Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos. John North

but almost all were originally covered with a cairn of stones or a mound of earth, or a combination of the two. If the dolmen was once a tomb, then it is usually called a chamber tomb, even where the chamber was only of timber. Where the soil acidity is low, skeletons will survive, and since undisturbed dolmens in such regions seem invariably to contain skeletons, equating dolmens generally with chamber tombs is not likely to be seriously misleading. Not all mounds were used as tombs, even when resembling others that clearly did, and even tombs served other purposes than burial alone. Several tombs have been found surrounded by thousands of shards of pots that had originally been placed on the tomb, a witness to some or other ritual of offerings continuing long after the primary interment. Similar collections of shards deposited over very long periods of time are found at many Neolithic sites throughout Europe.

      There are two broad categories of chamber tomb: a passage grave is one in which it is easy to distinguish between the burial chamber and a passage leading into it, while a gallery grave is one where there is no clear distinction, but where the chamber-passage, usually slab-lined, is long—a substantial fraction of the length of the tomb as a whole.

      Although there are large patches of territory without them, chamber tombs abound in a region of Europe and north Africa lying to the west of a line running roughly from south-central Sweden to Poland and across Europe to Tunis, taking in Sardinia and Corsica. There are also chamber tombs to the northeast of the Black Sea (the Caucasus), to its southwest (north of Istanbul), in Malta, the heel of Italy, and Palestine. Early in the twentieth century, surveys were made across Europe of modern human skull-formations, and it is a curious fact that the remains of chamber tombs generally are concentrated in much the same regions as those where the modern populations with longest skulls were then found to be living (dolichocephalic, those with highest cephalic index). The skulls those tombs yield up are similarly dolichocephalic.

      Chamber tombs are found in a multitude of forms and sizes, and some date from at least as early as the fifth millennium BC. Tombs built with dry-stone walling—that is, using relatively small stones—seem to have given the lead to the builders of megalithic tombs, tombs with very large component stones. In the Iberian Peninsula and Brittany, and in Britain, the two techniques went on being used side by side, even under a single covering.

      Many of the earliest of the chamber tombs had a long, tapered, trapezoidal form, almost always with the burial section lying across the broad end, which was also the higher end. (Various Wessex examples will be illustrated later in the present chapter. The word trapezoidal here indicates a four-sided figure with two sides parallel and two not so.) In Poland the taper may come almost to a point, while in Denmark and Britain the plan is often a long and narrow rectangle. The traditional English name used loosely for such tombs, without regard to their internal structure, is long barrow. It is possible that some rectangular tombs were of constant height rather than wedge-shaped, but until firm evidence is offered for this idea it is best ignored. In Britain—for example at Wayland’s Smithy, on the Ridgeway near the well-known White Horse at Uffington—as well as in northeastern Europe, there are long asymmetrical barrows that were quite obviously made deliberately so. That the lie of the barrows’ sides was not random, or a product of incompetence, will soon be evident from aspects of their internal structure.

      While regional fashions do assert themselves, several properties of the tombs clearly rule out the idea that they were developed in the various centres entirely independently. The problem of the spread of tomb design across Europe is a difficult one. The homeland of farming and cattle-breeding seems to have been in Asia Minor, from whence it worked its way into the Mediterranean and Europe. The spread of European languages, however, followed different routes. The historical Indo-European languages are thought to have radiated from the Balkan–Carpathian region, around the fifth and fourth millennia BC. The spread of the Neolithic peoples responsible for the long tombs, one that took place over millennia rather than centuries, seems to have radiated from Anatolia or the Balkans. As an archaeological measure of cultural movement, pottery styles link the later English long barrows with the tombs of the Funnel Beaker Culture of Northern Europe, but long barrows had been built by earlier Neolithic groups, who had also come from the continent. There are those who believe that the (Belgian) Michelsberg culture is a part of the Funnel Beaker Culture, and that it was a group of Michelsberg people that crossed to Britain and influenced the earlier Neolithic Windmill Hill culture there, with its characteristically simple ‘baggy’ pottery.

      Many centuries after the immigration that had brought funnel-shaped beakers, a new immigrant people introduced beakers of bell shape—the ‘Bell Beaker people’. They favoured round rather than long barrows. The Bell Beaker expansion was an important agent of cultural change in western Europe during the earlier Bronze Age, say from 2500 to 1800 BC. It is impossible to do justice to it in a brief space, but its movements were evidently largely sea-borne, with influences passing from the Low Countries down the Rhine, and to Britain and Brittany, thence to the Atlantic rim of France and Spain, as well as into the western Mediterranean.

      The Funnel Beaker Culture—also known as ‘TRB’ from its German name, Trichterbecherkultur—covered at one period or another most of the area from the Low Countries in the west to central and southern Poland in the east, and from southern Scandinavia down to Bohemia and Moravia in the south. No doubt the great rivers of Europe, not forgetting the Elbe, helped with the dispersion of its influences. Most sea navigation would have been chiefly coastal, with crossings to Britain kept as short as possible, and presumably made in skin-covered boats capable of carrying at most two or three tonnes.

      There are other traces of contact between the distant peoples of the Danube area and those of the north and west. The styles of fortification and enclosure they had in common are hard to overlook, if only because they are on such a massive scale. Use was made of rings of concentric ditches broken at intervals by what have been described as ‘causeways’—a potentially misleading name, in view of the fact that while some ‘causeways’ were several metres wide, others were only a few centimetres across. Causewayed enclosures are typically found on promontories, with the ground falling away—in Denmark often to water or bog—on two or three sides. Links between some of these structures and the long barrows will be proposed in Chapter 3.

      Quite apart from similarities of form, and cultural traces of those responsible for them, it will soon emerge that there are very specific astronomical parallels between the long barrows of Northern Europe and Britain. While this reinforces the idea of a continental source for custom and ritual in Britain, it seems quite possible that a number of island practices developed independently, and then passed back to the continent. Megalithic tomb styles as such do not seem to be traceable to the cradle of the TRB culture, but their relatively rapid spread becomes a little less mysterious if we are prepared to suppose that there were established and continuing cultural links over great distances between different groups. If only by hearsay, these groups could have known much about each other—much more than we know about them, for instance. In short, the essential movements need not have been of whole peoples, but of ideas, carried in all probability by a few individuals. It has often been said that the outward forms of northern and western graves agreed far more closely than the grave goods in them, and the rituals to which they point. The astronomical principles they embody, simple as they might appear to us, must have represented a great mystery to many of the prehistoric community, so yet again the movement of a few experts might be of greater significance in the cultural transmission than the movement of whole peoples.

      The densely populated long barrows of the earliest Neolithic Windmill Hill culture in Wessex have been intensively studied. There are less numerous groups in other regions, such as Sussex and Kent, the Hampshire Uplands, the Chilterns and East Anglia, the Lincolnshire Wolds, Yorkshire, Wales, Western Scotland, and Ireland. The British long barrows, like their Northern European counterparts, are usually a few tens of metres in length, although an unusual bank barrow running across the ditched camp at Maiden Castle in Dorset, and later surrounded by an Iron Age fort, is as long as 540 m. More than half of all British earthen long barrows are between 30 and 60 m long, and outside the Sussex area few groups of small barrows are without at least one long example. The Stonehenge district is well populated with earthen long barrows, some of the properties of