[net.nlang.celts] Stonehenge was NOT built by the Celts

heahd@tellab1.UUCP (Dan Wood) (07/10/84)

   I posted an article last week stating that Stonehenge was ancient by the
time the Celts arrived in the British Isles, but after reading Mr. McGhee's 
article on the so called cultural background of Stonehenge, I think it must 
have been missed or ignored. The Celts DID NOT build Stonehenge. Since
reading Mr. McGhee's article I have done some homework; according to Gerald
S. Hawkins in his book Beyond Stonehenge  the first phase of Stonehenge was
constructed c. 3000 B.C. (about 2200 years before the Celtic culture arose in
Europe and 2600 years before they migrated to Britain). The last phase of
Stonehenge was constructed and then *abandoned* c 1400 B.C. (10 centurys before
the Celts arrived in Britain). These figures are based on carbon 14 dates for
artifacts associated with the various phases of Stonehenge, later dating of
the same artifacts revised the dates I have quoted 500 years earlier. This
means that Stonehenge may have been abandoned 8000 years before the Celts even
existed as a culture! All discussion of the Celts with regard to Stonehenge is
irrelevant! In one of the previous articles on Stonehenge a quote from a book
on the subject said that Stonehenge was built by a *neolithic* culture; the
Celts were an iron age people, yet the article's author went his merry way
discussing the Celts and Stonehenge. 

(My Grandmother's maiden name was McLarin)
-- 


Yrs. in Fear and Loathing,        
DW @ ...!ihnp4!tellab1!heahd

donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (07/12/84)

(I'm afraid I'm rather tickled by the idea of putting archaeology
material in net.roots...  but since we don't get it, I can't do it.
Just as well, this stuff has been slopping over into way too many
groups anyway.  Here's to the two or so other readers of
net.nlang.celts!)

To recap the recent fierce debate, Dan Wood maintains that none of
Stonehenge was built by Celts; Joe McGhee claims that Celts were
involved from the very first.  I've always had an interest in
archeology and I thought I remembered some of the history of the area
from courses I was taught in decades past (not too many decades, I'm
not THAT old), and I'm not afraid to do some new reading, so here I
am to stick my big foot in.

------------------------
The Dating of Stonehenge
------------------------

Let me first summarize the current ideas on Stonehenge dating.  My
sources are:

  +	Stonehenge: the Indo-European heritage.  Leon Stover and
	Kraig.  c1978.

  +	Stonehenge complete.  Christopher Chippindale.  c1983.

(I admit I did not use some more speculative books like Hawkins', or
one I found by a fellow named Cohen who seems to think that Stonehenge
marks the site of a prehistoric nuclear blast.  Hmm.)

Here are the stages of Stonehenge, with current radiocarbon dates:

Stonehenge I.  3100-2300 BC.  2 sarsens (the Heel Stone, plus one that
was discovered in 1979); the 56 'Aubrey' holes; the ditch and
embankment.  The orientations of the Heel Stone and the holes are not
astronomical (so say both books).  The holes were filled in soon after
construction (partly with human remains!) and were lost until recent
times.

Stonehenge II.  2150-2100 BC.  The positions of the two earlier stones
and the Avenue were altered so that they would have astronomical
significance.  An incomplete double circle of 'bluestones' was
erected.

Stonehenge IIIa.  2100-2000 BC.  The lintels were put up.  Many huge
stones were put in place.  This was Stonehenge's prime.

Stonehenge IIIb.  2000-1550 BC.  The 'Y' and 'Z' holes; new
trilithons.

Stonehenge IIIc.  1550-1100 BC.  All my notes say is 'moved
bluestones'.  Oh well.

Stonehenge IV.  1100 BC.  The Avenue was extended for more than a
mile.

-------------------------
The Peoples of Stonehenge
-------------------------

Now for the cultural history of the area.  Here I am going by
the account in Stover and Kraig.

Neolithic culture arrives from the continent, 4400-4300 BC.  It
displaces or absorbs the old Mesolithic culture.

Windmill Hill culture arises, circa 3500 BC.  They erect Stonehenge I.
They were almost certainly not Indo-Europeans.  They may have been
related to other megalith cultures at the time, but little evidence
is known that correlates them -- megaliths are a common feature of
Neolithic cultures.

Beaker culture arrives from Iberia, circa 2200 BC.  They make the
changes necessary for Stonehenge II.  The 'Beaker' culture is named for
the pottery found in their graves.  They knew how to work metal, and
they were warriors, conquering enclaves over wide stretches of coastal
Europe.  There is a possibility that this group was a mixture with the
'battle-axe' people of Central Europe, who were probably Indo-European,
so these people may have had some IE blood in them.  It has been
speculated that they are the ancestors of the Basques, so they may not
have spoken an IE language.

The 'Wessex' culture arises, 2000-1500 BC.  This may be a speculative
reconstruction of Stover and Kraig.  They were responsible for
Stonehenge III.  Stover and Kraig claim that this culture is related to
the 'Unetice' culture of Central Europe, ca. 1500 BC -- I'm not so
sure, based on the other reading I've done (see below).  The Unetice
culture was at least partly Indo-European, and on the basis of the
presumed relationship, Stover and Kraig speculate that the Wessex
culture was proto-Celtic.  This does not jive at all with my other
reading, which indicates that Pictish was the (non-IE) language of
Britain at the time.

