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Skeleton at Stonehenge
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| Sherilyn Herron | Sun Oct 22 2000 11:43:13 |
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A skeleton recovered from a shallow grave at Stonehenge shows the site was used for executions long after it was thought to have been abandoned. History will have to be rewritten, says Anjana Ahuja Mike Pitts describes his find as the British equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls An ugly secret The serene expression worn by the disembodied head belies the terror that marked his final moments. He met his end at Stonehenge, beheaded in one clean, brutal slice, probably in an execution carried out to satisfy royal whim or religious fervour. This nameless man, whose skeleton was uncovered from a shallow grave at the edge of the stone circle in 1923, is about to rewrite the history of this ancient site. Scientists have narrowed the execution date to around AD650, a full two millennia after the stones were thought to have been abandoned as a site of importance. The skeleton, known as 4.10.4 after the catalogue number assigned to him by the Natural History Museum in London, could have been a victim of any number of grisly scenarios. The date coincides with the emergence of a new Anglo-Saxon order - the beginnings of both a judicial system and Christianity - where bloody retribution, including decapitation, was meted out to criminals and pagans. It was a time of petty rivalries between kingdoms across the island, with sword-wielding assassins being sent to settle tax and land disputes. Whatever his transgression, 4.10.4 testifies to a time when Stonehenge was synonymous with fear and vengeance. Mike Pitts, a British archaeologist who came across the skeleton last year in the basement of the Natural History Museum, describes it as the British equivalent of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls. "This momentous discovery will change the way everybody thinks about Stonehenge," says Pitts, who has spent years studying the stones and has written Hengeworld, a book about the site. "We all thought that until 1600BC it was an active place and then it just went dead. Now we know that at one point at least in the vacuum between then and now Stonehenge was very much alive." Archaeologists knew that a skeleton had been unearthed at the Wiltshire site. Its finder, Lt-Col William Hawley, sent it along with many other bones to his anatomist friends at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. In 1941, the college took three direct hits during a bombing raid, and the bones, presumed destroyed, were afterwards thought to exist only in archaeological myth. In fact, the haul had been split up and ferried by American ambulance crews to various country houses outside London for safekeeping and, after the war, reassembled and sent to the Natural History Museum. Little of this rescue mission was documented. But last year, Pitts, 46, spotted a letter in some archaeology archives revealing the bones' whereabouts. Pitts, former curator of the museum at the Avebury stones, 20 miles north of Stonehenge, travelled from his Wiltshire home to the Natural History Museum to peruse a catalogue of skeletons in its collection. It read like a treasure trove of archaeological artefacts. "My eyes just fell out of their sockets," he recalls. "I saw pages and pages of information about human remains that had been excavated in Britain between the wars, and had been transferred from the Royal College of Surgeons. They were listed with their dates, locations and the names of their finders. It was absolutely amazing." In the midst of it all was an entry numbered 4.10.4, alongside the name Hawley, dated 1923. In a plain box in the basement, lay a skull, the spine, and some leg bones. The rest of the skeleton is missing - probably still in a box in a country attic, unbeknown to its owner. Pitts, who studied archaeology at London University, is not formally connected with any university or museum but he is a respected figure in the close-knit world of archaeology and was allowed to study them. After English Heritage, Stonehenge's owner, agreed to foot the bill, Pitts and Jacqueline McKinley, an expert in human remains, began to piece together the story of 4.10.4. "He was about 5ft 5in, and aged between 30 and 40 when he died," says Pitts. "He had a pronounced overbite so his front teeth would have stuck out. He was reasonably healthy and could have been expected to live a few more years." It was not to be. Analysis of the spine showed that he had been decapitated from behind, probably while kneeling with his head aloft. It bore the hallmarks of execution rather than sacrifice. The story features in a Channel 4 documentary to be screened next week. As part of the programme, scientists at University College London used the skull to generate a computer reconstruction of the man's face. The executed man had close-set eyes, a wide mouth and a firm jaw. "Jackie calls it a Gillette jaw because he looks like a man from a shaving advert," says Pitts. "I suppose he wasn't bad-looking." The real shock came from radiocarbon-dating the skeleton. Instead of dating back to 2300BC, when the first stones arrived, 4.10.4 died in AD650. Pitts looks intently at an eerie print-out of the man's face and tries to paint a picture of the world he inhabited. "We know from documentation that beheading was taking place in warfare. Also, people were beginning to