Gods of Prehistoric Britain

Britain has one of the richest of all pagan heritages in Europe, defined as the textual and material evidence for its pre-Christian religions. The island is possessed of monuments, burial sites and a range of other remains not only from several distinct ages of prehistory, but also from three different major historic cultures.

This lecture will look at what we know of prehistoric worship, focusing on Stonehenge and the bog body known as Lindow Man, to examine the difficulties of interpreting evidence for ritual behaviour for which no textual testimony survives.

A lecture by Professor Ronald Hutton

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/prehistoric-gods

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Transcript

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- What is Britain's pagan heritage, and why does it matter? And the first can be answered very speedily that it is one of the richest and finest inheritances of the pre-Christian religions of Europe in the entire continent. From the earlier old Stone Age or Paleolithic, we have the so-called Red Lady of Paviland. A burial perhaps 34,000 years old from a cave in South Wales. From the later Paleolithic, we have the carvings in the caves of Creswell Crags in the North Midlands. Some of the finest from the period in the world. From the Middle Stone Age or Mesolithic, we have settlements and campsites with evidence of ritual, above all, Starr Carr in Yorkshire, one of the finest such places in Europe. From the New Stone Age or Neolithic, the monuments begin, first of all, the chambered tomb shrines we call long burrows or dolmens. And then the stone circles, which carry on being built into the Bronze Age. From the Iron Age, we have the enormous structures known as Hill Forts, formally thought to be the equivalent of medieval castles as the stronghold of chiefs, but now realized to be communal gathering places for many purposes, including and centrally religion. So they are mighty ritual monuments. And then we reach the dawn of history with the coming of the Romans. And the Romans not only bring in their own goddesses and gods from Italy, but they also reveal those of the Native Iron Age British by giving them inscriptions and sculptures for the first time. And from every corner of the vast Roman Empire, different peoples arrive in Britain bringing their pantheons of deities with them, from as far as Syria, Egypt, Africa, and all over northern Europe. And when the Romans convert to Christianity and they pull out, the Anglo-Saxons, the early English come in, bringing a completely new set of deities like Woden and Thunor, Tiw and Frig. Then the Anglo Saxons convert to Christianity just in time for the Vikings to turn up with virtually the only group of Western and central European goddesses and gods we hadn't seen yet in Britain. And only when the Vikings turn Christian after one to 200 years is the whole marvelous pageant complete. We need to approach the second question in the light of what I've just described, why it matters and it matters because of its exceptional richness and diversity. If you are a modern inhabitant of Iceland, Estonia, Greece, Italy, or Germany for example, your pagan heritage will consist of one pantheon of goddesses and gods with an accompanying archeology. But just because so many peoples ended up here, we in Britain have no less than four different sets of deities, including the vast array from the entire Roman empire, and before that, no less than six different ages of pre-history to provide their input. So we are spoiled for choice. These are an extraordinary resource to inspire the imagination of the modern age, to inspire music, literature and art, and to enable people to define their own spirituality if needed, either sympathetically with the ancient religions or against them. But what makes these particularly fine as a resource with which to think is that the whole of prehistoric British religion and even much of that from the early historic periods defy confident interpretation. And I'm going to illustrate that argument with two major case studies. The first is simply the most famous prehistoric monument in the world, which is Stonehenge. And the second is a spectacular artifact, the human bog body known as Lindow Man. So let's go first to Stonehenge. What can we say with certainty about Stonehenge? Well, it's built around about 2,600 BC or BCE in the later New Stone Age. And there's nothing else like it. It's the only stone monument of the world built by people crazy enough to use carpenter's techniques. It's a woodworker's wonder, taking huge stones, planing and smoothing and bending them like planks of wood and fitting them together with mortise and tenon joints. Now this is difficult enough to be virtually pointless, but it does produce something that looks like nothing else. You put one of those great three stone door like settings from Stonehenge on a rock album, a T-shirt, or a hoarding, and everybody knows it's Stonehenge. And not only was it built by carpenters, but it was built by careless hurrying megalomaniac carpenters. And let me prove that statement. We know that they were megalomaniac, not only because they tried something architecturally very