Mike Pitts on Stonehenge Live on Channel 5 TV
Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 21 June 2005 Page Views: 50890
StonehengeCountry: England County: Wiltshire Type: Stone CircleInternal Links:
Mike Pitts writes: I thought Portal readers might like to know a bit about the Channel 5 project to build a full-size representation of the new Stonehenge. I'd say it's the biggest Stonehenge hypothesis ever seen!
All the megaliths in place where I think they were, including a complete circle of bluestones but not, at least in sarsen, a complete ring of lintels. There is a half-size upright in the circle (stone 11) that has always been recognised but, apart from one drawing published by Edgar Barclay in 1895, never shown in any reconstruction illustrations. If it's an original part of the design (which I think it is: at the equivalent position at contemporary Woodhenge, amongst all the posts are 2 small sarsen stones) it cannot have supported any lintels. We came up with one possible solution - that has the advantage of being testable by excavation.
Having to answer the model-makers' many questions, such as what colour were the stones (who knows?), has reinforced for me how little the standing remains at Stonehenge have been studied. There is not even a chart of basic measurements, let alone a proper study of the carvings or the stone tooling (for which there is a variety of very interesting evidence). Are the lintels curved or straight on one side? Do the uprights taper by design? We just don't know. Given that the surfaces of the sarsens seem to be eroding (there are small spalls in areas of dense lichen growth), these are urgent questions that need addressing.
Last Tuesday around a dozen Stonehenge archaeologists met at the nearly finished model on the Wiltshire downs, and vowed to do something about this research. We also took the opportunity to toast our friend John Evans, who died the night before. John had initiated our understanding of the ancient Stonehenge environs with some key land snail studies.
One of the people I brought to the Channel 5 film is Gordon Pipes, a Derbyshire carpenter with good ideas about how the stones were moved and erected - he's focussed on the sheer weight of the sarsens (around 30 tons, and 40-55 for the trilithon uprights) and reckons the popular rollers would not be possible. On Monday morning a review copy of Aubrey Burl and Neil
Mortimer's new book arrived in my post: Stukeley's Stonehenge An Unpublished manuscript 1721-1724 (Yale). To my great surprise, Stukeley described precisely the same method of moving stones as proposed by Pipes, what Stukeley called using "leavers in the nature of a galley oars". We still have much to learn from old Stukeley, not least because his eyes were focussed on the above ground remains that arguably we have overlooked since we started digging.
We broadcast live from the model on June 20 and 21 at 7.30pm, Channel 5.
Note: We now also have a Summer Solstice 2005 Gallery in the making, but none from Stonehenge yet. More photos please!
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