The Human Cosmos. Jo Marchant

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СКАЧАТЬ by a procession approaching along the avenue from the northeast. In fact, the stone surfaces visible from this direction are more carefully dressed, suggesting this midwinter moment was the most important. A rectangle of stones called ‘station stones’ is also possibly aligned to the most extreme rising and setting points of the full moon, which occur at the solstices every 18.6 years.⁵

      What was it all for? That was the question concerning British archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson when he took part in a television documentary about Stonehenge in February 1998. Parker Pearson had invited a Malagasy colleague named Ramilisonina to join him. The pair had spent several years working together in Madagascar, where traditional communities still erect standing stones known as vatolahy (‘man stones’) in honour of the dead.

      The day before filming, Parker Pearson took Ramilisonina to nearby Avebury, where there are three Neolithic stone circles. Curious to know what his friend thought of the prehistoric site, Parker Pearson explained to Ramilisonina that archaeologists didn’t know why the stones had been erected. ‘He asked if I had learned nothing from working in Madagascar,’ Parker Pearson recalled in 2013. ‘It was obvious to him that such stone circles must be monuments to the ancestors, constructed in stone to represent the eternity of life after death.’ Perishable materials such as wood, by contrast, belonged to the temporary world of the living.

      At first, Parker Pearson dismissed the idea that Madagascan beliefs could reveal anything new about the purpose of these Neolithic monuments; the idea of Stonehenge as a memorial to the dead had been suggested before. But the next day, during filming at the site itself, he wondered if Ramilisonina’s words might help to explain not just these ancient stones, but the entire surrounding landscape.

      A few miles up the River Avon from Stonehenge is another Neolithic site, built from earth and wood. Durrington Walls is the largest known henge in the British Isles, an earthen circle that encloses over 17 hectares and includes several large rings of timber posts. Archaeologists had long thought that Durrington Walls was centuries older than Stonehenge, but redating of the Stonehenge stones had just revealed that the two sites could have been in use at the same time. After speaking to Ramilisonina, Parker Pearson wondered if Stonehenge and Durrington Walls might not be two separate monuments after all. Perhaps they were two halves of the same complex: one for the living and one for the dead.

      To test the idea, Parker Pearson and his colleagues excavated across both sites from 2003 to 2009. As predicted, the team found evidence of a previously unsuspected settlement at Durrington Walls. It dates to around 2500 BC, when the giant sarsens were erected at Stonehenge. The site overflowed with debris from domestic life, whereas Stonehenge has yielded almost exclusively cremated human remains (archaeologists estimate hundreds of people may have been buried there in the third millennium BC). What’s more, the team uncovered an avenue leading from one of the timber circles to the Avon, suggesting the site was linked to Stonehenge by river. They also confirmed several solstice alignments at Durrington Walls – including that this circle and its river avenue both face southeast towards either midsummer sunset or midwinter sunrise – and the remains of lavish midwinter feasts.

      Parker Pearson concluded that this was where the builders of Stonehenge’s epic second phase lived. They appear to have travelled from miles around at certain times of year, to celebrate their ancestors and perhaps usher the dead from the living world into the eternal afterlife. The midwinter solstice, when the sun had waned to its lowest point and plant life was dormant, might have been seen, he suggested, as the point at which ‘the dark world of the dead was closest to the world of the living’. Perhaps people gathered then at Durrington Walls to commemorate the recently deceased by feasting and erecting timber posts.

      A procession might have started in the midwinter-oriented timber circle at dawn, with people walking down to the river towards the rising sun. They could have floated downriver by raft or canoe into the realm of the ancestors, perhaps carrying the cremated remains of selected dead, before walking up towards Stonehenge in the afternoon. From this angle, the lintelled circle would have presented a solid silhouette against the sky. The sun would have set directly behind, shining straight through a tight window between the top of that circle and the upper portion of the towering central trilithon. For anyone walking up the slope towards Stonehenge, the last glimmer of sunset would have been held there for a few moments, transformed as at Newgrange into a beam of light framed by stone.

      The idea of Stonehenge as a realm of the dead, visited by the midwinter sun, makes sense in the light of theories about passage tombs such as Newgrange. In both cases, the Neolithic builders used the stones to convert their knowledge about repeating patterns of Earth and sky into dramatic moments of sensory perception. Knowing that the solstice falls on a certain day is one thing, collectively witnessing it in the depths of winter would have been quite another: during the time of greatest darkness comes the light. From their knowledge of cosmic cycles, they constructed a dramatic message about eternity – perhaps eternal afterlife – that would last for millennia.

      The big innovations of the Neolithic are often said to be stone monuments and farming. Yet both of these can be traced back to a deeper shift, as humans mentally separated themselves from nature, and it became conceivable to manipulate and dominate the natural world. Instead of simply adapting to their environment people took control, shaping not just individual monuments but eventually entire landscapes to give their beliefs and desires physical form.

      It’s a revolution begun at and around Göbekli Tepe, but completed 6,000 years later by the builders of Stonehenge. Here the animal spirits are gone; human ancestors rule supreme. And the dependence on caves and the underworld has been broken. The farmers of Neolithic Britain constructed a new cosmology, suitable for a larger, more complex society. People now explored their universe not through individual trance states, deep inside caves as at Lascaux or in tombs like Newgrange, but in public arenas dramatically aligned with the sky. Instead of hiding in the dark, they had stepped into the light.

      1 The Neolithic begins with the introduction of farming and ends with the appearance of bronze tools.

      2 Dolmen tombs are single-chamber tombs in which a large, flat capstone rests on two or more vertical stones.

      3 Many of the excavation’s finds went to the archaeological museum in Sanlıurfa, where they are on display today – including the complete cult building, which has been carefully rebuilt inside the museum.

      4 True henges, however, have the ditch outside the bank. Stonehenge is unusual in having its ditch on the inside.

      5 Claims made in the 1960s that the stones incorporate dozens of astronomical alignments, and that the ‘Aubrey Holes’ were used to predict eclipses, are not generally accepted by scholars today.

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      FATE

      In December 1853, a twenty-seven-year-old archaeologist named Hormuzd Rassam was leading excavations near Mosul, now in Iraq, on behalf of the British Museum in London. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, particularly for someone born and raised in the Middle East. But after more than a year of work, he had yet to make a big discovery, and the spot he was desperate to investigate had been promised to a rival team. He had one last-ditch idea, but the timing had to be perfect. So he watched the desert sky, waiting anxiously for the full moon.

      Mosul was Rassam’s home city. Today, it’s known largely as a casualty of the war against terror, left as a pile of rubble and bones after Iraqi forces won it back from ISIS in July 2017. But in Rassam’s time, Mosul was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, with centuries-old brick walls that enclosed dusty streets, crowded bazaars and mosques with bulging domes and soaring minarets. Rickety, flat-bottomed boats ferried passengers across the River Tigris to the fertile land beyond: cornfields; melon and cucumber beds; and a series of shallow grassy hills.

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