop from
the mysterious idea of Druid to the mysterious idea of Stonehenge,
(05:52):
it just seemed to kind of line up and fit together. However,
as soon as carbon dating was invented and used at site,
it completely dispelled the idea that it's a Druid monument.
Stonehenge dates back much much earlier than the Iron Age,
and we just don't have records of the Druids existing
(06:12):
back that far. So once again, in spite of this
preconceived idea that only an Iron Age society would be
advanced enough to build something like stone Hinge and reality
a Stone Age and then Bronze Age society actually did it.
I will say that I think a lot of people
just have the idea of Druids as conventional wisdom tied
to Stonehenge, even still, even though that's been pretty thoroughly
(06:34):
discredited at this point, I think like the common knowledge
of Stonehenge to a lot of people is Druids, agreed.
I have actually witnessed an argument over this fact that
someone was completely like, everyone knows that Stonehenge is built
by the Druids, and I had another acquaintance he was like, well,
what everyone else seems to not know is that there
has been dating done, and that is not correct. And
(06:55):
you've ever seen two people dig in so hard on
a historical argument. In the nineteen sixties, astronomers started to
speculate that Stonehenge was basically a giant calendar or a
computer for predicting eclipses and other astronomical events. This is
actually something that was part of my astronomy class in college.
(07:16):
I dug out my astronomy textbook hoping to refresh my memory,
and I learned that this is like my astronomy professor's
went off script and didn't teach it from the book,
It was from some other source. Basically, there are all
kinds of astronomical events that you can witness by standing
in one part of Stonehenge and kind of sighting down
another part. And while many of the stones and other
(07:37):
formations at Stonehenge definitely follow astronomical lines. So what my
teachers were telling me that was all correct. It all
circles back around to like, was a Stone Age or
maybe Bronze Age society sophisticated enough to do that, uh,
you know, or or back when it was still thought
to be an Iron Age thing, even was an Iron
Age society able to do that? We really don't have
(08:01):
the best track records so far of deciding what different
societies were advanced enough to do or not do, so
who knows. And over the years researchers have also theorized
that it was sort of a Bronze Age capital for
many tribes, like a seasonal gathering place, a funereal monument,
a healing site, and a religious site including sacrificial rights.
(08:23):
But for now it still sits squarely in the not
conclusively proven category. Yeah, people have all kinds of ideas
about what it was quote for and their pros and
cons to all these different ideas. Also in the not
conclusively proven category is exactly how the massive stones on
the site got there, A lot of them, way between
(08:45):
four and eight tons. The bluestones brought in from Wales.
Some of them had to travel like three hundred miles
and so there are theories that maybe they were rolled
along logs, or maybe they were floated down the Welsh
coast and then up the Avon River, uh like the
Druid idea. That idea has been around for quite a while,
(09:06):
but none of these are conclusively proven. A more recent
supposition is that the stones were actually carried in enormous
baskets hauled by oxen or that the bluestones used at
Stonehenge were pushed south by glaciers. One of the like
counterpoints to that last part that made me chuckle was
somebody saying it seems weird that glaciers would move exactly
(09:30):
the right number of stones to put into Stonehenge. That
made me laugh. I don't. I don't think that's actually
valid as a counterpoint, because the stones are used for
other stuff too, But still, I don't know. Those glaciers
are sneaky. I know they're wildly So we're going to
talk some more about how Stonehenge was built after a
brief word from a sponsor. So monuments were actually erected
(09:54):
in the Stonehenge area long before the construction of the earthworks,
and the stone works actually started as far back as
eight thousand b c. E. Hunter gatherer people erected pine
posts in the area, and the purpose of these posts
is not completely clear. As we mentioned in our Poverty
Point podcast and as we've kind of alluded to a
couple of times in this episode, not particularly common for
(10:17):
hunter gatherer societies to build elaborate monuments. Although it's not
unheard of. Also in the area are burial mounds that
date back at least to three thousand b c. E.
The construction of Stonehenge itself with a six stage process
that started around three thousand b C and ended around.
(10:39):
Construction of other barrows, dwellings, monuments, and other sites went
on at the same time. The first stage of building
at Stonehenge was from about three thousand to twenty nine
thirty five b C, and this was mostly an earthwork stage.
