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...