difficult to use stone like wood, but it's also the only prehistoric monument in Europe made of big stones that were brought from further than five miles away. The huge stones there were towed from 10 to 20 miles to the north from the North Wilshire Downs. And the smaller stones in the setting were brought from the far end of Wales, which is a hundred miles as the crow flies and twice that as human beings push, tug, curse, and sweat. So it's an extraordinary overambitious expenditure of energy and we know they were careless and hurried by the results. We know that the monuments aligned on the midsummer sunrise, the great avenue of bank and ditch leading out from the monument is aligned in that direction. And that's why to this very day, thousands of people in various states of altered consciousness gather at Stonehenge to witness this event. But far more spectacular is the effect that we have lost that of the midwinter sunset because the greatest of the three stone settings we call trilithons, those great door-like effects, the great trilithon was aligned precisely on the midwinter sunset. It was set in the southwestern corner of the inner circle. And when the setting sun went down at midwinter, it threw a laser-like beam of red light through the narrow gap between the two great uprights so that it struck the upright altar stone in the center like a laser beam. It was a stunning effect. We have, of course, no idea what it meant. It could have represented a marriage of the sun with the earth or alternatively, for example, you might look at that great arch as being like the belly and the legs of an enormous divine woman giving birth to the new year by that wonderful visual effect. But we don't have it anymore because they built it badly. They found one enormous long upright stone which could go five to six feet into the earth. And what they needed was one equally long to go on the other side as the other upright of the door-like structure. And they arrived or unable to find one, or they weren't bothered to find one, so they got one that was much shorter, and it had a ledge of stone projecting out from the bottom of it because it's long gone. I can't give you visual aids for this. And you can hear the arguments around the drawing board. They persuaded themselves that if they stuck this thing on the ground beside the long solid upright one, the projecting stone at its foot underneath the turf would anchor it. And in any case, if you dump a heavy enough lentil stone on the top and fit it with a mortise and tenon and joint, the solid stone next to it will keep the wobbly one on the other side upright forever. It didn't.(audience laughing) At some point afterwards, it may have been very swiftly, or it may have been a few hundred years, the shorter stone rocked over, skidded out, fell over and broke in half, knocking over the altar stone and shedding its huge lintel. The interior of Stonehenge was now littered with giant, broken stones and could not be used for ritual thereafter. In fact, it's possible it happened so swiftly that Stonehenge was never finished. There is no solid evidence that the outer circle was completed to the southwest. There are holes there, but no proof that stones were ever in them. There are no stones there. So Stonehenge could be one of the great architectural disasters of human enterprise built by cowboys,(audience laughing) working to an over ambitious plan. And that's all that we can say for sure. So what can we say about why it was built and what religion inspired it and was conducted there? Well, the sensible answer is we haven't got the faintest, but each generation produces a range of different possibilities. And the first person with the nails and the guts to say this was the great Elizabethian Antiquary, William Camden in 1580, who stated, Stonehenge is a fantastic monument. We've no agreement on why it was built. Here are the current theories. And in fact, every sensible guide to Stonehenge ever since has just repeated that tactic right down to and including the current English heritage guidebook. But the great thing about leaving the question of why it was built open is that it clears the way for breakthrough hypotheses, great ideas to try and solve the mystery. And there have been a number of these. The earliest and most successful was by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1140s who said that Stonehenge was built by the Wizard Merlin as a war memorial. And this seemed so self-evidently sensible to the Middle Ages that it was the most long lasting of all the breakthrough hypotheses. It only ran out of steam in the 17th century and got dumped in the 18th, when it was dumped, that cleared the way for number two, that of William Stukeley, the father of the discipline of archeology, Stukeley, had worked out by surveying and by excavation that Stonehenge was definitely built by the pre-Roman British, not by the Romans or by the post-Roman British or the Vikings or Anglo-Saxons as had been thought. And what history told us was that the priests of the pre-Roman British were the druids. And so quite logically, he declared that Stonehenge was the work of the druids. And this idea held sway at least in popular minds until the 1950s and 1960s. Only then did the message