That's when the circular ditch that's sort of the hallmark
of the hinge was built. And that ditch is about
(11:02):
three hundred and thirty ft or a hundred meters in diameter,
so it's today the outer perimeter of kind of what
we think of as Stonehenge, as a high bank on
the outside and a low bank on the inside. The
builders of this ditch placed antler picks, which were probably
used to dig the ditch itself, as well as animal
bones down into the bottom of the ditch. Some of
(11:25):
these animal bones were much older than the ditch itself is.
The ditch encloses fifty six pits, known as the Aubrey holes.
These were named for the man who identified them John Aubrey.
The Aubrey holes probably contained Welsh Blue stones, and they
also contained burial remains of cremated people. The second stage
of construction took place between twenty forty b C, so
(11:49):
that's a multi hundred year jump. Burials continued to happen
at Stonehenge in the interim, but there wasn't new construction
before the second phase started. When construction zoomed, that's when
the huge sarsen stones started to be erected in a
very methodical, systematic manner along regular intervals and following that
post and lintel style. The stones are held together using
(12:11):
dovetail and tongue and groove joints, much like is used
to hold wood together in construction. Wood construction actually may
have been the inspiration for how to secure the stones
to one another. Big difference though, unlike would those stones
weighed around seven tons for upright. Stones known as the
station stones were probably also erected during the second phase,
(12:32):
but only two of those are still in place. Timber
circles were also built to the north and the south
of the Stoneworks during this second phase of construction, as
was a collection of dwellings that may have been the
builder's camp. The third stage started just about ten years
after the second one ended. The building during this sphase
(12:52):
included a roughly C shaped avenue lined by banks and ditches,
which went all the way from Stonehenge to the River Avon.
This is almost two miles or three kilometers away. A
lot of this avenue has since been destroyed by plowing,
although when it was intact, parts of it lined up
with the sunrise during the summer solstice and the sunset
(13:13):
during the winter solstice. This is of course one of
those features that has led people to believe that Stonehenge
is some kind of computer or clock. But in two
thousand eight it was discovered that this line also follows
a line of chalk ridges that happened to follow that
same course, so it was probably a coincidence. I think
it's also one of the things that makes people think
(13:33):
druids celstice. Yeah. More recent stages of Stonehenges construction spanned
from twenty to eighty to fifty BC, and these phases
largely involved rearrangements of the existing stones and digging of
a series of pits that are known as the Why
and Z holes. And if you are wondering, just how
(13:56):
many man hours this massive project may have taken. It's
estimated that it's about three million. So that's kind of
an overview of Stone Hinge as a monument. And before
we talk about the discoveries about Stonehenge in let's take
another brief break for a word from a sponsor. So
(14:16):
all of this finally brings us to the fourteen discoveries
that led us to doing this episode. This latest round
of discoveries comes thanks to using three D imaging to
study the site, rather than what you might imagine when
somebody says archaeological dig This study is called the Stoneheinge
Hidden Landscapes Project and it's a team effort between the
(14:37):
University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological
Prospection and Virtual Archaeology. This project started in July and
it went on for four years, although the actual field
work totaled about a hundred and twenty days spread across
that time. The field studies included magnetic perspection, ground penetrating, radar,
(14:58):
electromagnetic in auction sensors, earth resistance surveys, laser scanning, aerial photography,
airborne spectroscopy and other technologies. To map the area in
a noninvasive way. Some of the pictures of this going
on are unintentionally kind of comical because their guys driving
a t v s that are towing these imaging rigs,
(15:20):
and what we would otherwise think of as a mysterious
ancient landscape, it just seems very incongruous and kind of anachronistic.
