ANST - [celtic-hist] Skeleton recovered from Stonehenge
Celestria LeDragon
celestria_ledragon at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 17 12:42:06 PDT 2000
Greetings,
I thought I would pass this on.
In Service,
Celestria
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
Links
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."
=====
I beleive that imagination is stronger than Knowledge
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts
That hope always triumphs over experience
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.
More information about the Ansteorra
mailing list