The distinctive silhouette of Stonehenge within the flat panorama of Salisbury plain in southwest England is immediately and iconically acquainted.
However, the 4,500-year-old monument and the world it encapsulated stays profoundly mysterious — there are not any written information that make clear its that means and significance.
A significant new exhibition at The British Museum that gathers 430 gorgeous objects from across the United Kingdom and Europe goals to light up the fast-changing and surprisingly refined world during which, for 1000’s of years, Stonehenge stood on the coronary heart.
“It’s virtually like we have develop into over accustomed to the monument however the context and the persons are lacking from the image,”mentioned Neil Wilkin, lead curator of the exhibition.
“We solely actually perceive the monument should you perceive what is going on in that world on the time it’s constructed.”
The exhibition, which spans a interval of 8,000 years, brings to life radical modifications: the shift from hunter-gatherer tradition to farming and the transition from crafting stone instruments and carved rock to mastering metals resembling bronze and gold.
Stonehenge is a quintessentially English monument, however the grave items and different artifacts on show reveal long-distance hyperlinks with Ireland, the Orkney Islands, Scotland, France, Germany — even historical Greece.
Long earlier than the stone megaliths have been erected — a activity that took generations to finish — the placement was already marked by wood poles set in three pits that date again 10,000 years, when Britain was nonetheless related to the continent by a land mass generally known as Doggerland.
Headdress, c.9000 BC, Star Carr, North Yorkshire. Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum
At this time, life was deeply intertwined with nature. An 11,000-year-old headdress comprised of the antlered cranium of a deer, present in North Yorkshire, would have conferred particular standing on its wearer.
Stone circles would be the best-known relics of this period, however hardly ever surviving timber circles have been additionally an integral a part of the panorama.
A key exhibit is Seahenge — a wood circle of 55 timber posts surrounding an upturned oak, with its roots reaching like tentacles into the heavens. It solely emerged in 1998 after spending millennia within the sands of a seashore in japanese England. Like Stonehenge, it was constructed to align with the trail of the solar, and the tree rings of the oak and posts reveal it was constructed within the spring and summer season of 2049 BC. Some suppose the oak stump may need supported a useless physique throughout funeral rituals.
This finely labored jadeite ax-head was comprised of materials quarried within the excessive Italian Alps 6,500 to five,500 years in the past. It would have belonged to among the first farmers to reach in Britain. Credit: The Trustees of the British Museum
A good looking jadeite ax-head, comprised of Italian rock, heralds the arrival of farmers from continental Europe. It was discovered discarded alongside a raised wood pathway, constructed 3,800 years in the past by among the first farmers, that traversed a marsh close to Glastonbury, not removed from Stonehenge. Its battered boards and helps are additionally a part of the exhibit.
On show for the primary time is a carved stone drum present in a baby’s grave that is billed as “crucial piece of prehistoric artwork to be present in Britain within the final 100 years.” It dates to 3005 BC-2890 BC, across the identical time as preliminary building of Stonehenge.
The Schifferstadt gold hat dates from 1600 BC and was present in Germany. It’s thought it may very well be a cosmic calendar. Credit: Kurt Diehl/Historisches Museum der Pfalz Speyer
Another compelling object is Germany’s Nebra sky disc — regarded as the world’s oldest depiction of the cosmos. It has solely left the nation 4 instances. Like Stonehenge’s alignment with the solar, the bands on both aspect mark the positions of the rising and setting solar, whereas the inlaid gold stars could characterize a constellation that may assist calculate a intercalary year.
The exhibition additionally consists of two conical gold hats which might be regarded as cosmic calendars.
“These are inklings of astronomical information that we’re actually stunned individuals had,” Wilkin mentioned.
Despite the Nebra sky disc being discovered buried in Germany, it is now recognized the inlaid gold on the artifact is from Cornwall, England. Bodies buried within the monument’s shadow even have revealed that Stonehenge was formed by waves of immigration. A person generally known as the Amesbury Archer, who was buried near Stonehenge together with outstanding copper instruments and gold ornaments, got here from what’s now modern-day Switzerland.
“Those long-distance connections are being demonstrated via science, and that is actually useful to grasp that Stonehenge wasn’t an remoted tradition, they have been really actually interconnected,” Wilkin mentioned.
The exhibition runs at The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, February 17 via July 17, 2022.