Stonehenge: A History

Stonehenge: A History

Professor Mike Pitts

23rd February 2023

Stonehenge has long been a biddable icon for notions of British antiquity and identity. But its most enduring modern evocation was shaped in the first quarter of the last century. Whenever we have a national crisis, we invoke Stonehenge – the epitome of our past and island identity. The stories we tell draw both on research, and on attitudes held by a nation that had once boasted the world’s most culturally varied empire: the first scientific excavation at Stonehenge occurred in the year Queen Victoria died, and the first modern book about it was written by a British engineer of the Indian railways.

That quarter century was also the era in which modern archaeology began. Ideas about Stonehenge were reflected in wider visions of antiquity that continue to dominate popular histories today.

We judge prehistory as deficient, and thus by implication, as we will see, recent and modern peoples too. I will ask you to think about prehistoric communities in a different way. And I hope to convince you that what I propose is more suited to modern Britain, and to a global community.

I need to start with a quick introduction to how archaeology works. The common image of archaeologists is that we bumble along until we fall over a discovery, which changes everything we thought we knew. I understand. If you’re not an archaeologist, it’s easy to imagine that we make it all up. But you need to know that archaeology is very good at writing history (though of course this is not the same as saying that we always get it right).

There are three parts to getting stories that were never written down. Each of these is being continuously explored by a range of professions and sub-disciplines.

First, we collect data: we survey sites, dig things up, analyse remains and use a lot of science.

That fills stores and libraries, but it’s only the start. At the same time, a great deal of research and thought goes into how we can read those data, which are several steps removed from any real-world past. How and why does stuff get buried (and what doesn’t)? What happens to it when it’s there? And which bits are going to tell us the things we want to know?

And then, given what we have achieved with all the science and stuff, we need to ask how can we read what people in the past were doing and thinking? Here we can experiment – make pots, grow rare crops, build bridges – or we can see what other people do. Both of these have been very useful.

We couldn’t begin to understand what was in the mind of a Homo erectus when they were making a stone handaxe if we hadn’t learnt how to make one ourselves. Alternatively, we can go to Mexico or Turkey, for example, and see how hand-looms of a type that might have been in use in Iron Age Britain work. And so on. Doing this helps us escape the very restricted mindset and the particular technologies of the world in which we ourselves live. There’s an old archaeological phrase for this – using ethnographic parallels.

We can go further than this, beyond the particular, and seek to identify apparent behavioural constants. Telling stories and making music, for example, seem to be universal. So we might imagine that ice age people didn’t just paint animals on cave walls – they told tales about them. Or we might find that all historical blacksmiths are male. Perhaps smithing is universally a male occupation, so that bronze age smiths were probably men? You can see this can rapidly fall into scary territory, but it is important. Archaeologists often forget that it is human to laugh. People need to sleep. Not everything we can know about the past has to be dug up.

Getting the right blend of these tactics is tricky. Today science dominates. Advances in radiocarbon dating and DNA studies are allowing us to map how people moved about and were related to each other, the building blocks for social insights undreamt of when I was a student. At the beginning, however, there were only texts: the Bible and, for Britain, medieval mythology and Classical observations of people on the fringe of empire.

Roman descriptions of the British emphasise their barbarity. A vague notion of savagery permeated early antiquaries’ visions of ancient Britons. And to help them picture those vanished people, they drew on reports from the New World.

As Caroline Dodds Pennock tells us in her new book, On Savage Shores, thousands of Indigenous Americans came to Europe from the days of first contact. For antiquaries, these people were walking illustrations of how ancient Britons might have looked.

John White famously drew Algonquian people and scenes in the later 16th century. He also illustrated ancient Britons. Pictures of both were published together, and explicit comparisons were made between them. The juxtaposition showed how “the inhabitants of the great Britain have been, in times past, as savage as those of Virginia”. Some argue today that there was an underlying purpose to this – to show European colonists they had little to fear from the Algonquians. They were more civilised than ancient Britons.

