Dates for stonehenge burials signify long use as cemetery (6/2/2008)

Excavations Turn Up Vivid Remains of Stone Age Life

New radiocarbon dates of human cremation burials Stonehenge indicate that the monument was used as a cemetery from its inception just after 3000 B.C. until well after the large stones went up around 2500 B.C.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project is funded by the National Geographic Society of America and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with support from English Heritage. Directors of the Project include Mike Parker Pearson (University of Sheffield), Julian Thomas (University of Manchester), Joshua Pollard (University of Bristol), Colin Richards (University of Manchester), Chris Tilley, University College London, and Kate Welham, (University of Bournemouth).

Many archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 B.C., before the large stones, known as sarsens, were put in place. The new dates provide strong clues about the original purpose of the monument and show that its use as a cemetery extended for more than 500 years.

"It's now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages," said Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield who with National Geographic support leads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project. "Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a 'domain of the dead.'"

The earliest cremation burial dated - a small pile of burned bones and teeth - came from one of the pits around Stonehenge's edge known as the Aubrey Holes and dates to 3030-2880 B.C., roughly the time when Stonehenge's ditch-and-bank monument was cut into Salisbury Plain. The second burial, from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, is that of an adult and dates to 2930-2870 B.C. The most recent cremation, Parker Pearson said, comes from the ditch's northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman; it dates to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.

The work at Stonehenge is featured in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine. An exclusive look at the new discoveries will appear in a global premiere on the National Geographic Channel - "Stonehenge Decoded" - on Sunday, June 1. Stonehenge also is featured in the June/July 2008 issue of National Geographic Kids magazine.

This is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The burials dated by Parker Pearson's team were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

New radiocarbon dates of an antler pick used for digging tell a story about the Stonehenge Greater Cursus, a cigar-shaped ditched enclosure nearly two miles long. The new date - 3630 to 3375 B.C. - puts the cursus 1,000 years before the erection of Stonehenge's sarsens. Archaeologist Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester in England, who led that investigation, says the cursus' two parallel ditches enclosed a linear space that might have been considered sacred. "Our excavation shows it's almost clean - no other animal bones or other deposits," Professor Thomas said. The exact purpose of the cursus is unknown.

On the same axis as the cursus, the Cuckoo Stone was the source of another of the season's revelations. The archaeologists, led by Colin Richards of the University of Manchester, found that the stone, a squat sarsen boulder that lies on its side, had originally come from that location, unlike many other stones at Stonehenge. In Neolithic times, the stone was placed vertically near special pits used for depositing items, according to Richards. "We find again and again that the antler picks used for digging - still perfectly usable - have been deliberately buried in pits as if for ritual," Parker Pearson said.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by The University of Manchester

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