get through from early 20th century archeologists that Stonehenge had been built two and a half thousand years before the druids were recorded as being around and so much had changed in prehistoric British culture and monuments in between. It's unlikely that it represented the same religion, though it's still possible. So when the druids went down, the scientists moved in an astronomer at Boston University. Gerald Hawkins in the 1960s put all the data for Stonehenge through a computer to discover why it was built. And the result reveals that computers have egos just as much as human beings because Hawkins computer concluded that Stonehenge had been a computer(audience laughing) designed to predict heavenly bodies' movement. And that lasted for about 20 years before the data Hawkins had used was revealed to be faulty. In the 2000s, English heritage decided to go for broke by allowing two different top teams of archeologists to come in and settle the question once and for all. The first was the spaces project led by Geoffrey Wainwright and Tim Darvill who are on the screen. These applied their considerable experience and aptitude to the question and concluded that Stonehenge had a bit of gigantic magical healing center, a kind of prehistoric lured to which the living came to be made well in body and mind, and they are absolutely certain of that. But at the same time, the Stonehenge Riverside Project led by Mike Parker Pearson on the screen, and practically every other archeologist who wasn't in the Spaces Project came in, did their work, and concluded absolutely that Stonehenge had been a shrine dedicated to the dead, which the living visited at the winter solstice in order to pay their respect and otherwise didn't come near. Now these two interpretations are completely incompatible and they were produced by top teams of archeologists working from excellent data. The sensible conclusion to draw is that short of a miracle, we will never know why Stonehenge was built. And in practice that leaves the way open for people to interpret the monument according to their own gut reactions, their instinctual views of the human and divine worlds. And for the last half millennium, there have been two main reactions. One is the benevolent one, one which sees prehistoric peoples as in many ways closer to nature and therefore wiser than later peoples. And those who also see humanity as being essentially good and benevolent. And so the simpler and further back we go, the more those qualities are enhanced. So this school would see pre-history as a time of considerable creativity of closeness to nature. Okay, that's the wizard Gandalf looking at the Cottingley Fairies. But the slide kind of makes the point of a general generic closeness of mystical communion with nature and romance and self expression. But there has always been a contrary view of humanity and religion. And that is the hostile one. And this springs from a number of very deep felt instincts. One is to view religion itself as something that is corrupting and deluding for humans, or alternatively to use prehistoric religion as a way of being nasty about religion you don't like in other people at the present day. So coming down on pagans or people who like lots of ritual like Roman Catholics or Orthodox Christians, you really take your pick as to your target. And also it's instinctual to people who feel that left to their own devices. Human beings unrestrained are pretty horrible. It's the Lord of the Flies view of human nature. And therefore, the further back you go in time, the more primeval human beings get, the worse they have to get. And so instead of religion of closeness to nature of gazing at the stars of benevolence to humanity, you get one of gloom, gore, despotism, and ignorance with a particularly tacky line in human sacrifice. And this has been applied to Stonehenge wholesale. You have there an Edwardian cartoon of druids committing a human sacrifice at Stonehenge. And here's the same thing about to happen in a modern TV drama. All that's happened as we've gone into color and the druids have lost their beards and turned into punks,(audience laughing) but it's the same basic message. Now these ideas run concurrently, but there are boom periods for each. The 18th century was a great time for the benevolent view because it was the age of reason, seeing human beings as essentially rational and of the cult of the noble savage. The Victorians were much more inclined to the harsh and brutal view, both because at that time we are creating a British Empire, especially in Africa and India and subduing large numbers of traditional peoples with indigenous religions. And so ancient paganism was often equated with the traditional religions of the rest of the world, which was being absorbed into European imperial systems. And also the 19th century was very big on the new idea of evolution, which suggested that things are always getting better in terms of natural selection and eventually of intellectual and humane prowess. So you would see the world as a steady upward staircase from a protoplasmic atomic globule rigging in the pre-Cambrian slime till eventually through higher and higher life forms you reach Queen Victoria.