Lucas de Heere, a contemporary of White’s then working in London, also drew Britons at the time of Julius Caesar. He was also the first person we know to have given us a shot at a realistic depiction of Stonehenge.

So we have early-modern Europeans observing other peoples in a way we might call ethnographic rather than myth-making. And we have the first antiquaries – notably William Camden, who published his first edition of Britannia in 1586, the year John White was preparing to sail to Virginia – figuring out how to tell stories about ancient Britons without falling back on medieval myths. The comparisons start at precisely the same time. And they are never given up.

Over the following three centuries, antiquaries worked out ways of writing histories before history. They looked at standing monuments like Stonehenge and chance finds of strange artefacts. They started to dig into earthworks. They realised artefacts could be arranged into a time-ladder of stone, bronze and then iron. Excavation began to be treated as a science. And, in 1901, a man who’d spent most of his career in Japan directed the first proper dig at Stonehenge. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

In the 16th century there was no great investment in the state of other peoples, Britons or Algonquians. They were just being observed. But any element of disengagement soon fell away.

Writing in the later 17th century, John Aubrey – author of Brief Lives and, at Stonehenge, the man after whom archaeologists named the Aubrey Holes – thought the early inhabitants of Wiltshire, were “as savage as the beasts whose skins were their only rayment”. They had the use of iron, however, which made them “2 or 3 degrees, I suppose, less savage than the Americans”.

Such judgments soon became commonplace. Analogies between observed peoples and imagined ancients moved steadily back in time, as the living were deemed inferior to the extinct.

Travelling on the Beagle in the 1830s, Charles Darwin described people he came across as “savage”, “the lowest barbarians”, and, in Tahiti, those who “would have formed a fine picture of man inhabiting some primeval forest”.

For Daniel Wilson, a Scottish archaeologist who coined the English word, “prehistoric”, north America was like a distant planet viewed from Earth, so far away that what he saw in his telescope was long past: its forests, its animals and its peoples were yet to suffer the oppressive effects of millennia of history that Europe had endured. Perhaps there he could identify the “primeval condition” of man, as he had existed after leaving Eden. Thus on the Pacific north-west coast, he finds “rude tribes… living in the simplest condition of nomade savage life”. His book was called Prehistoric Man. It was about not modern peoples.

Move forward a century. In Roger Fry’s influential work on art published in 1920, Vision and Design, he compared Ice Age cave art in Spain to modern art in South Africa. The prehistoric art was better, he said, but the South African Bushmen had somehow held on to some of that Ice Age genius, as they were “descendants of Palaeolithic man”, though their achievements were otherwise “at the same rudimentary stage”.

Move forward to two months ago. The Conversation – a website promoting academic research – illustrated an article about the supposed origins of language 70,000 years ago, with photos of modern people in Southern Africa.

The issue shows starkly in the work of the Victorian politician, banker and popular science writer, John Lubbock. His ancient monuments bill received its first reading in parliament 150 years ago this month. In 1865 he published a book called Pre-historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. Glowingly reviewed in Nature, its seventh edition was published in 1913.

It was a detailed roundup of archaeology, with a survey of more or less contemporary people around the world, whose lives, thought Lubbock, could help his readers understand the ancients who were his main subject. There’s plenty about Stonehenge, which he compares to megalithic structures in India.

Lubbock followed this up with another book about prehistoric people. First published in 1870, it too was popular and reprinted several times. But this was no catalogue of facts. It was called The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, with a revealing subtitle: the Mental & Social Condition of Savages

It’s a lengthy polemic about the behaviours of living “savages”. Study of “the lower races of man”, he says, has “direct importance… in an empire like ours”. Minds are impenetrable, and communication often impossible. How can you govern an empire like that? Answer: you need to understand “savage life”. Lubbock warns his readers to expect “facts which are very repugnant to our feelings”.