--------------
Celtic history
--------------

It is easier to reconstruct the history of the Celtic cultures which
are the ancestors of the modern Celtic populations of Britain and
Brittany.  The Unetice culture of ca. 1500 BC is named after a site
south of Prague, and it combined the metal-working skills of both the
Beaker people and the battle-axe people (the Indo-Europeans).  The
abundance of copper and tin in the area where they settled led to trade
with the Aegean and spurred the development of an aristocracy whose
graves provide the most notable relics of the culture.  They buried
their dead in graveyards of a sort.

This practice changed with the advent of the Tumulus culture in the
late second millennium BC (~1250 BC?), who buried their dead in tumuli
or cairns, as their name implies.  The burial practices of this
population changed again after a major cultural disruption in the late
second millennium, resulting in the Urnfield culture.  As you can
probably guess by now, the Urnfield culture cremated its dead and
buried them in urns.  Aren't archeologists morbid?  The possibility
exists that the Urnfield people spoke a Celtic language, although this
is by no means certain.  This culture was the first to build its sites
on hills, protected by rings of fortifications, and it is noted for its
increased sophistication in the manufacture of metal weapons.

Another disruption in the sequence of cultures and another change in
burial practices resulted in the so-called 'Hallstatt' culture.
Hallstatt is a typical site of the culture, located in the
Salzkammergut region of Austria, but other early Hallstatt culture
areas were the upper Danube, Bavaria and Bohemia (ca. 700 BC).  In the
6th century this culture spread to the upper Rhine, Switzerland
Burgundy; the city of Massalia (Marseille) has been associated with
them since about the year 600 BC.  The Hallstatt culture had many of
the hallmarks (ouch) of Celtic culture as we know it, including the
working of iron, the use of horses, burials in tumuli, fortified hill
towns and constant internecine warfare.  The language they spoke was
probably a Celtic precursor, and it may have been brought by
aristocratic conquerors from the east; the latter are also supposed to
have donated their elaborate burial rituals and monuments.

(Hang on, we're almost there...)

Another change in clothing styles, pottery, art and weapons marks the
entrance of the 'La Tene' culture (500-0 BC), which is named after a
site near Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland.  This culture was truly
Celtic, and enough of their language has been recorded by contemporary
literate cultures to enable the roots of modern Celtic to be analyzed.
You might say that these folks gave the Romans a taste of things to
come from the later Germanic tribes, because they really gave them
problems -- they colonized Iberia and Gaul (~500 BC); they invaded and
settled Northern Italy in ~400 BC, finally sacking Rome in 390 BC;
around 350 BC they invaded the Balkans and Greece and Britain; in 279
BC they sacked Delphi; in 270 BC they invaded Asia Minor (a contingent
that stayed behind became known as the Galatians, to whom St. Paul
wrote his Epistles); in 114 BC, after some defeats at the hands of the
Romans, they were still working their way through Thrace.  If you have
iron weapons, I guess you're hard to stop.

--------------------
The Celts in Britain
--------------------

Britain was something of a backwater during all this action, but
sometime in the last half of the first millennium the so-called
Brythonic Celts invaded Britain, pushing aside the native Picts or
'Prateni', after whom the islands were named.  (This resulted in the
Pict language acquiring a substantial Celtic vocabulary and ended with
the extinction of the Pict language, in a way similar to the later
extinction of Cornish and Manx Gaelic.) One particular tribe of Celts,
the Belgae, are known to have come across from Gaul in the 300s BC.
The Brythonic Celts are the ancestors of the Celts of Wales and
Cornwall (and I think, Brittany, in a much later colonization).

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, the Goidelic Celts invaded
Ireland; it has been speculated that these were the remnants of the
defeated Gaulish army in ~58 AD.  The language of these Celts is the
ancestor of modern Irish and Scots Gaelic (in an invasion from Ireland
ca. 500 AD; a reverse invasion in more recent times has led to the
current strife in Ulster).

I used two books and my memory of old coursework as sources:

  +	The Celts.  Nora Chadwick, introduction by JXWP Corcoran.  c1970.

  +	Celtic.  DB Gregor.  c1980.

--------------------------------------------
What Does All This Have to Do With Anything?
--------------------------------------------

Well, it just means that Dan Wood is right -- it simply isn't the case
that Celtic cultures like the ones we know had anything at all to do
with the construction of Stonehenge.  Several preceding cultures in
Britain unquestionably contributed elements to the modern cultures, but
the original Celtic cultural entity did not appear in Britain until
well after the construction of Stonehenge.  It is very probably true
that Celts treated Stonehenge with religious awe, but not because their
religion caused it to be built.  I think it's safe to say that Mr.
McGhee's ideas about the dating and culture of Stonehenge are not
accepted by the current stick-in-the-mud, heads-in-the-ground,
closed-minded clique of professional archeologists, linguists and
radiocarbon daters.  (Not to mention notions about Celts in America in
2000 BC!  Or prehistoric construction of thermonuclear devices, etc.)

Boy, am I going to get it,

Donn Seeley      University of Utah CS Dept      donn@utah-cs.arpa
[Lazy sod still hasn't any coordinates!]         decvax!utah-cs!donn

PS -- Honest, I'm part Celtic.  1/4 Welsh, 1/8 Scots.  Unfortunately
the remainder has been fouled by base Angles and Saxons and Germans.
Don't send the IRA after me...