(audience laughing) And this view, of course was going to be harsh on British pre-history because it was so far back, it had to be awful. And again, this view is as tenable as the other. We have no idea where the truth lies because the evidence can be interpreted in so many different ways. And I'm going to illustrate that argument further by going to my second case study. It's time for us to leave Stonehenge, join a traffic jam on the A303, head up the M3, meet a bigger traffic jam on the M25, and eventually enter London and end up at the British Museum. And in the Celtic Gallery you will find this gentleman, Lindow Man, arguably the most sensational find of British archeology in the 1980s, and the most carefully investigated human body until that time, it's the upper part, or here's the upper part of a human body found in a peat bog called Lindow Moss south of Manchester in 1984 with the remains of one leg. Peat cutting equipment had dismembered the body before the remnants were found, it was immediately taken for study. It ended up in London where a top pathologist called Ian West, studied it and suggested that the man concerned had died as the result of a horrific triple killing. His skull had been smashed by a heavy object. His neck had been broken by a strangling tourniquet, a garrote, the loop of which was still around his neck sunk into the flesh, and his jugular vein had been sliced open to bleed him to death. And all these things that apparently occurred simultaneously. Now by anybody's reckoning, this is overkill.(audience laughing) And so it appeared as if he'd been put to death in a horrifically brutal, ritualized killing. And he was dated by the radio carbon method to the Iron Age. And this was the time when the druids really were supreme in Britain and northwestern Europe, and many Roman and some Greek writers at the time had accused the druids of being addicted to human sacrifice. And here was the proof, the physical evidence of a druidic ritual killing. And it went into the British Museum with that label on it and became the display in the gallery concerned, which was most visited, a standing example of the horror and brutality of the druids and of prehistoric British religion. And as such, it had a knock on effect on attitudes to alternative spiritualties in the modern age. Fundamentalist Christian novels from the Victorian and early 20th century period were republished in the 1990s, the novels concerned were about the horror and brutality of the pagan druids and the goodness of Christianity in putting paid to them. And new prefaces said, if you doubt the truth of anything in what we thought was fiction, just go and see Lindow Man. And you know how awful the druids really were. And therefore, we must not let new pagan or druidic spiritualties reappear in modern Britain. We must remain true Christians otherwise this horror would come back. Now this is the work of religious fundamentalists, but even the supposedly liberal Guardian newspaper cashed in on this line when the gallery concerned was renovated at the end of the 2000s, a guardian journalist ran an item on this process and he said, following the label on the exhibit, that this was a victim of the druids, and we know who are the perpetrators and they're still around. So when you go and see these supposedly harmless people in their natty white robes performing their funny rights at Stonehenge, be aware that all this could come back at any moment. You are only a heart beat away from horror.(audience laughing) Well, fair enough, if the evidence is sound and like most people, I thought it must be. But then come the 2000s, I noticed two things. The first was that there was a double standard in evaluating the reports of the Greeks and the Romans. And this was noticed by more and more experts in Greek and Roman culture because the accusation of committing human sacrifice was one which both peoples levied against foreigners whom they wanted to do down and people in their own society whom they wish to persecute. It was a standard smear tactic. And it was noticed also that when the Romans made the same charge of people like the Jews or the early Christians, nobody now believes it because those have left powerful lobbies in the modern world. And also we have good records for their actual practices from the ancient world. And we know they didn't commit human sacrifice. So we don't believe the Romans and the Greeks, but when the Romans and the Greeks make the same charge about foreign pagan peoples who haven't left direct descendants and who haven't left us good written records like the druids, most people believe them. So there is an uncomfortable double standard here, which needs to be interrogated. And in the case of the Druids, the Romans had a particularly good reason for accusing them of horrific practices, which was it was a large justification for the conquest and subjugation of their peoples by the Romans that they were taking these masses of land in order to civilize and domesticate the tribes concerned, including improving their disgusting religion. So there's a clear propaganda incentive. And the Greeks who wrote were in Roman employ. So a question mark now exists over the ancient evidence. It's also noted that bodies are found in bogs from the late prehistoric