Yet still, all this is wrapped up in the idea that these wild, uncontrollable people are in some ways like prehistoric folk, and can help us understand the past. It, too, was repeatedly praised by reviewers in Nature.

And so, we come to Stonehenge. By the turn of the 20th century there’d been little advance in real understanding of Stonehenge since the 18th century, and the days of the great antiquary, William Stukeley. Meanwhile the site had decayed. People had dug holes in it, and a cart-track ran through the middle. Visitors’ horses scattered manure underfoot. Some of the largest megaliths had fallen over, and stones within easy reach had been badly damaged by souvenir hunters.

Within 25 years all that had changed. It began in 1901, with a small excavation that focused on straightening a large stone people feared might fall on visitors. t was led by William Gowland, a retired engineer who had worked for the government in Japan. While there he’d got really interested in archaeology, and had excavated megalithic sites. His experience showed in Wiltshire.

Today, thanks to more excavation and radiocarbon dating, we can see the monument was changed at various points over as much as 1,000 years. But we still agree with Gowland’s basic conclusion: that Stonehenge had been built at the end of the stone age, or the start of the bronze age.

Soon after his dig, the owner sold the stones, and in 1918 the buyer – Cecil Chubb, a local barrister and worthy – gave it to the nation. Stonehenge was now permanently protected (or, to put it another way, any damage done was authorised by the government). A larger conservation programme began, accompanied by further excavations which continued until 1926. Directed by William Hawley – who had served with the Royal Engineers in South Africa – these revealed most of what we know today.

As well as insights into what lies underground, there were a couple of significant spin-offs from this work.

The bigger stones at Stonehenge were long recognised to be a local sandstone. Suggestions as to where the smaller megaliths originated, however, were not limited to southern Britain, and extended even to Ireland, Finland and Africa. Hawley’s team found a lot of rock debris. The government’s petrographer established that almost all of these smaller stones had in fact come from Pembrokeshire – and the only way they could have got to the site, is by people bringing them.

The other outcome was a book, published in 1924. Called The Stones of Stonehenge, it was written by Herbert Stone. Stone too was an engineer. He spent most of his career working in Asia: first at Simla and Calcutta, then on the Rangoon Railway in Burma, and finally as Chief Engineer of the East India Railway based at Hyderabad.

In his work he will have visited stone quarries. And almost certainly he will have heard from other colonial staff in India, especially in the north-east, about people who were then creating megalithic monuments, which could be compared to Stonehenge. In his book he describes a quarry at Hyderabad, and stone hammers that he calls mauls – the “native system”. Rounded boulders were used to spilt off a layer of granite for building use. A row of men, says Stone, each holding a maul between two hands above his head, stood along the rock face. At a signal from a foreman, they brought down their mauls simultaneously, and a crack would open up.

Back in England, Stone found that the megaliths at Stonehenge had also been carved with mauls – many had been found in the recent excavations. The stones, says Stone, were split by hammering with mauls, aided by setting a line of fire which would be doused with water – such use of fire had been reported to the Royal Anthropological Institute in London in 1871, by a colonial officer who took part in the Second Anglo-Burmese war and later joined the Survey of India.

To move the great megaliths, says Stone, the builders used timber levers and rollers – these had been described extensively in India and especially in Indonesia, where people had been photographed moving megaliths. The idea runs throughout the last century, and today features at the Stonehenge visitor centre in a full-size model. You can test your strength by pulling on a rope.

So the megaliths are dressed at the quarries, put on wooden rollers and pulled by men on ropes until they reach the building site. Here, Herbert Stone tells us, they were raised with sheerlegs. And that is how it looks in English Heritage's 2022 Stonehenge guidebook.

This is quite complicated stuff. But the people who built Stonehenge, as the 1920s guidebook says, were “a primitive race”. How did they do it? Herbert Stone agreed that the stones were erected “by a primitive people”. But they were told what to do by an expert. This “architect and engineer… a man of extraordinary ability”, wrote the man who’d overseen construction of India’s railways, was “probably a foreigner – ‘a wise man from the east’”.