In the case of the magnetic prospection, these are actually
specially built a TV s to be non magnetic so
that they wouldn't interfere with their readings. And this isn't
at all the first time that noninvasive imaging has actually
(15:41):
been used to study Stonehenge. There was already a really
large body of digital imagery and other noninvasive work that existed. However,
a lot of that existing body of data focused on
the monuments, which we already knew existed, and this time
the focus was much more broad what was actually between
all of the monuments. The result of all this is
(16:03):
a highly detailed map of what's under the surface of
the earth at Stonehenge and a ten square kilometer region
around it, which was obtained without actually having to dig
anything up. And their findings include seventeen previously unknown ritual monuments,
burial sites, and a barrow that dates back to before
the first phase of Stonehenge construction. This last one was
(16:26):
a huge building made of timber, which was then buried
under a mound. The survey also examined the Durrington Walls Superhinge,
which is a nearby site that's much, much much larger
than Stonehenge. Derrington Walls has a similar avenue to the
one at Stonehenge, which, like the Stonehenge avenue, aligns with
(16:46):
the summer solstice sunset, so there's some speculation that these
two sites were meant to kind of complement each other.
The findings at Drington Walls include an entire earlier phase
of construction that was previously known and has since been buried.
The earlier phase included a series of posts or stones,
some of which may still exist beneath the surface. There
(17:08):
was a whole documentary about all this on BBC two
which was called Operations Stonehenge What Lies Beneath which full
disclosure we have not watched because it appears not to
be available outside of the UK that I can find,
and based on all this new information, Stonehenge was not
as popularly imagined a secluded spot where only a few
(17:29):
people visited. There's a whole lot more going on than
just what we can see from above ground. And really
this imaging work, as awesome as it is, it's really
just a next step. It's a tool to figure out
where researchers should study next. So it's a treasure trove
of new information, but it's also really a way for
researchers to figure out what their next project should be.
(17:53):
Some of the more recent discoveries at Stonehengd also come
from a much less high tech method, and one that
may surprise you. I did not realize that there are
people taking care of the grass at Stonehenge and watering it. Uh.
In my head, Stonehenge just makes its own grass. I
don't know the fact that they're like lawn care people.
(18:14):
They're trying to make sure that it remains lush and
green just took me by surprise, but so not druidic magic.
Right in the summer of an irrigation hose pipe that
was being used to to irrigate this area and keep
the grass watered was too short to reach the outer
parts of the stone circles, and later on aerial photography
of this parched area of land found particularly dry patches,
(18:38):
and those are now believed to have been the sites
of stones which have since been removed. It pretty much
confirmed what everyone already suspected Slash knew, which is that
the circle used to be a complete circle and not
a partial circle. But it did give clues to the
exact positions of the other stones, which was less known before.
So that is Stonehenge and all I can think of
(19:00):
his ediizard, all I can think of a spinal tap
between the two of us were very entertained. Yes, So
before we close out, I have some listener mail and
it is from Joanne. Joan says, hi, ladies, I'm enjoying
your podcast while I remodel our eighteen eighties Victorian home.
I attempted to count the number of hours I have listened,
(19:22):
but it was two time consuming and I needed to
get back to painting. My favorite episodes have been The
Orphan Trains and The Lines of Tsavo, mainly because of
my personal connection to both. Although I don't have any
official documentation, I believe my great grandfather was a child
on the Orphan Trains. His name was Thomas. He and
his siblings William, Martin, and Mamie were placed into the
(19:42):
Catholic Protectory, which was an orphanage, after their mother died
in eighteen nineties six and their father could not keep them.
Their father later disappeared, the siblings were separated. The orphanage
would not give Tom any information because he had become
a Protestant. Tom located his brother Bill, who was a
conductor on the subway. Tom talked about the orphan train
(20:03):
and how his family reconnected in a later and a
letter to his older brother Martin dated April eighteenth, nineteen,
and he basically, I don't want to read the story
because I feel like it's a little too personal to
just read on the air um. But he sort of
tells the story of looking for his brother and then
basically finding him in the phone book, which I found
(20:23):
to be delightful. He found him in the phone book
and then went and met him and confirmed that it
really was his brother. Tom would have been sent on
the train in five I have not found what happened
to the other siblings while they were separated, but Martin
was in jail when the later letter was written. William
continued as conductor on the subway. Their sister Mamie, got
married and had a family. My great grandfather Thomas and
(20:44):
my great grandmother Elizabeth became officers in the Salvation Army.
Thomas lived to be ninety four. As for the Lions
of Tsavo, our family served in the bush in Kenya, Africa,
where the man eating lightning lions were terrorizing the railroad.