develop concepts of right and wrong and punishment. Among the many punishments were beheading and mutilation. "Criminals would be put on hills, near boundaries between kingdoms, as if they were being cast out. Bodies would be left hanging on gallows, or near burial mounds, where people could see the bodies. "But this was different. It was a one-off event at a unique location - he was not just a petty thief. The grave also had holes for wooden posts at each end. There was something special about this person or what he did. It was either a political or religious execution. The people who did this wanted to banish him to beyond even a burial mound, to a place of intense evil and fear. Stonehenge is close to a boundary between kingdoms, and remote from any settlement." As a sinister footnote, Pitts explains that Stonehenge is early English for stone gallows and the monument's distinctive trilithons - where one stone lies horizontally on top of two vertical ones - mirror the shape of a wooden medieval gallows. Stonehenge probably resembled a circle of huge gallows, says Pitts. "I think it must have been scary. Perhaps the people who took the man out there were frightened and wanted to get away as fast as they could, hence the shallow grave." In another twist, it emerged that the skeleton had also been "discovered" by a Welsh dentist named Wystan Peach. This ardent amateur, to his credit, was the only person apart from Pitts who tracked 4.10.4 down to the Natural History Museum (the museum still has his letters). In 1976 Peach paid £300 to have a tiny sample carbon-dated, but was unhappy with the date he received - about AD700. Peach died in 1980, aged 71. "He was upset at the result because it did not fit his theory," says Peach's son, Penrhyn, who has kept his father's Stonehenge paraphernalia. "He thought the skeleton might have been sacrificed, and maybe was a leading character in the establishment of Stonehenge. So he was looking for a date around 2000BC. He thought the date was wrong. "He was upset because he thought he had not been allowed by the museum to take a big enough sample. He also felt he was the subject of jealousy from professional archaeologists - he once wrote a pamphlet on Stonehenge but people refused to sell it at the monument. But he let it drop because by that time he had had a minor stroke and retired. "My father was a bit obsessive and could bore you rigid on the subject. But I am excited the skeleton has been rediscovered, and I think my father would be too." Pitts, perhaps conscious of how much of his own work has relied on the goodwill of others, wishes that Peach could have been treated with greater respect. The first sign of Stonehenge, which is around 100 metres in diameter, dates back 5,000 years. In its first incarnation there was a circular bank surrounded by 56 holes, called Aubrey holes, probably the sites of oak posts. The excavation of human bones suggests the location was a burial site for a short while. Over the next 1,500 years the stones, some weighing 35 tons, arrived from Wales and the Marlborough Downs and were rearranged five times. Around 1600BC - the last detected sign of activity at Stonehenge - two concentric rings around the stones were dug. These pits were probably meant to be graves, but remained empty. A few miles from Stonehenge lies the remnants of Woodhenge, a monument made with wooden blocks. Madagascar has similar monoliths - wood for the recently dead; stone for long dead ancestors. It is likely, says Pitts, that Stonehenge and Woodhenge fulfilled the same purpose of commemorating the afterlife. He does not subscribe to the idea of the stones representing an astrological temple. Alignment of planets, stars and the moon with the stones and Aubrey holes are inevitable, he says. Neither does he agree that faces are hidden in the carved megaliths. Over the past century, four complete skeletons have been found there, including 4.10.4. One was an archer, shot to death at about the time the stones were raised. The other two are missing, either destroyed in the Blitz or still in a country residence. With the 7th century execution of 4.10.4, Stonehenge springs to life again. "It is more likely that Stonehenge did have some role in people's lives more recently than we thought," says Pitts. "It would have been a complex religious or political role - not a picnic site. And that is a radically different way at looking at it. It also allows us to say that what happens today at Stonehenge with Druids is as meaningful and valid as what was happening there when it was built. "Every generation is reinventing the monument. Stonehenge has always been there and people have always been there - maybe the two interacted from 1500BC onwards. Further excavations might shed light on this." Pitts used to visit the stones at Stonehenge and Avebury to meditate, to think and to clear his mind. He loves their "physical presence", he says. Now his visits are different. "It is impossible to go there without thinking of that man, without seeing an image of someone being beheaded," says Pitts. "He would have been terrified. He was surrounded by armed men, he had probably been tortured. He probably knew what was going to happen. It is not uncommon for people in the last minutes to give up struggling. "I suspect a time comes when the sheer terror and horror of the event just cuts off a normal human response. When I look at his face, I know I am looking at someone really remarkable." |
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