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Just before dawn on 21 December 1967, archaeologist Michael O’Kelly stepped into the darkness of a 5,000-year-old tomb. He clambered through a long, narrow passage towards a burial chamber hidden deep inside the huge mound of stones, and then turned to look back towards the entrance. The visible patch of landscape looked dark and featureless, cut through by a glittering silver river. Flocks of starlings looped across the sky. He checked his watch: two minutes to nine. What happened next would catapult him to fame and change his life for ever.
O’Kelly had been excavating this site in Newgrange, Ireland, for the past five years. Workmen realised in the seventeenth century that what appeared to be a small, scrub-covered hill was actually built from ancient stones: a passage tomb, of a type common across parts of the British Isles. But this one was huge – an impressive 90 metres in diameter, with a 24-metre-long passage constructed from great stone slabs leading to a cross-shaped chamber with a high, corbelled roof. Inside and out, the walls were alive with art – elaborate chevrons, diamonds, spirals – picked into the rock using flint-tipped chisels.
Local people said the tomb was a burial place for the legendary Kings of Tara, whom medieval writers said ruled from a hill nearby. During his project to excavate and restore the stones, O’Kelly did find human remains mixed into the earth floor. But radiocarbon dating showed that the tomb was far more ancient than the stories about Tara. It was built around 3200 BC, centuries before even Egypt’s Great Pyramids.
O’Kelly also noted a curious rectangular opening high above the tomb’s entrance, which he called the ‘roof box’. It was partly blocked by a square chunk of crystallised quartz, which seemed to have worked as a shutter; a second chunk had fallen to the floor. Scratches on the stone of the roof box suggested that these shutters had been repeatedly slid open and closed. The opening was too small and high for people to climb through, so O’Kelly was mystified by its purpose. Perhaps it was a place for offerings, or formed a doorway for the souls of the dead.
Then he considered a third possibility. Another story told by locals was that at midsummer, the light of the rising sun shone into the tomb, illuminating a distinctive triple-spiral carving at the back of the burial chamber. O’Kelly couldn’t find any witnesses. And he knew that the story was impossible, because the tomb faces southeast, over the valley of the Boyne river, whereas the midsummer sun rises much further north.
But the stories were persistent, and O’Kelly realised that the tomb’s entrance does point in roughly the right direction to be lit at midwinter, when the sun rises at its furthest point south. So in the early hours of the morning on the winter solstice in December 1967, he drove over a hundred miles through the darkness from his home in Cork to test the idea. When he arrived, the surrounding fields and even the road below were deserted. He entered the tomb feeling utterly alone.
It was a clear morning, so as he waited in the burial chamber he was hopeful that the sunrise might indeed creep inside. But what actually happened was sudden and dramatic. As the sun’s first rays appeared above the ridge on the river’s far bank, a thin, bright shaft of light burst through the roof box and struck not the entrance passage but the floor at his feet: a direct hit right in the tomb’s heart. The light soon widened to a rich golden beam about 15 centimetres across, until the chamber was so bright he could walk around without a lamp, and see the roof 6 metres above.
‘I was literally astounded,’ O’Kelly said later. ‘I expected to hear a voice or perhaps feel a cold hand resting on my shoulder, but there was silence.’ After 17 minutes, the sun passed across the slit and darkness returned. He was deeply moved by the experience, and returned to the tomb every winter for the rest of his life, lying on the soft sandy floor of the burial chamber as the light shaft danced across his face.
Thanks to O’Kelly’s work, the tomb is now a World Heritage Site, with tens of thousands of people applying each year for the privilege of standing inside when it lights up. And although his discovery was rare and unexpected at the time, we now know that Newgrange is just one of many stone monuments constructed in western Europe during the Neolithic period1 that were aligned to events in the sky.
Some are exceptional and dramatic, such as Stonehenge in England, aligned to the midsummer and midwinter solstices; or the stone circle at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, which captures the nineteen-year cycle of the moon. But there are many smaller examples, such as the hundreds of simple dolmen tombs in southern Europe, whose entrances face the rising sun.2
What did these stones mean to their Neolithic builders? Why did people go to such effort to build these monuments, and to relate so many of them to the sky? The answers, as far as we can glean, reveal aspects of human identity and cosmology at a transformative time in our history, perhaps the ultimate transformation, when our species first adopted agriculture.
The hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic had existed as an integral part of the natural world, sharing their environment on equal terms with other species. During the Neolithic revolution, people cut those ties and became farmers, controlling and exploiting the land. This shift in lifestyle and mindset changed humanity for ever, setting a trajectory of technological progress that has ultimately made us capable of reshaping not just landscapes but the entire planet.
The revolution was about more than forging a new relationship with wheat or fields or sheep. It transformed our wider cosmos; how people viewed the spirit world and the sky. In fact, there’s a case to be made that these new cosmological ideas didn’t simply reflect the shift to farming. They caused it.
It’s a story that starts not in Ireland but with humanity’s oldest known megalithic monument, built a staggering six millennia earlier than Newgrange, and thousands of miles to the east.
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In 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was searching for a new project. For the past decade he had been helping to excavate a site in southeast Turkey called Nevalı Çori, a hunter-gatherer settlement inhabited in the ninth and early eighth millennia BC, with houses made from limestone blocks held together with mud. The village included a series of mysterious ‘cult buildings’ (constructed on the same site over time), that were sunk a few metres down into the ground. They were shaped like rounded squares, with stone benches around the edges of the interior, interrupted by T-shaped monolithic pillars. Two further T-shaped pillars stood in the centre, decorated with carvings of human arms, like some kind of anthropomorphic beings.
The site was fascinating, a glimpse into the worldview of a society on the verge of transition: within a few centuries, farming would flourish in this region. For the first time in history, people here started to cultivate wheat and to corral sheep, pigs and goats. But in 1992, the entire settlement was flooded by the construction of the Atatürk Dam. The rest of its secrets were lost for ever.3
To find a new site, Schmidt surveyed other prehistoric remains in the region. He came across a 15-metre-high mound in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains just 60 kilometres from Nevalı Çori, called Göbekli Tepe – ‘Potbelly Hill’ – because of its curves. The hill was strewn with Neolithic flint tools and broken limestone slabs. Archaeologists who spotted the slabs in the 1960s had dismissed them as belonging to a medieval cemetery, but Schmidt realised that they matched the T-shaped pillars in the cult buildings at Nevalı Çori. Except that these were gigantic, made from great blocks of stone several metres high. ‘Within a minute of first seeing it, I knew I had two choices,’ he later said. ‘Go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here.’ He chose the second.
Through excavations and geophysical surveys over the next two decades, Schmidt and his team found that the hill is packed with buried pillars and enclosures. There are square chambers similar to those at Nevalı Çori and also dating to the ninth millennium BC. But beneath them is an older layer of much larger circles, up to 20 metres across, dating to the tenth millennium BC. Up to twelve T-shaped pillars around the edge of each space were connected by a stone bench. Two more giant pillars – up to 5.5 metres high and each weighing several tonnes – stood parallel in the centre, with traces of carved arms, belts and loincloths made of animal skins. Other stones are covered in carvings of animals: spiders, scorpions, vultures, foxes, boar, gazelles. The archaeologist and prehistorian Steven Mithen has said that Göbekli Tepe is ‘an amalgamation of Lascaux cave and Stonehenge’, and in time, too, it is a stepping stone, falling roughly midway between the two.
The discovery of huge stone monuments at such an early date – 12,000 years old – was astounding. It takes colossal effort and organisation to erect constructions like this, with hundreds of people working together; other sites on such an enormous scale aren’t known until thousands of years later. Archaeologists had assumed that hunter-gatherers simply weren’t capable of doing it. They figured that the conversion to agriculture, perhaps triggered by climate change or growing populations, eventually made such monuments possible by providing the resources for large, permanent settlements. This led to a more complex society, as well as changes in religious belief, which together produced both the ability and the motivation to create giant symphonies in stone.