We lived among the Massai people. One evening, my husband
showed the movie Ghost in the Darkness to the staff
at our project. I don't think that many of them
(21:06):
slept that night. It did not help that on nights
that there was no moon, you could not see two
inches in front of you, and you can occasionally hear
the roar of lions. We traveled through the Savo area
but did not stop. The story of the man eating
lions continues to put fear in the hearts of Kenyans
and Americans even now. If you ever want to take
(21:27):
a road trip to Kenya, let us know we would
be happy to be your tour guides. Then she thanks
us for the podcast. Thanks Joanne, I love the personal
connection to you, and I'll mention that part of the
reason that the Lions of Tsavo story persists and still
scares people, is that there are still incidents of lions
attacking men. The they're doing what lions do. Yeah, And
(21:52):
I don't mean to sound callous. I'm just like, they're
wild animals. They're gonna attack things. Yeah. And we mentioned
it in that podcast that this particular route, these lines
in this area are sort of extra aggressive, and there's
still lots of research going on about why that might
be the case. But uh, there's a reason that fear persists. Yep,
it's justified. They are they are fierce. Uh. If you
(22:16):
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is at missing history doup spreadshirt dot com. If you
(22:39):
would like to learn a little bit more about what
we've talked about today, you can come to our parent
company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com and
put the word stone hinge into the search bar and
you won't find various things about stone Hinge. You can
also come to our site which is missed in History
dot com, and we will have in the show notes
for this episode links to all the sources we use,
(23:00):
some of which have cool pictures of things that have
been found, a kind of virtual maps of what is
underneath the ground its Stonehenge. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot
com and missing history dot com. For more on this
from thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com, m
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. When news broke this September, this is
that we're recording that there is a whole lot of
(00:23):
stuff we never knew about buried in and around Stonehenge.
I thought, great, when it's the end of the year
and we do all our unearthed episodes, I'll update our
Stonehenge episode. And I filed that away in my brain,
and once I got started planning out how we were
going to cover our holiday schedule, I penciled it in there.
(00:44):
And I also remember at some point double checking to
make sure we actually had a Stonehenge episode. But in
a very twilight zone development, when December actually rolled around
and it was time to really start recording our unearthed
stuff this year, ill and there was no Stonehenge episode
in the archive. Uh. I was so sure that we
(01:05):
had one that I actually wondered if something had happened
to our RSS feed and the disappeared or something. So
I m I opened up that spreadsheet that you and
I got when we very first started that had every
episode on it, and it was not on there either.
And so I just disc decided that I don't know,
maybe I've been body snatched or something. Um. I expressed
(01:28):
my bafflement on Twitter, and we got way more people
asking us if we were going to have a Stonehenge
episode or telling us to please do it. Then we
got from people who were like, mat, no big loss.
So now also the archive feels like it's missing something
because it doesn't have the Stonehenge episode that I wish
sure had had. So we're gonna take a little page
(01:51):
from the Sarah and Holly playbook from back when they
found Richard the Third under that car park, and we're
gonna have an unearthed episode is actually a whole new thing,
but about one specific topic. So next week we're going
to have the Unearthed episodes that have become traditional in
the year end Time, where we talk about all kinds
of things that were dug up in some way or
(02:13):
another this year. But this episode is going to be
a whole new thing on Stonehenge, both past and what
was just discovered about it this year. So here's what
we knew about Stonehenge before September. Uh. Stonehenge is most
famously a prehistoric monument north of Salisbury Wiltshire in southern England.
It's most recognizable features are these immense stones in post
(02:37):
and lintel formations known as trilithons. It's thousands of years
old and it was also built over thousands of years
at the end of the Neolithic period and the beginning
of the Bronze Age in England. Stonehenge is just one
of many Neolithic hinges. These are all earthworks that include
both a circular bank and a ditch, and many of them,
(02:58):
but not all allso so include stone works. So even
though those stones are what you think of probably when
someone says Stonehenge, what makes a hinge is the earthword part,
the earthwork part. Stonehenge is also the only prehistoric stonework
that includes a lentil atop the posts, so there are
lots of upright stones, but Stonehenge is the only one
(03:19):
from the prehistoric period that has that crossbar over the top.