period across northern Europe, especially in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. And some of them had suffered horrific deaths, deaths of great violence. And so there is a pattern here, but the continental bodies have been thought either to be victims of human sacrifice or executed criminals or the victims of criminal act. Lindow Man was judged to be a human sacrifice, and that was the only option chosen. So that's problem number two. The third, what really mattered to me, was revealed when I came across one foggy winter evening in a secondhand bookshop in Bristol, the original British Museum report on the body. And that revealed two things to me. The first was that it had been studied initially by two medical experts and not one, one was Ian West and the other was an anatomist from Liverpool University called Robert Connolly who became the top anatomist there. And Connolly had seen the same body at the same time and had decided that the man had been beaten to death. His skull had been smashed by a heavy object as West had agreed. But the broken neck was not from garroting, but from another blow in the rain of the heavy object which had also smashed a rib. The cord around the neck, according to Connolly, was not a garrote, it had been a necklace. And the reason why it was sunk into the flesh was because the flesh had swollen in the bog. Connolly said it showed none of the trauma associated with strangulation victims. And so Connolly concluded that instead of a ritual triple death, this is somebody who'd been hammered to death by a club or an axe. And that was that, the cut across the jugular vein, Connolly said, had been caused by a peat cutter spade many centuries after the body went into the bog. So here we have two top experts who like two top teams of archeologists at Stonehenge have come up with utterly different conclusions. But one of them got buried, and it was the sensational one that got put on display. And even more disturbing was the dating. It was indeed dated as a body to the Iron Age, 300 years before the Christian era. But they then realized what they were dating was the peat bog, not the body, the peat having seeped into the body. So they then sent tissue to two different labs, and asked for their opinion, and the very first one came back saying, this is post-Roman, it's from the early Middle Ages. And the second lab had said that it's almost certainly Roman in its date. It could be possibly Iron Age or it could be possibly post-Roman, but probably Roman. And what the museum did was to ask the second lab for a final more detailed opinion. And the answer came back that there was a 30% chance that it was from the later Roman period or even later, and a two third chance that it was dated from just before the Romans arrived until well into the Roman period. And at that point the museum concluded it was Iron Age.(audience laughing) And this remained the conclusion even when two more or bits of two more bodies had been identified in Lindow Moss, one an earlier find and the other, a later one with different bits of a body. And they were firmly dated to the Roman period, and a severed head was found in another bog near Manchester and firmly dated to the Roman period. So what's the problem? Well, the answer is in the Roman period, there are no druids. The Romans had annihilated them. So it can't easily be a druidic human sacrifice. It's probably Roman. It could be a human sacrifice of some kind, or it could be the execution of somebody for a heinous crime, which he may or may not have committed. And likewise the other bodies, or there could have been a criminal gang operating in that bit of Roman Britain who dumped their victims in the bogs around where Manchester was to grow. So we seemed to have a range of different explanations of which the label on the body was only one and stretching the dating a bit. So I wanted to start a debate. And in 2004, I did so in the Times literary supplement by laying out that argument, and I was answered swiftly and courteously by a very distinguished archeologist, JD Hill, who was the curator in charge of the gallery. And he upheld Ian West's reputation as a superb pathologist, justifiably, and he also said that it probably is a Roman body, but that doesn't rule out the fact that human sacrifice might still have been practiced in secret in the Roman period. So I answered him saying that when you have two criminal pathologists who disagree in a modern legal case, you don't ignore one and only listen to the other. And this is what had happened in this case. And I also said that the whole idea that human sacrifice had been carried out in the pre-Roman Iron Age of Britain had hinged on Lindow Man being a human sacrifice. So the argument's now going in circles. JD Hill, eventually in the Times newspaper stated, we may never know how Lindow Man died, which was the argument I wanted conceded. And he did so there graciously, but the label wasn't changed, and it remained the same for a few more years until in 2009, the body was returned to the Manchester Museum where it had first been stored and examined for a special exhibition. And the exhibition there adopted the argument of, could have been a human sacrifice, could have been an executed criminal, innocent