There were dissenters. The French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin argued in the 1990s that cultural or religious changes must have come first. From a technical point of view, early humans could have started farming long before, ‘but neither the idea nor the desire ever came to them’. Something must have happened, he suggested, to change how they viewed the natural world. But there was little hard evidence for what that shift might have been, or how it happened.
What Schmidt found, however, suggested that Cauvin was right. Here was clear evidence of a complex, organised society, with some form of religion, or at the very least sophisticated mythology, all before the invention of farming. What’s more, the pillars of Göbekli Tepe were erected at precisely the place where farming was about to originate.
Biologists have pinpointed this small region, between the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, as the only place where all seven Neolithic founder crops (chickpea, einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea and bitter vetch) grew together, while genetic studies of hundreds of einkorn and emmer wheat strains have concluded that domesticated versions of both likely originated from wild strains that grew in the Karacadag Mountains, just 30 kilometres from Göbekli Tepe.
Large numbers of people, maybe hundreds, would have had to congregate on the hilltop to build Göbekli Tepe. Simply having to feed them all may have created pressure to develop new and more predictable food sources. Mithen has suggested that gathering and processing wild grain at or near the site could have led to fallen grain springing up and being gathered again, leading over time to domesticated strains. Rather than being a response to climate change, he concluded, the domestication of wheat ‘may have been a by-product of the ideology that drove hunter-gatherers to carve and erect massive pillars of stone on a hilltop in southern Turkey’.
But the connection might run deeper than that. German archaeologist Jens Notroff and his colleagues, who have continued excavating Göbekli Tepe since Schmidt’s death in 2014, see clear evidence of a shifting relationship to the natural world, as suggested by Cauvin. In the cave art of the Palaeolithic, people are rarely represented; it’s the animals that take centre stage. By contrast, the foxes, snakes and scorpions of Göbekli Tepe are reduced to smaller attributes or decorations on those huge anthropomorphic pillars. As the team put it in 2015, ‘humans are no longer depicted as a coequal part of nature, but are clearly more prominent and “raised” above the animal world’. The art shows, they argue, that people had already begun exerting power over nature: a ‘mental control’ that led to the subsequent physical control of domestication.
Another striking aspect of Göbekli Tepe is an apparent obsession with death. The art here features multiple images of headless people, as well as statues of heads apparently broken from larger statues. Among animal remains found in the sediment – thought to be the debris from lavish feasts – are hundreds of pieces of human bones. Anthropologists reported in 2017 that most of these are from skulls, and that some are carved with grooves and holes in a way that suggests intact skulls were once hung up for display.
Schmidt interpreted the abstract T-shaped statues as beings from a ‘transcendent sphere’ (naturalistic statues found at this site and elsewhere show that the builders could depict realistic humans when they wanted to). And, intriguingly, the circular enclosures appear to have been accessed not via doors or gateways but through small openings in ‘porthole stones’. One of these stones is decorated with a boar lying on its back. The circles, Schmidt suggested, represented the realm of the dead, which could only be entered by crawling through the hole.
In fact, a preoccupation with death and particularly skulls emerges across the region at this time and in the centuries following, with human remains commonly buried inside people’s houses. At sites such as Jericho and ’Ain Ghazal in Jordan, dating to the tenth and ninth millennia BC, selected skulls were removed after death and given faces made of plaster, with shells for eyes, before being placed under the floor. At Çayönü, southern Turkey, archaeologists found a building that they called the ‘House of the Dead’, dating to around 8000 BC, with 66 skulls beneath the floor and the remains of a further 400 people. It also held a large, flat stone like an altar, with traces of human and animal blood.
A particularly bizarre example is Çatalhöyük, a 20-metre-high mound on Turkey’s Konya Plain, a few hundred kilometres from Göbekli Tepe. The mound contains mud-brick houses from a settlement that housed thousands of people at its height in around 7000 BC. The closely packed houses were dug down into the ground, and entered by climbing down a ladder through a hatch in the roof. Inside, the houses were richly decorated with paintings, as well as sculptures of animals that burst out of the walls. There were no doors; to move between rooms, inhabitants had to crawl through portholes. The small chambers were further subdivided into sections, just a metre square, which occupied different vertical levels, with their edges marked or guarded by bulls’ heads. Human bones were found buried beneath these platforms and in the walls, including a stillborn foetus enclosed in a brick.