All these ideas about how to shape, move and erect large stones had been imported from Asia, mostly by colonial officers who had recorded local people making megaliths. Sheerlegs alone, I think, came from Stone’s own engineering works. We also have a judgement about what sort of people did it.

Native Britons were a primitive race. But they pulled off the extraordinary engineering achievement of Stonehenge because they were directed in the “mere manual labour” – not quite as slaves, but neither were they volunteers – by a higher being from another land: “a primitive people under the immediate guidance and supervision of an expert”. Far-fetched as that might sound, it was espoused by Richard Atkinson, Stonehenge’s lead archaeologist in the second half of the last century, in the guise of a priest from Bronze Age Greece. And as such it survived well into the 1970s.

Let’s recap a bit more. This Stonehenge vision – a civilised man abroad directing primitive labourers – was created in the 1920s by a former imperial Indian railway engineer. He was 22 when the first edition of Lubbock’s book about savage minds and lives was published. A book which not only compared modern with prehistoric people, but also advocated their study as important because it would make them easier to rule.

I don’t think archaeologists, at the time or since, were explicitly conscious of this pedigree in the way that, say, John Lubbock would have been – they just thought, this is what happened at Stonehenge. They didn’t think that Stonehenge people were like the modern subjects of empire.

They may have done it with innocent intentions, but archaeologists throughout the last century turned to modern people around the world as models for antiquity, from how to use stone axe blades to building roundhouses. Bryony Orme, a distinguished archaeologist now retired, wrote a book for her colleagues about “ethnographic parallels”. Published in 1981, it defines anthropology as the study of “primitive” societies. Unconscious, I think. But both antiquity and modernity are being judged: they are deficient. Just as the image of ancient Stonehenge is informed by modern peoples, that comparison judges modern peoples. It works both ways.

One person who made no bones about the primitive nature of the prehistoric world, was a popular writer on stone circles, Aubrey Burl. In a 1987 book he compared Stonehenge people – “short-lived… superstitious… sun-worshippers… [who lived in] dirty hovels… [in] a dark land [and] feared death but feared the dead more” – to “19th-century Zulus in southern Africa”.

And here’s the rub. When it came to Stonehenge, Herbert Stone got almost everything wrong. For a variety of reasons, none of his proposals – now enshrined in modern Stonehenge mythology – could have worked.

Fire would not have worked on the Stonehenge types of rock, and there is no evidence for its use in this way. The roller idea was based on a misreading of the ethnographic evidence: stones were not being pulled over rollers, but along fixed tracks – the poles were pegged in place. And despite best intentions, experiments always show rollers to be a barely controllable liability.

And as for sheerlegs, much loved by experimenters: they would have been impossible at Stonehenge. There just wasn’t room. It might have worked for one or two stones in a field, but not in the confined spaces of a building site.

A dramatic group of Stonehenge scenes was drawn by John Kenney for a 1961 Ladybird book. They show splitting (described at one Indian quarry, but inappropriate in the UK), rolling and ramping. Earth ramping was another thing that Herbert Stone picked up from India: he proposed it as a way to raise the horizontal lintels at Stonehenge. If it had been used at Stonehenge, there would be physical evidence. There is none.

The unexpected inspiration for one of these illustrations came from Rapa Nui in the south Pacific: the stone raising is based directly on a photo in Thor Heyerdahl’s best-selling book about Easter Island, published in 1958. In fact, it’s only something like this that would have been possible at Stonehenge. We don’t have the evidence for earthen ramps, but the same effect could have been achieved with wood. And we do know that people then were in the habit of using very large timbers.

You might be thinking: Neolithic people got the stones up. These are just details. But there is a bigger point.