or guilty, could have been the victim of criminals. And JD Hill himself nobly contributed a panel to the exhibition which endorsed this view. A conference was held to accompany it, I was invited to give the keynote address and of all the other speakers, all but one held to the open verdict line, which had been advocated in the original debate which I'd started. One of the speakers was a young man called Jody Joy who succeeded JD Hill as curator of that gallery. And he wrote a pamphlet inviting visitors to make up their own minds on the matter. And when the body was returned, the museum put a new label which opened up the matter and made ritual killing only one of the points that were there. There is all the information that I have been describing. So it's time to conclude, and it's pretty clear what I'm going to be arguing. I'm going to be arguing for an open verdict on most of prehistoric British religion in which those who take the benevolent view, those who take the pessimistic and disapproving view can have equal honors, and everybody has an equal chance of being right, because that's actually time and again what the evidence suggests. And so we end up with a multiplicity of possible interpretations. We don't have the story of prehistoric England, early historic England or Britain. We have the stories and everybody has the right to propose one of their own. And to my mind, this fits a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society of individual choice of the sort into which we are rapidly turning in this nation. Does not mean I'm talking myself at other professionals out of a job. Heritage managers still have an important role to protect and display sites, to lay out the evidence, to invite people to make their informed choices on the evidence provided in front of them. And there's a similar role for professional historians and archeologists. We are the national experts in identifying and dating finds, explaining what sites probably were, reading and translating documents, and then laying all this before the public. It's invaluable work and will always be necessary. But in terms of pre-Christian religion, the experts should then stand back and let the public dream their own dreams, make their own uses, draw their own conclusions and tell their own stories within the limits which are quite capacious of the evidence provided. This doesn't mean we're not making advances in the understanding of prehistoric Britain, science enables us increasingly to understand the diet, the health, the ethnicity, the technology, the environment, and the living circumstances of prehistoric people. But we still can't get inside their minds. We have no idea of their political structures, their gender relations, their societies, and most of all their religions. Absolutely nothing to tell us because the evidence can be interpreted as suggested legitimately in so many ways. There's a lot of talk in education, the last 30 years of pupil-centered learning, which I endorse. It seems we need public-centered appreciation where prehistoric and early historic British religion is concerned. And this I suggest, fits the kind of society into which we're evolving, as I've said, and seems to me, logical, natural, and simple. In fact, it isn't easy at all because it runs counter to a number of powerful and persisting trends in national culture. One is the idea that experts are paid to produce results. And indeed in the sciences they often do, making great strides to improve human knowledge, human happiness, human health, human welfare. And as suggested in physical circumstances, we do continually know more about prehistory, but not about the mental world of prehistory. And if governments pay academics or subsidize academics to produce answers about these areas, and the academics turn to them with a smile and say, don't ask us, we haven't actually made an advance in this area in a hundred years, then the pay masters of the system and the pay mistresses are likely to be rather discontented. And also we are still quite justly caught up in a rhetoric of progress. The idea that ideally each generation should know more than the last, have a better standard of living than the last, and a better world to which to look forward. And again, progress is made in knowledge in most fields, but not in this one. And so if I suggest all we produce is more evidence, exciting, compelling, colorful though that may be, then a great many people other than those who hold the purse strings and the political power are going to be rather upset. And furthermore, I have extolled a multiethnic, multi-faith complex society based on individuals. Not everybody in Britain is happy with the appearance of such a thing. And even those who are are often inclined to say that we need desperately something to bond the faiths, the ethnicities, the cultures together, and a common story of Britain which everybody can be taught and which is certain and positive and embedded in scholarship is one of the ways of doing this in order to make people understand what it is to be British or English, Scottish, or Welsh, and part of a community. If you remove this some very distinguished people have argued, then you are removing the last balm, the last cement from our society, which may well fragment completely as a result. And finally, this pluralism I'm suggesting doesn't fit any traditional mode of storytelling. You want to get a contract for a TV documentary on archeology or history, especially archeology, one of the best ways of doing it is to present it as a quest romance. Now the quest romance is the oldest known form of human literature, the oldest surviving in the world. The Epic of Gilgamesh is about a man on a quest, the oldest European literature, the Odyssey of Homer is about a man on a quest to get home. The quest romance is one of the most thrilling and compelling modes of storytelling we possess. The golden fleece, the holy grail, getting that darn ring into Mount Doom.