Along with more than three hundred hinges and other nearby sites,
Stonehenge was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in six
and the stones themselves come in two main varieties. There
are sarsen stones, which are made of sandstone that can
be found in southern England. The Sarsen stones were probably
(03:42):
core quarried at Marlborough Downs. Then there are the blue stones,
and this is a catch all term for a lot
of the smaller stones at Stonehenge. They're not all necessarily
the same type exactly of stone. These stones came from
a range of places, and some of them were from
as far away as what is now Ales. Many of
the stones that were once part of Stonehenge are now gone,
(04:04):
taken away and repurposed for centuries up through the medieval period.
Some of the stones are still on the site but
have fallen down from their original position. The ground around
the area was also dug up over the centuries for
all kinds of reasons, sometimes for vaguely archaeological purposes, sometimes
for straight up treasure hunting. One of these diggers was
(04:26):
actually Charles Darwin, who dug who dug two holes at
Stonehenge to study earthworms in eighteen seventy seven. The first
official archaeological dig started there in nineteen o one, and
over the centuries people have come up with a lot
of possible explanations for what Stonehenge means. It's been studied
(04:46):
from every possible angle anthropologically, archaeologically, mathematically, geometrically, astronomically, just
on and on every point of view you can analyze
it from. It's been done. I think that's one of
the reasons that there was at least some talk on Twitter,
like nobody lost everybody. Everybody knows about Stonehenge. Legend has
(05:06):
tied Stonehenge to Merlin and King Arthur. So, according to legend,
Merlin brought the stones from Ireland with the help of
a giant from Africa. In this story, King Ambrosius are
Lean is buried at Stonehenge along with his brother Uther Pendragon,
who was the father of King Arthur, and for centuries
the academic world generally thought Stonehenge was some kind of
(05:28):
Druidic temple. This idea goes back to at least the
seventeenth century, and one of the reasons it had so
much staying power was that people thought a civilization would
have had to advance at least to the Iron Age
to pull off such a feat. That's when we have
the evidence of the Druids in Britain, largely thanks to
the Roman records. It's also not a far hop from
the mysterious idea of Druid to the mysterious idea of Stonehenge,
(05:52):
it just seemed to kind of line up and fit together. However,
as soon as carbon dating was invented and used at site,
it completely dispelled the idea that it's a Druid monument.
Stonehenge dates back much much earlier than the Iron Age,
and we just don't have records of the Druids existing
(06:12):
back that far. So once again, in spite of this
preconceived idea that only an Iron Age society would be
advanced enough to build something like stone Hinge and reality
a Stone Age and then Bronze Age society actually did it.
I will say that I think a lot of people
just have the idea of Druids as conventional wisdom tied
to Stonehenge, even still, even though that's been pretty thoroughly
(06:34):
discredited at this point, I think like the common knowledge
of Stonehenge to a lot of people is Druids, agreed.
I have actually witnessed an argument over this fact that
someone was completely like, everyone knows that Stonehenge is built
by the Druids, and I had another acquaintance he was like, well,
what everyone else seems to not know is that there
has been dating done, and that is not correct. And
(06:55):
you've ever seen two people dig in so hard on
a historical argument. In the nineteen sixties, astronomers started to
speculate that Stonehenge was basically a giant calendar or a
computer for predicting eclipses and other astronomical events. This is
actually something that was part of my astronomy class in college.
(07:16):
I dug out my astronomy textbook hoping to refresh my memory,
and I learned that this is like my astronomy professor's
went off script and didn't teach it from the book,
It was from some other source. Basically, there are all
kinds of astronomical events that you can witness by standing
in one part of Stonehenge and kind of sighting down
another part. And while many of the stones and other
(07:37):
formations at Stonehenge definitely follow astronomical lines. So what my
teachers were telling me that was all correct. It all
circles back around to like, was a Stone Age or
maybe Bronze Age society sophisticated enough to do that, uh,
you know, or or back when it was still thought
to be an Iron Age thing, even was an Iron
Age society able to do that? We really don't have
(08:01):
the best track records so far of deciding what different
societies were advanced enough to do or not do, so
who knows. And over the years researchers have also theorized
that it was sort of a Bronze Age capital for
many tribes, like a seasonal gathering place, a funereal monument,
a healing site, and a religious site including sacrificial rights.