The ideas that came from observations in Asia weren’t really thought through. Stone, and the other archaeologists, didn’t look carefully enough at what was being done in India. Neither did they think they had to get close to the stones at Stonehenge – to understand their materials, to scrutinise the evidence for how they’d been dressed, and to imagine not just one stone being pushed about, but an entire, complicated monument. All of that came only this century.

We now know where at least some of the large, sarsen stones came from – West Woods, 20 miles north of Stonehenge. This gives us the chance to look for quarries; we have much to learn. It means we can map the journey the stones took, knowing each end point.

Wooden tracks were used early last century for dragging large timbers out of forest in Malaysia. In north-east India people used to carry small megaliths in wooden frames. These are both viable techniques in Neolithic Britain. I can’t imagine how you could get 75 sarsens to the site, averaging 20 tons and many weighing more than 30 and tied to a 10-ton sledge, without a fixed track – and we know people were laying wooden tracks at this time elsewhere in Britain.

Study of the megaliths’ surfaces at Stonehenge has revealed them to be far more heavily shaped than we had realised. And people didn’t just bash with large mauls, but used tools of varying sizes in a sequence of ever-finer dressing.

The evidence was always there. It was just that, like Lubbock, Herbert Stone imagined that he, the engineer, was the boss. Everyone else was a labourer – primitive hands in need of instruction. To understand the simple technology, you needed to do no more than give it a quick glance. It didn’t occur to anyone that “superstitious sun-worshippers” might be able to do things the archaeologists could not. And the final irony is that, if they’d looked more closely in India, they might have got it right.

When Herbert Stone in retirement was defining a Stonehenge for the 20th century, social and cultural anthropology were taking shape. Bronisław Malinowski in Britain, and Franz Boas in north America, were promoting the idea that peoples or cultures could only be understood on their own terms. They could not be judged. Partly they were reacting against that very dismissal of other peoples as “savages”, the living counterpart to the archaeologists’ primitives – Lubbock’s “lower races of man”.

Archaeology, too, was taking shape at this time. Here emphasis was self-consciously on the new sciences of excavation and artefact study. The earlier reliance on knowledge of other peoples rapidly fell away. As a result, Stonehenge archaeologists missed what was going on in anthropology – and more immediately, in India. Some people there continued to move and raise large stones. And some of the new observers recorded them. In particular John Hutton.

Hutton became Commissioner for the Census of India, encouraging officials “to produce descriptive accounts of the tribes and backward communities with which they were familiar”. He resigned in 1936 to become professor of anthropology at the University of Cambridge, but by then he’d been able to conduct substantial fieldwork among people living in the Naga Hills in the north-east. Here he recorded megaliths being created in vivid detail.

What’s striking is how much what he observed, seems relevant to Stonehenge – as he himself recognised. I’ll mention just one thing: how stones were raised upright. Hutton saw no sheerlegs. Instead, he described how people gathered around a stone, and by pushing and pulling, wedging and levering with poles and a bit of rope, they just worried it into place. Which is what we see in Rapa Nui. Heyerdahl says it took 18 days to get a small statue upright from the horizontal. Hour by hour, it was barely possible to see anything move. It was a very gentle affair.

At Stonehenge, the only realistic option is nudging stones up with timber frames, levers and short ropes, and with many people: because labour is not a costly resource to be managed and minimised, but the social engagement of entire communities who want to be part of the project. Because Stonehenge is more than anything about people – politics, religion, sharing and being seen. The more the better.

Contrast that with sheerlegs. A BBC film broadcast in 1994 features a large modern experiment. First a stone is rocked into a pit with the help of a large weight. Then it is pulled vertical with giant poles and long ropes – this project is the inspiration behind a current English Heritage guidebook illustration. Once everything’s in place, the actual erection is over in a matter of minutes. It happens fast, with an element of real danger.

You couldn’t do this at Stonehenge, because there’s no room. But my point here is the huge distance between the stone and the people moving it: gangs pulling on the ropes are out of shouting distance. Contrast this with the Rapa Nui scene, where people are close to the statue. Here there is an intimate affair between labourers and stone, drawn out over half a month.