(audience laughing) These are the basis of epic. And so if you go to a commissioning editor and say, I've had this great idea to explain a puzzle which has thwarted historians or archeologists for centuries, and now I've got the answer and we'll lay out the problem for the public, we'll take them on the journey and at the end, we'll have the revelation, that is brilliant TV. No matter how long it lasts, it will get the commission. You go to a commissioning editor and say, we have all this wonderful data, and we're going to show it all to the public and we ain't got the foggiest idea really what it means. They're going to have to make up their own minds to put it mildly, it's going to be uphill work.(audience laughing) So I acknowledge the problem, nonetheless, tough as the gradient is, I prefer the pluralist idea of presenting the evidence, and then encouraging people to see different things in it. Not just because it fits pluralism and individualism, but also because I think it's the actual honest way of dealing with the data which we can't interpret positively. And there I rest my case, but of course in doing so, believing in polyvocality and pluralism, if you happen to disagree with everything I've just said this evening, then I thoroughly endorse, indeed celebrate, your right to do so.(audience laughing)(audience applauding)- Now I have some great questions, and I'm going to take the first one from our online audience, and the first one is from Hannah. Now she asks, now many people speak of the special spiritual feeling that they get when visiting Stonehenge. Do you think this is hysteria or have you ever felt that very special feeling that others talk about?- I'm an expert so the answer is I haven't got the faintest idea.(audience laughing) But it's undoubtedly true that these places have a capacity to move. And it's certainly not hysteria because they're luminous places, they're places built to be very special. They're places in which humans have invested a huge amount of emotion and experience, stretching back in some cases many millennia. So they darn well should move us. I think people have very polarized reactions to Stonehenge in particular. Many see it as a place of extreme sanctity, a people's temple, which is not hedged in by a dominant priesthood or priestesshood and religion. On the other hand, many feel instinctually it's a place of conflict and division and trauma, and each as suggested have a right to that. I find Stonehenge an incredible pain personally just because it gets involved in so many controversies. I was one of the trustees for English Heritage for many years, a commissioner before that. And Stonehenge gave us more controversy and more difficulty than all the other 420 sites in English Heritage's custody put together. But that is a mark of its emotive power and its importance.- [Audience Member] Would you apply your skepticism about human sacrifice more generally to Carthaginian and other areas of Europe?- Selectively. I'm skeptical about it in Northern and Central Europe because the evidence is not conclusive enough. I'm skeptical about it in the Near East for the same reason, Carthaginian does seem different because there we actually do seem to have textual evidence of elite people purchasing poor children as offerings to the deities. They're specifically children, they're specifically in hard times. And that does seem to be a strongly marked local tradition. And indeed in the rest of the world there are peoples in historic times, not very many, but nonetheless present of whom we have good evidence for human sacrifice, Mesoamerica and Polynesia examples. So it does happen. I'm just reluctant along with other scholars at the present day to apply it wholesale to a range of peoples where the evidence is not quite good enough at present to enable us to conclude that it certainly occurred.- [Audience Member 2] Yes, thank you. I did just wonder whether you don't think that scientific advances in many different disciplines and also the insights from anthropology and so forth, looking at societies who live in similar environments today or in the recent past will not actually advance knowledge and get us closer to the truth about the mentalities of these people. Or do you think that's a lost cause?