The residents seem to have found the walls of their houses highly significant. As well as embedding objects in them, some had small, undecorated alcoves just big enough for a single person to crouch within. And wall sculptures of animals such as leopards and bulls were repeatedly replastered, up to a hundred times.
It seems a crazy way to live: cramped, dark and difficult to move around. Ian Hodder, an archaeologist at Stanford University who has been excavating the site since 1993, has concluded that for the residents of Çatalhöyük, the physical structure of their houses was entwined with their mythical beliefs: ‘The world was replete with substances that flowed and transformed, and with surfaces that could be passed through.’
Archaeologist and rock-art expert David Lewis-Williams goes further. He believes that people here were deliberately mimicking the experience of crawling through limestone caves. There are such caves in the Taurus Mountains, just a couple of days’ journey to the south, and pieces of stalactite and limestone from these caves have been found in the Çatalhöyük houses. Lewis-Williams has suggested that – just like visitors to the caves of Upper Palaeolithic western Europe – the people who built these houses saw the walls as permeable interfaces, or portals, to the cosmos’s spirit realms. At Çatalhöyük a house wasn’t just a place to live, but ‘the material expression of a mythical world’. It was a model of their universe.
Houses modelled on the cosmos are still known in societies around the world. The Barasana people in the dense forests of Colombia, for example, traditionally live in wooden longhouses called malokas. Each one is a miniature universe in which the roof is the sky and a vertical post, called ‘the seat of the sun’, aligns with the sun’s rays every day at noon. The major horizontal roof beam, oriented east–west, is called ‘the sun’s path’. The floor is the Earth and beneath it is the underworld, where the dead are buried. In his 2005 book, Inside the Neolithic Mind, Lewis-Williams argues that a similar principle might explain other Neolithic monuments and cult buildings found in the Near East, such as the stone circles of Göbekli Tepe. Like Schmidt, he concludes that they modelled the spirit world, or the cosmic realm of the dead, incorporating spaces that are sunk into the ground, with human remains often under the floor.
Were the builders only concerned with the underworld, or did they also look up at the sky? Göbekli Tepe is located on a high point in the landscape, so would have offered a panoramic view of the heavens. Some researchers have suggested that the flat tops of its pillars could have been used to observe the rising or setting of prominent stars, such as Orion’s Belt, or were built to commemorate the gradual appearance in the sky (due to precession) of the bright star Sirius. Others have linked the animal carvings at the site to specific constellations, for example proposing that a scorpion depicted underground might represent Scorpio below the horizon.
Notroff isn’t convinced: he suspects the enclosures were at least partly subterranean, dug down into the sediment, and had roofs, perhaps made from an organic material such as animal hides. So the site may make more sense as a terrifying journey to a cave-like underworld than as an astronomical observatory. He has experienced these spaces beneath a roof recently built to protect the site, and the shadows make the pillars and carvings look larger and ‘even more awe-inspiring’, he told me. ‘I can only imagine how all these images of giant scorpions, curling snakes and snarling predators must have affected the young hunter on his first descent into the darkness, maybe with nothing but the flickering light of a torch.’
This doesn’t mean that the builders of Göbekli Tepe weren’t interested in the sky. One of the best-preserved pillar statues wears a carved necklace decorated with a disc and crescent. These symbols are thought to refer to the moon; it has even been suggested that the necklace identifies this pillar as a ‘moon-deity’. Either way, what structures like Göbekli Tepe reveal is a fundamental shift in how people related to the cosmos. It seems likely that the people who constructed these sites had a similar tiered universe – with lower, middle and upper worlds – to their predecessors in the Palaeolithic and traditional hunter-gatherer societies today. Lewis-Williams argues that altered states of consciousness were likely still important as a way of journeying between these different cosmic realms.