They were close to the stone in Hutton’s description, too. In all he writes about megaliths in India, creating them is not just about engineering: there’s an understanding between people and stone, a slow, careful respect. In one of his articles, Hutton described people erecting wooden memorial posts: in 15 pages, only two are about actually carving and raising the posts. The rest is about ceremonies, symbolism, ritual preparations, drinking, and sacrificing animals.

This is not just about a few people in India. Any construction of a ceremonial or religious monument, where we have information, is a huge social event. We are seeing here, I think, one of those universals that, as archaeologists, we can bring in as a working hypothesis, and that changes the way we think about how Stonehenge was built. It’s about people, stupid.

Another man who looked at living peoples in the 19th century, and through them thought he could see prehistoric times, was Edward Tylor. Inspired by John Lubbock, he wrote an influential book, Primitive Culture, first published in 1871. Searching through records of the “low races of Mankind”, he contrasts “lower tribes” and “higher nations”, identifies “progress” and “degradation”, and comes up with a scheme: primitive culture steadily gets better, so that over time all peoples might progress from a stage of savagery, through barbarism to civilization. In the present, some remained primitive, others had regressed – in the Mississippi Valley, writes Tylor, “native tribes in modern times do not rank high even as savages”, though in the past they were a “somewhat advanced race”.

In the States, Lewis Henry Morgan did something similar, in his book published in 1877. This was explicitly a historical scheme, that began 60,000 years ago with “lower savagery”. While Tylor was happy to compare his stages to the three archaeological ages of stone, bronze and iron, and Morgan less so, there are clear parallels.

Here were schemes in which the past, and people in the present assessed as somehow still living in that past, were judged. The further back in time, the less sophisticated. The less complete. Morgan and Tylor are themselves now history. But the three ages live on, in popular narratives and in academic thinking. Nominally, of course, ages of stone, bronze and iron are just handy ways of dividing up an immensely long past. Yet it’s hard to escape the impression that an element of judgment remains. Even among archaeologists.

The further we go back into the past, the less there is for us to dig up. Early populations were smaller; they had less of a physical impact. Early technologies generated less varied waste. Age decays: less survives from remoter times.

For the archaeologist, it’s undeniable that this has the effect of making older records at once less complicated, and harder to read. That easily becomes a version of lives were simpler then. And when you’re in the habit of thinking about culture changes over millennia, it is also easy to slip into an unspoken version of Morgan–Tylor progression. And all that happens in the context of the archaeological profession: that began with judgments about modern peoples, which as we’ve seen at Stonehenge, remain embedded in popular imaginations.

And, of course, it’s not just about Stonehenge. In 1911 the Illustrated London News ran a feature about a newly excavated Iron Age village at Glastonbury. It was headlined, “Not the woad-daubed savage of the old history-books: the civilised ancient Briton”. After more than a century of research which has transformed understanding of the past, that line is still being used. Every week something turns up to show us that ancient people were not as primitive as we thought.

Because, we do think ancient people were primitive. And that is a judgment not just on the past, which has no voice. Our understanding of prehistoric people is so tied up with reports of recent people, that it is also a judgment on anyone alive whose technology, culture or lifestyle is not the same as ours. On at least two occasions, men from Africa turned the argument around – and in doing so, exposed its nonsense. Olaudah Equiano, in his memoir published in 1789, used it to counter slavery:

“Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous. Did Nature make them inferior to their sons? and should they too have been made slaves? Every rational mind answers, No.”

Nearly two centuries later primitive Britons were again invoked to admonish the patronising British. In this case, it was Hastings Banda, premier of what is now Malawi, then Nyasaland. Addressing his Parliament, he criticised white missionaries for calling out dancing as “savage and sinful”:

“I wish I could bring Stonehenge to Nyasaland,” he said, “to show there was a time when Britain had a culture that was savage.”