- I think that what you've very ably and correctly described are ways that increase the options which we have. And I think the perceptions which generations bring to this question do vary from generation to generation in turn as our own environments and preoccupations and views of humanity in the world change. And I think that it's perfectly legitimate to look at people with New Stone Age economies and technologies in places like Papua New Guinea, and say this is an example of how people with that kind of lifestyle could view the cosmos. And equally so to look at megalith builders in Madagascar and say, this is one way in which people who work with great undressed stones can position them in regard to society and the world, but there is no way that we can prove that the prehistoric British actually did have the same belief systems as Papuans or Malagasy. So what we are provided with very usefully is an increasing range of possible alternatives. And of course the more possible alternatives we have, the greater the statistical chance that one or more will be right, even if we might not tell, which.- Now there's a short and sweet question from a member of the audience online, are experts sure Lindow was a man.- Sorry?(presenter laughing)- Are experts sure that Lindow was a man.- Yes.(presenter laughing) His skeletal makeup is male, that's clearly identified. So it's a guy, but one of the other bodies in the same bog is probably female because her skull was found in the bog a couple of decades before. And in an appalling dark comedy, a local man confessed to having murdered his wife and dumped her in the bog because he assumed that the 2000 dear old head was hers,(audience laughing) and he's now doing life as a result. So there are both sexes represented in the bog.(audience laughing)- We just thought we would check- Yeah. Worth doing.- [Audience Member 3] How would you compare Stonehenge with Seahenge.- Okay.- At all?- They are both cause célèbre, but Stonehenge is the most famous prehistoric monument in the world. And Seahenge is a completely routine Bronze Age timber circle from the end of the third millennium, the millennium BC which Stonehenge was built, which happened to hit the headlines because rather like a mammoth eroding out the Siberian ice, it eroded out of the mud of the northern coast and was very well preserved. Most of these circles are only represented by their post holes and the timber in them. But this one was intact and had it just been excavated and removed to Kingsland Museum, there had been no problem. But it's in a bird sanctuary in breeding season. And so everything had to be postponed for months, and the media storm was created, a neon lit term, Seahenge was invented by journalists for the site and a few Rory erupted between local people, archeologists, heritage managers, and pagans as to who had moral custody of the site and how it should be treated, which since this had never happened before, the heritage managers bungled, which I think they now fully acknowledge it was a learning process. The result was that after conservation and treatment, the circle is now in Kingsland museum and can be enjoyed there. But it was a tough summer for all the parties that I've described in what were often bitter and emotional contestations over how this site should be regarded and treated.- With the noticeable a alignments with the sun at certain times of the year being tied to more parts of the building of both Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland, are there, and now my, oh here we go, the light's come back, full of suspense now for the main question, are there other similarities between these two sites?- Yes, they, they all begin at around the same time, which is 3200, 2900 BC or BCE when two big things happen in the then Britain Islands and other islands around, which is first the peoples go nuts about round shapes. Until now the circle have not been the main unit of sacred space. And now it becomes so definitively either the older tomb shrines box-like arrangements of big stones, chambers with the dead in them are given huge round mounds or else they're abandoned, and people start worshiping in circles of earth or timbers or stones. The stone circle. And the second thing in which is probably linked is that peoples go very excited over heavenly bodies is certainly the sum. So the three greatest prehistoric monuments of the three great Irish and British realms are all the lines on the solstices, Newgrange in Ireland on the midwinter sunrise, Maeshowe in Scotland on the midwinter sunset, and Stonehenge upon the midwinter sunset, the midsummer sunrise, and La Hougue Bie, which just for the record is the best prehistoric monument, in the Channel Islands is aligned on the equinoxes. This is a particular phase of prehistory in which alignments, certainly solar, maybe lunar and stellar as well suddenly become very important.- Okay.- We dunno why it's a kind of like a reformation in pre-history of which there are a number in which the religion changes, it seems dramatically, that there are at least a dozen great novels waiting to be born in this story.(audience laughing)- Wow. And on that wonderful inspiring note, that was absolutely fascinating, Ronald, and I can't get the image of Stonehenge being built by megalomaniacs and cowboys out of my head. I think that's a wonderful quote amongst many in your lecture, and we're very much looking forward to your subsequent lectures in the series.- Thank you.- Thank you so much.(crowd applauding)