Place of the Ancestors Theory
In 1998, the BBC investigated how an anthropological approach to the monument might help to shed new light on its purpose. As part of the programme, an academic from Madagascar visited the site and compared Stonehenge to monuments in his own homeland as a place of the ancestors.
Ramilisonina
Ramilisonina, Musee D’arts & D’archeologie, Madagascar “I think that the stones that we find here are linked to the ancestors because where I come from in Madagascar each stone represents an individual, an old person, a memory, and that is where the spirit is. So if someone wishes to keep in contact with the ancestor that’s where they would go to talk.”
Unlike other stone circles, no leftovers of feasting, no quantities of bone or broken pottery have been found inside Stonehenge. This truly was hallowed ground.
Dr Michael Parker Pearson “I think we’re looking at a building which was actually reserved for a completely different group of entities, very probably not human beings at all but effectively the spirit world in whatever form it may have been.”
But can we tell what went on inside the holy of holies? The trouble is the lack of ritual remains inside Stonehenge. There’s only really the stones. And yet they hold the key. Their positions, their shapes, even their textures are all full of meaning.
It was only by chance that archaeologists spotted differences in the surfaces of the stones. It’s the first clear confirmation that worshippers moved inside the circle but also of how they moved.
In each trilithon, one upright is always smooth and slim, the other rough and bulky. This pattern is repeated right round the arc of trilithons. It was rather like the Stations of the Cross in a church, where you have to walk around to follow the story.
The gaps in the trilithons themselves may also have been meant as supernatural doorways.
Dr Michael Parker Pearson “They are extremely narrow, they are not for humans to go through, so I think we are definitely looking at people who have the ability to go into trance states, to move between… this world and the worlds of the spirits and the dead and so forth. I think what was important about interpretive archaeology for understanding Stonehenge was that it took us away from ideas of economy and social organisation to think about why did they build it the way they did, why did they build it in the place that they did, why was it related to certain natural features and other prehistoric monuments. So, thinking about symbolism in part but also ideas about human agency, human motivation, so it took us away from some rather kind of dry aspects of social inquiry, and out of that, I think, came some really extraordinary answers that we hadn’t expected.”
At the same time as this “place of the ancestors” theory was taking shape, another group of archaeologists was formulating a radically different interpretation as to why Stonehenge was built.