We are back with John White and his Elizabethan counterparts, imagining the inhabitants of ancient Britain to be as savage as the people of Virginia. But the solution to this is not a primitive shouting match. It is to drop such terms altogether. And not just the vocabulary, but to escape the whole judgmental thing.

The world of Stonehenge was very different from our own, or from that of any other people today – including the appearance and genetic makeup of the Stonehenge people themselves. But here is my key point. We must recognise that those differences were down to history and choice, the particularities of time and place. Not to any qualitative failings either in culture or individuals – in Britain then, or, I need to add in view of the way some people approach Stonehenge today, now.

If we can achieve that open curiosity, that wonder for such alien difference in our midst, bereft of judgment: then we can claim Stonehenge to be part of the past of everyone, anywhere.

© Professor Pitts 2023

Classical Views of People in Britain

Roman perceptions of Britain

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/miscellanea/geography.html

Dispelling Some Myths: Ancient Britons

www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/dispelling-some-myths-ancient-britons

Early Images of Ancient Britons Influenced by American Observations

Ancient Britons & the Antiquarian Imagination, by Stuart Piggott (1989)

Lucas de Heere: Théâtre de tous les peuples et nations de la terre avec leurs habits et ornemens divers, tant anciens que modernes, diligemment depeints au naturel par Luc Dheere peintre et sculpteur Gantois

https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:000794288/items/910000094764 

A New World: England's first view of America, by Kim Sloan (2007)

European Visions: American Voices, ed Kim Sloan (2009), especially essays by Michael Gaudio and Sam Smiles

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, by Caroline Dodds Pennock (2023)

Modern Peoples Compared with Imagined Ancients

“Charles Darwin’s observations on humanity during the Beagle voyage,” by Patrick Armstrong, Records of the Western Australian Museum Supplement 79 (2011), 136–42

Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old & the New World, by Daniel Wilson (1862)

Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, & the Manners & Customs of Modern Savages, by John Lubbock (1865, 7th ed 1913)

The Origin of Civilisation & the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental & Social Condition of Savages, by John Lubbock (1870, 4th ed 1882)

Primitive Culture, by Edward Tylor (1871, 4th ed 1903)

Vision & Design, by Roger Fry (1920)

Anthropology for Archaeologists, by Bryony Orme (1981)

The Stonehenge People, by Aubrey Burl (1987)

“When did humans first start to speak? How language evolved in Africa”, by George Poulos (2022)

https://theconversation.com/when-did-humans-first-start-to-speak-how-language-evolved-in-africa-194372

Stonehenge Official Guidebooks

Stonehenge Today & Yesterday, by Frank Stevens (1916 – 1938)

Stonehenge, by RS Newall, William Hawley’s assistant (1953 – 1977)

Stonehenge, by Julian Richards (2015 – 2022)

Stonehenge 1900–1925

“Recent Excavations at Stonehenge”, by William Gowland, Archaeologia 58 (1902), 39–118

William Gowland: The Father of Japanese Archaeology, by Victor Harris & Kazuo Goto (2003)

William Hawley reported on his excavations at Stonehenge in the Antiquaries Journal from 1 (1921) successively to 5 (1925), and 8 (1928)

“The source of the stones of Stonehenge”, by Herbert H Thomas, Antiquaries Journal 3 (1923), 239–60

The Stones of Stonehenge, by E Herbert Stone (1924)

For general Stonehenge history see Stonehenge Complete, by Christopher Chippindale (2012, 4th ed)

Asian inspirations

“The meaning & method of the erection of monoliths by the Naga Tribes”, by JH Hutton, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland 52 (1922), 242–49

For more on colonial British officers in India reporting on local megalith building, see my talk on the subject, “Stonehenge & the British Empire: an overlooked debt” (2022) at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8p6TWWfVXo&t=18s 

Africa

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, by Olaudah Equiano (1789)

Hastings Banda quote from The Daily Herald, March 7 1963.