(08:23):
But for now it still sits squarely in the not
conclusively proven category. Yeah, people have all kinds of ideas
about what it was quote for and their pros and
cons to all these different ideas. Also in the not
conclusively proven category is exactly how the massive stones on
the site got there, A lot of them, way between
(08:45):
four and eight tons. The bluestones brought in from Wales.
Some of them had to travel like three hundred miles
and so there are theories that maybe they were rolled
along logs, or maybe they were floated down the Welsh
coast and then up the Avon River, uh like the
Druid idea. That idea has been around for quite a while,
(09:06):
but none of these are conclusively proven. A more recent
supposition is that the stones were actually carried in enormous
baskets hauled by oxen or that the bluestones used at
Stonehenge were pushed south by glaciers. One of the like
counterpoints to that last part that made me chuckle was
somebody saying it seems weird that glaciers would move exactly
(09:30):
the right number of stones to put into Stonehenge. That
made me laugh. I don't. I don't think that's actually
valid as a counterpoint, because the stones are used for
other stuff too, But still, I don't know. Those glaciers
are sneaky. I know they're wildly So we're going to
talk some more about how Stonehenge was built after a
brief word from a sponsor. So monuments were actually erected
(09:54):
in the Stonehenge area long before the construction of the earthworks,
and the stone works actually started as far back as
eight thousand b c. E. Hunter gatherer people erected pine
posts in the area, and the purpose of these posts
is not completely clear. As we mentioned in our Poverty
Point podcast and as we've kind of alluded to a
couple of times in this episode, not particularly common for
(10:17):
hunter gatherer societies to build elaborate monuments. Although it's not
unheard of. Also in the area are burial mounds that
date back at least to three thousand b c. E.
The construction of Stonehenge itself with a six stage process
that started around three thousand b C and ended around.
(10:39):
Construction of other barrows, dwellings, monuments, and other sites went
on at the same time. The first stage of building
at Stonehenge was from about three thousand to twenty nine
thirty five b C, and this was mostly an earthwork stage.
That's when the circular ditch that's sort of the hallmark
of the hinge was built. And that ditch is about
(11:02):
three hundred and thirty ft or a hundred meters in diameter,
so it's today the outer perimeter of kind of what
we think of as Stonehenge, as a high bank on
the outside and a low bank on the inside. The
builders of this ditch placed antler picks, which were probably
used to dig the ditch itself, as well as animal
bones down into the bottom of the ditch. Some of
(11:25):
these animal bones were much older than the ditch itself is.
The ditch encloses fifty six pits, known as the Aubrey holes.
These were named for the man who identified them John Aubrey.
The Aubrey holes probably contained Welsh Blue stones, and they
also contained burial remains of cremated people. The second stage
of construction took place between twenty forty b C, so
(11:49):
that's a multi hundred year jump. Burials continued to happen
at Stonehenge in the interim, but there wasn't new construction
before the second phase started. When construction zoomed, that's when
the huge sarsen stones started to be erected in a
very methodical, systematic manner along regular intervals and following that
post and lintel style. The stones are held together using
(12:11):
dovetail and tongue and groove joints, much like is used
to hold wood together in construction. Wood construction actually may
have been the inspiration for how to secure the stones
to one another. Big difference though, unlike would those stones
weighed around seven tons for upright. Stones known as the
station stones were probably also erected during the second phase,
(12:32):
but only two of those are still in place. Timber
circles were also built to the north and the south
of the Stoneworks during this second phase of construction, as
was a collection of dwellings that may have been the
builder's camp. The third stage started just about ten years
after the second one ended. The building during this sphase
(12:52):
included a roughly C shaped avenue lined by banks and ditches,
which went all the way from Stonehenge to the River Avon.