But such journeys were now occurring in man-made, rather than natural, settings. The residents of Çatalhöyük appear to have copied the cramped passages of natural caves. Elsewhere, the greater control that people now had over these portals allowed the development of simpler, more formulaic designs: circles, pillars, squares. As Lewis-Williams has pointed out, this shift towards purpose-built structures would have allowed for greater social control too, with the emergence of powerful elites and formal rituals – including decorating and displaying selected skulls after death and possibly human sacrifice – that prescribed who could access these other realms and how.
Göbekli Tepe, then, epitomises two important changes that seem to have happened in parallel just before the adoption of farming, both of which involve societies beginning to separate themselves from, or elevate themselves above, nature. The spirit realms became populated primarily not with animal guides but human ancestors. And instead of using existing caves or natural features as entrances to these other worlds, people started to build their own.
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It was many millennia before these changes reached the Boyne valley. Genetic studies suggest that farming gradually spread throughout Europe from the Near East, carried by migrants who largely replaced the local populations. The new way of life arrived in Greece around 7000 BC, in northwestern Europe around 4500 BC. And when these farmers reached the Atlantic coast, they made monuments from giant stones, in an explosion of pillars, circles, tombs and graves, from Portugal to Brittany to Sweden.
Different societies expressed this common theme in a variety of ways: in Ireland, a tradition of passage tombs led to Newgrange, one of the most spectacular Neolithic monuments of all. Farmers arrived here around 3750 BC, bringing with them pottery and robust rectangular houses as well as cereals such as wheat and barley. Studies of plant remains suggest that the transition was relatively swift. Within a century or two, cereals were grown across the island, while large areas of forests had been axed or burned.
At the same time, people started building simple stone tombs, with a burial chamber defined by five or six large stones plus a flat capstone on top, all covered with a mound of earth. Over the following centuries, the designs became larger and more complex. Whereas the first tombs were too small to enter, later ones had cairns or mounds up to 20 metres across. Passages inside led to inner chambers decorated with art and corbelled roofs, where rituals could be performed.
Irish archaeologist Robert Hensey, who has studied the development of passage tombs in Ireland, sees these sites too as portals. In his 2015 book First Light: The Origins of Newgrange, he describes them as ‘a powerful transcendental network; a chain of monuments which had acted as bridges to other worlds’. Through occupying the same space as the bones of their forebears, he suggests, ‘select individuals could now physically enter the other world, the realm of the ancestors’. Just like in the Near East, instead of using natural features of landscape as doorways to other dimensions of reality, people were building their own.
And as at Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, this journey to the spirit world was deliberately made difficult. Regardless of the size of a tomb, the passage inside was only ever wide enough for one person at once. Reaching the burial chamber often required ducking, crawling or climbing over stones. And as tombs became larger, the burial chambers became more complex, with up to seven recesses, each just big enough for a sitting or squatting adult. Hensey suggests that people might have stayed inside these for long periods, perhaps to facilitate trance states through sensory deprivation (maybe aided by the spooky effect of echoing chants). He notes that in some traditional communities, such as the Kogi of Colombia or the Orokaiva of northern Papua, individuals in training to become spiritual leaders are confined alone, in darkness, for up to years at a time.
At Göbekli Tepe, the link to the sky is unproven. In Neolithic Europe, it’s crystal clear; megalithic monuments here often feature celestial alignments. A survey of 177 dolmen tombs in Spain and Portugal found that every single one faces east, towards a point on the horizon within the arc of the rising sun. The survey author concluded that each tomb was oriented towards sunrise on a particular day, perhaps when construction began. This fits the idea that such tombs were believed to lead to the underworld – where nature regenerates, and where the sun appears to go each night before being reborn in the morning.
In Ireland, not all passage tombs have obvious solar orientations. A few have roof boxes like the one at Newgrange, though – strong evidence that the builders wanted sunlight to enter at certain times. There is also an emerging focus not just on the daily rebirth of the sun but its annual cycle. A 2017 study of 136 Irish passage tombs concluded that more than 20 of them were intentionally oriented towards key dates in the solar cycle, mostly the solstices.
