The secret of Stonehenge
Writing about tourism in Mexico City last week made me think of my most recent experience as a foreign tourist. I went to England for the first time this spring, which I loved in the most cliched way possible. The castles! The meadows! The lambs! The pubs! The museums! The accents! The history! I insisted we pull over at every single crumbling castle, ancient village, and old rock we passed, and every single one was amazing. So of course we had to visit the most famous old rocks of all: Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is about 4,500 years old, roughly the same age as the ancient Egyptian pyramids in Giza. It’s a monument from Britain’s Neolithic period, which means when people first started farming in the region. Ancient burials dot the landscape around the stone circle, which was probably an open plain even before people started cutting down trees to plant fields and let animals graze. Some of the stones were local, others were brought from a quarry in Wales, almost 200 miles away. When people built the monument, they precisely arranged the stones to frame sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice—the two most important days of the year if you were a Neolithic farmer.
Today, Stonehenge is one of those places where, if you’ve been, people will ask you if it’s “worth it.” Can it possibly live up to the hype? Will it look as impressive in person as it does in pictures? Will the crowds be overwhelming? It’s a fair question. One-and-a-half million people visited Stonehenge in 2018, and the recently spruced-up tourist infrastructure makes it a fairly circumscribed experience. You park quite a ways from the circle and board a shuttle to take you there. You walk along a path that wraps around the stones, which you can’t touch or even get all that close to. You follow the flow of people on the path with you, everybody ooohing and aaahing and taking pictures. And then you’re back at the shuttle stop, and you’re done. That’s it. You’ve seen Stonehenge.
But if that’s your attitude, you’ve missed the point. Stonehenge was never about the stones. It was always about the people there with you. If you were a Neolithic farmer, you didn’t need a giant clock to tell you when the solstices were. What you needed was to be with other people on those special occasions, especially the longest, darkest night of the winter solstice. Archaeologists have discovered giant pits filled with pig bones near Neolithic monuments all over southern England, including in Durrington Walls, an ancient village 2 miles from Stonehenge where the primary builders and caretakers of the monument probably lived. Pits of animal bones are a sure sign of big feasts, with hundreds or thousands of people coming together to eat, drink, and party. The pigs would have been born in the spring, and they were about nine-months-old when they were slaughtered, putting the feasts right around the winter solstice.
These pigs seem to have been brought from all over the place. As an animal (or person) grows, its bones absorb chemicals from the water it drinks and the food it eats. Different geological regions have different chemical signatures. So by analyzing the strontium or oxygen isotopes trapped in bones, scientists can figure out where the long-dead owner of those bones once lived. If that signature is different from the place where they died, you know they moved. The pigs eaten at Durrington Walls and the other Neolithic monuments had isotopes signatures that match environments all over Britain and even Ireland. That means the people bringing them to the feasts were from all over, too.
The secret of Stonehenge? It’s a 4,500-year-old tourist attraction. It was built to bring far-flung people together. The only thing that’s changed between then and now is what “far-flung” means. Then, it meant many places in Britain, an island half the size of California. Now, it means the U.S., Mexico, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, Australia, China, and just about anywhere else you can imagine. Normally crowds of people with selfie sticks exhaust and annoy me, because I am an introverted snob. But at Stonehenge, I loved them. We had all come from so far to be there, together. Being one tourist in a crowd of many was more than “worth it.” It was the whole point.
Recommendations
“The Adults in the Room.” In light of the mass resignations at Deadspin, here’s ex-EIC Megan Greenwell’s look at how the site’s new bosses are running a successful media company into the ground for seemingly no reason at all.
“Dropshipping journalism.” And if you want more media gossip from the darkest timeline, don’t miss this truly bonkers look inside Newsweek. It ranges from the skewed incentives of clickbait to…money laundering for a cult? I couldn’t put this down.
Día de los Muertos. The best holiday, the best season. Here’s our ofrenda, looking atmospheric.