This is almost two miles or three kilometers away. A
lot of this avenue has since been destroyed by plowing,
although when it was intact, parts of it lined up
with the sunrise during the summer solstice and the sunset
(13:13):
during the winter solstice. This is of course one of
those features that has led people to believe that Stonehenge
is some kind of computer or clock. But in two
thousand eight it was discovered that this line also follows
a line of chalk ridges that happened to follow that
same course, so it was probably a coincidence. I think
it's also one of the things that makes people think
(13:33):
druids celstice. Yeah. More recent stages of Stonehenges construction spanned
from twenty to eighty to fifty BC, and these phases
largely involved rearrangements of the existing stones and digging of
a series of pits that are known as the Why
and Z holes. And if you are wondering, just how
(13:56):
many man hours this massive project may have taken. It's
estimated that it's about three million. So that's kind of
an overview of Stone Hinge as a monument. And before
we talk about the discoveries about Stonehenge in let's take
another brief break for a word from a sponsor. So
(14:16):
all of this finally brings us to the fourteen discoveries
that led us to doing this episode. This latest round
of discoveries comes thanks to using three D imaging to
study the site, rather than what you might imagine when
somebody says archaeological dig This study is called the Stoneheinge
Hidden Landscapes Project and it's a team effort between the
(14:37):
University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological
Prospection and Virtual Archaeology. This project started in July and
it went on for four years, although the actual field
work totaled about a hundred and twenty days spread across
that time. The field studies included magnetic perspection, ground penetrating, radar,
(14:58):
electromagnetic in auction sensors, earth resistance surveys, laser scanning, aerial photography,
airborne spectroscopy and other technologies. To map the area in
a noninvasive way. Some of the pictures of this going
on are unintentionally kind of comical because their guys driving
a t v s that are towing these imaging rigs,
(15:20):
and what we would otherwise think of as a mysterious
ancient landscape, it just seems very incongruous and kind of anachronistic.
In the case of the magnetic prospection, these are actually
specially built a TV s to be non magnetic so
that they wouldn't interfere with their readings. And this isn't
at all the first time that noninvasive imaging has actually
(15:41):
been used to study Stonehenge. There was already a really
large body of digital imagery and other noninvasive work that existed. However,
a lot of that existing body of data focused on
the monuments, which we already knew existed, and this time
the focus was much more broad what was actually between
all of the monuments. The result of all this is
(16:03):
a highly detailed map of what's under the surface of
the earth at Stonehenge and a ten square kilometer region
around it, which was obtained without actually having to dig
anything up. And their findings include seventeen previously unknown ritual monuments,
burial sites, and a barrow that dates back to before
the first phase of Stonehenge construction. This last one was
(16:26):
a huge building made of timber, which was then buried
under a mound. The survey also examined the Durrington Walls Superhinge,
which is a nearby site that's much, much much larger
than Stonehenge. Derrington Walls has a similar avenue to the
one at Stonehenge, which, like the Stonehenge avenue, aligns with
(16:46):
the summer solstice sunset, so there's some speculation that these
two sites were meant to kind of complement each other.
The findings at Drington Walls include an entire earlier phase
of construction that was previously known and has since been buried.
The earlier phase included a series of posts or stones,
some of which may still exist beneath the surface. There
(17:08):
was a whole documentary about all this on BBC two
which was called Operations Stonehenge What Lies Beneath which full
disclosure we have not watched because it appears not to
be available outside of the UK that I can find,
and based on all this new information, Stonehenge was not
as popularly imagined a secluded spot where only a few
(17:29):
people visited. There's a whole lot more going on than
just what we can see from above ground. And really
this imaging work, as awesome as it is, it's really
just a next step. It's a tool to figure out
where researchers should study next. So it's a treasure trove
of new information, but it's also really a way for
researchers to figure out what their next project should be.
(17:53):
Some of the more recent discoveries at Stonehengd also come
from a much less high tech method, and one that
may surprise you. I did not realize that there are
people taking care of the grass at Stonehenge and watering it. Uh.
In my head, Stonehenge just makes its own grass. I
don't know the fact that they're like lawn care people.
(18:14):
They're trying to make sure that it remains lush and
green just took me by surprise, but so not druidic magic.