Eventually, between around 3200 and 3000 BC, passage tombs became larger still, often more than 50 metres across, with bigger stones, higher roofs and longer passages. They had other design modifications too, such as art and decorations on the outside of the tombs, public spaces and platforms around the cairns, and flat mounds so that people could stand on top. The empty recesses where people may once have secluded themselves were now filled by ceremonial stone basins.
Together, these changes suggest that the purpose of these sites was shifting away from enabling individual spirit journeys towards public ceremonies, presumably conducted by powerful elites and intended to invoke drama and awe for the watching crowds. The culmination of this tradition was Newgrange, decorated with a gleaming quartz façade: the most impressive passage tomb known in terms of its size, complexity, the quality and quantity of its art, and the accuracy of its alignment.
It didn’t stand alone, however. This piece of land, famously nestled in a bend of the River Boyne, hosts not just Newgrange but two other passage tombs of similar size – Knowth and Dowth (the latter aligned to the winter solstice sunset) – plus around ninety other monuments, including smaller passage tombs, standing stones, timber circles, earth enclosures and a processional way. It was a dramatic ceremonial landscape which would have required the coordinated effort and resources of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
On the morning of the winter solstice, a procession of mourners or worshippers perhaps walked across the river and up onto the ridge before placing human remains in the tomb. At sunrise, the beam of light shone into the burial chamber, symbolising the journey into the dark underworld. But that may not have been the final destination. Lewis-Williams suggests that people may have imagined the sunlight, with the released spirits of the dead who had been placed in the chamber, then continuing up through the high corbelled roof and back to the sky, where they would join the sun ‘in the eternal round of cosmological life, death and rebirth’.
There was a problem, though. No matter how impressive a tomb like Newgrange or Dowth might have looked to the gathered crowds, the main event – the lighting of the burial chamber – could only be witnessed by the handful of individuals inside. Maybe that’s one reason the tradition reached a dead end; passage tombs were no longer built after about 2900 BC. The focus shifted instead to a new kind of monument which took those same illuminations and made them visible to hundreds of people at once.
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Few ancient monuments have inspired as many different interpretations as the worn, tumbling ruin of Stonehenge, set in the open grasslands of England’s Salisbury Plain. Over the centuries, this mysterious giant circle has been described as a druid temple, astronomical observatory, healing centre, war memorial and even a landing point for alien spacecraft. But thanks to a series of recent excavations at Stonehenge and beyond, archaeologists are now in a better position than ever before to tell the stones’ real story.
The site is unique for the sheer epic size of its stones and the staggering distances they were carried. Giant sandstone slabs called ‘sarsens’, weighing 22–27 tonnes each, were probably brought from hills near Avebury, more than 30 kilometres to the north. Smaller bluestones standing among them, weighing several tonnes each, were brought hundreds of kilometres from Wales: one of the most impressive achievements of the entire Neolithic. Adding to the mystery is the monument’s famous orientation to the sun.
Modern excavations and radiocarbon dating show that Stonehenge was constructed in several phases. Just after 3000 BC, a circular earthen ditch and bank (loosely described as a ‘henge’4) was dug from the chalk using antler picks, with a ring of bluestones just inside and an entrance facing towards the northeast. Several sarsen stones were erected inside the ring and beyond the entrance, leading towards a large, unworked sarsen now called the Heel Stone. Several centuries later, the monument took roughly the form we recognise today, as the bluestones were rearranged and the giant sarsens added in a circle of 30 uprights, with horizontal lintels that may have formed a continuous stone ring, 4 metres in the air. At the centre, arranged in a horseshoe-shaped arc, five doorway-like arches called ‘trilithons’ rose nearly 8 metres.
The most complicated astronomical theories suggested for Stonehenge – for example that it predicted eclipses – have been debunked. But it is indisputable that the trilithon arc, plus an avenue leading away from Stonehenge towards the northeast (it later turns and eventually reaches the nearby Avon river), point towards midsummer sunrise. Thousands now gather every year to watch the midsummer sun rise over the Heel Stone, but in Neolithic times, the sun would have risen in line with the avenue itself.
The monument also captures midwinter sunset, in the opposite direction. Whereas the summer alignment is visible from inside the circle, the setting midwinter sun could have been viewed 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.
