The World of Stonehenge

Abstract

This major British Museum exhibition is the first to feature Stonehenge at its centre and covers many of the new discoveries made in recent years. I visited it early in March and was greeted on entering with a digital display of some of the major stone circles of the British Isles. Thereafter, the exhibition was laid out as a series of themed areas. The first section, 'Working With Nature', touches on the Mesolithic period that preceded the arrival of the early farmers and the Neolithic and Bronze Age. It includes two headdresses manufactured from deer skulls, one taken from the many that were found at Star Carr and the other from a female burial of what seems to have been a shaman, from Germany. The similarity between these is of no surprise since Britain and the continent were still linked by a land bridge at the time of the Star Carr settlement and the nomadic Mesolithic peoples would have moved freely between Britain and mainland Europe. A fine selection of jadeite axes found in Britain and a massive display of other European polished stone axes showcase the objects often regarded as definitive of the Neolithic. There is also an image of the burial of a pair of oxen together with a cart and the information that oxen were used in the construction of monuments like Stonehenge. In this section the establishment of Stonehenge as the circular monument that exists today is discussed, very briefly. We move on to the section entitled 'Sermons in Stones'. Much of this is devoted to artistic representations on stone and other materials. Thus we have a fine collection of carved stone balls from North East Scotland, the Folkton Drums from Yorkshire, the glorious Knowth macehead together with stones from Northern Britain marked with cup and ring. There are shared motifs among these objects – the eyebrows, the spirals, the concentric rings. There are also a couple of large anthropomorphic stones from Southern Europe whose design includes motifs clearly intended as sun imagery. The section includes reference to the Orcadian civilisation, in particular Skara Brae and the Ness of Brodgar, and to the great tombs of Ireland. Next up is 'Seahenge'. Dendro-dating has precisely determined the date for its construction to 2049 BCE so it was in use at the same time as Stonehenge. This wooden circle from Holme-next-the-Sea has been recreated in the Museum, oriented so that, as the curators say, they ‘have managed to align the monument so that you can see the sun rising and setting through the doorway of the monument’. The inclusion of Seahenge is to give an idea of the smaller circles that were being used by family groups, perhaps, for ceremonies. TIME AND MIND 2022, VOL. 15, NO. 2, 269–273 https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2022.2122347