Right in the summer of an irrigation hose pipe that
was being used to to irrigate this area and keep
the grass watered was too short to reach the outer
parts of the stone circles, and later on aerial photography
of this parched area of land found particularly dry patches,
(18:38):
and those are now believed to have been the sites
of stones which have since been removed. It pretty much
confirmed what everyone already suspected Slash knew, which is that
the circle used to be a complete circle and not
a partial circle. But it did give clues to the
exact positions of the other stones, which was less known before.
So that is Stonehenge and all I can think of
(19:00):
his ediizard, all I can think of a spinal tap
between the two of us were very entertained. Yes, So
before we close out, I have some listener mail and
it is from Joanne. Joan says, hi, ladies, I'm enjoying
your podcast while I remodel our eighteen eighties Victorian home.
I attempted to count the number of hours I have listened,
(19:22):
but it was two time consuming and I needed to
get back to painting. My favorite episodes have been The
Orphan Trains and The Lines of Tsavo, mainly because of
my personal connection to both. Although I don't have any
official documentation, I believe my great grandfather was a child
on the Orphan Trains. His name was Thomas. He and
his siblings William, Martin, and Mamie were placed into the
(19:42):
Catholic Protectory, which was an orphanage, after their mother died
in eighteen nineties six and their father could not keep them.
Their father later disappeared, the siblings were separated. The orphanage
would not give Tom any information because he had become
a Protestant. Tom located his brother Bill, who was a
conductor on the subway. Tom talked about the orphan train
(20:03):
and how his family reconnected in a later and a
letter to his older brother Martin dated April eighteenth, nineteen,
and he basically, I don't want to read the story
because I feel like it's a little too personal to
just read on the air um. But he sort of
tells the story of looking for his brother and then
basically finding him in the phone book, which I found
(20:23):
to be delightful. He found him in the phone book
and then went and met him and confirmed that it
really was his brother. Tom would have been sent on
the train in five I have not found what happened
to the other siblings while they were separated, but Martin
was in jail when the later letter was written. William
continued as conductor on the subway. Their sister Mamie, got
married and had a family. My great grandfather Thomas and
(20:44):
my great grandmother Elizabeth became officers in the Salvation Army.
Thomas lived to be ninety four. As for the Lions
of Tsavo, our family served in the bush in Kenya, Africa,
where the man eating lightning lions were terrorizing the railroad.
We lived among the Massai people. One evening, my husband
showed the movie Ghost in the Darkness to the staff
at our project. I don't think that many of them
(21:06):
slept that night. It did not help that on nights
that there was no moon, you could not see two
inches in front of you, and you can occasionally hear
the roar of lions. We traveled through the Savo area
but did not stop. The story of the man eating
lions continues to put fear in the hearts of Kenyans
and Americans even now. If you ever want to take
(21:27):
a road trip to Kenya, let us know we would
be happy to be your tour guides. Then she thanks
us for the podcast. Thanks Joanne, I love the personal
connection to you, and I'll mention that part of the
reason that the Lions of Tsavo story persists and still
scares people, is that there are still incidents of lions
attacking men. The they're doing what lions do. Yeah, And
(21:52):
I don't mean to sound callous. I'm just like, they're
wild animals. They're gonna attack things. Yeah. And we mentioned
it in that podcast that this particular route, these lines
in this area are sort of extra aggressive, and there's
still lots of research going on about why that might
be the case. But uh, there's a reason that fear persists. Yep,
it's justified. They are they are fierce. Uh. If you
(22:16):
would like to write to us, we are a history
podcast like how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook
at facebook dot com slash miss industry and on Twitter
at miss Industry. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, and we are also on pentrant at
pinterest dot com slash miss in History. We have a
spreadshirt store full of shirts and other things, and it
is at missing history doup spreadshirt dot com. If you
(22:39):
would like to learn a little bit more about what
we've talked about today, you can come to our parent
company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com and
put the word stone hinge into the search bar and
you won't find various things about stone Hinge. You can
also come to our site which is missed in History
dot com, and we will have in the show notes
for this episode links to all the sources we use,
(23:00):
some of which have cool pictures of things that have
been found, a kind of virtual maps of what is
underneath the ground its Stonehenge. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot
com and missing history dot com. For more on this
from thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com, m
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