He’s a modern druid and a protester at Stonehenge. He hangs out and talks very rationally about his mission. I've seen some documentaries with him in them, and he's a really eloquent, charismatic speaker. This is what he does.
A bunch of eye-catching signs. The last one's a little off- there were no bones at the henge, just cremains.
The petition. He's got a whole binder of signatures with name, country of origin, and religion to show that it's not just an English thing or a druid thing- it's everybody's concern.
He’s been working to increase public access to the stones and the preservation of the human burials at Stonehenge for the past fifteen years. “But!” you say. “There are no human burials at Stonehenge! You’ve messed up a simple archaeological truth.” Bollocks, I say to you. There are human remains at Stonehenge. They’re here. Or rather, they were.
If you're going to mark a gravesite, do it right. (This is not the right way to do it.)
This is an Aubrey hole, first discovered by John Aubrey in 1666 and rediscovered by Robert Newell in the 1920s. These are holes in the ground where human cremains were found. All of the cremains were removed by Hawley, studied, and then reinterred into Aubrey Hole 7… for a while. They were re-removed in 2008, and they’ve been King Arthur’s pet cause since then. The British Museum has them for study, and he’s worried that they won’t give them back. After all, they were supposed to be back by now, but the museum repetitioned for ten more years and got them. It does make sense that they got them- they’re one of the world’s premiere research institutions. If any information can be gleaned from these remains, then they should of course hold them and study them. But the thing is? There’s really not much we can learn from these. Cremains are difficult to analyze. There’s not much you can learn from calcined bone about who a person was. Furthermore, these cremains are all mixed up due to the… not exactly forward-thinking archaeological practices of the 1920s. Any information we could get from them would be tainted. Sure, we might develop better techniques later on, but what’s the point in holding claimed cremains in a museum? After all, these are to the Brits what Native Americans are to Americans. They were here first, and there are some people who can claim them as biological ancestors. Many more can claim them as spiritual ancestors. The people who want the cremains to go back in the Aubrey Holes are fine with having them placed in a sealed container to be dug up later. They’re fine with the museum keeping a sample. All they want is for their ancestors to come home. That’s what the Native Americans wanted back in the 1970s. What they got was NAGPRA. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s something. There's nothing like that here. It's interesting the way they run their sites here. At many current excavations, there are rules that say that amateurs must be allowed to assist and that digging must stop to give public tours of the site. Stonehenge, which is managed by English Heritage, is a living site. There are sheep roaming around and loads of birds.
Seriously, there's a whole flock of them. Those are barrow graves in the background, by the way. More on them in a bit.
Here is a video with some narration. Hopefully this is less terrible than my other videos.
This is Petulant Crow. He's a very friendly bird! (I think he's actually a rook, not a crow.)
Honestly, Stonehenge really does a poor job explaining the place’s role as a burial site. The Aubrey Holes are poorly marked- just white painted circles on the ground. A footpath goes right over one of them, and if you don’t have the audio tour (I didn’t, I don’t like the things) and aren’t a mortuary anthropologist or somebody with similar knowledge, you won’t know what they are. The barrow graves, on the other hand, are amazing. They’re these great hillocks in the middle of a field. Like the Aubrey Holes, if you didn’t know what they were, you wouldn’t. Unless, of course, you wandered up there.
See those hills? That's where we're going.
A fence to keep the sheep out. Normally, you can go in.
A barrow grave.
Civilization is right down the lane...
And on the other side of the hill.
A barrow grave, for those who don’t know, is a mass grave that’s basically a hollowed-out hill, sometimes surrounded by a ditch. Once they were filled with grave goods as well, but those were lost to antiquarians in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s… so different from Stonehenge. You feel like you’re a part of the landscape. The barrows are managed by the National Trust, and they do a beautiful job of presenting them as part of the landscape. There’s a sign, a lovely illustrated unobtrusive sign, and it’s so silent and peaceful. Usually, the barrows are accessible to people; however, every now and then they fence them off to let the grass repair itself. We went when they were closed. A pity; I would rather have liked to climb one. After Stonehenge, we moved on to Bath, where there is a gorgeous Roman temple complex.
The sign! That's new. Not Roman. Not Roman at all.
Left to right: Anna, Kelly, me.
Even though the water here is green, it's very ferrous. Tastes like suckin' on nails.
This is the pediment from the temple to Sulis Minerva. Fun fact: one of the finds here were a bunch of curse tablets. I couldn't get any pictures of them, but they were written backwards on metal and tossed into the water. Mostly they dealt with the theft of clothes while the curser was bathing.
They do a neat reconstruction of the pediment with lights. The first step is putting it all to rights in classic white marble...
And then they paint it up much like it would have been.
There were several burials at the site, and the museum has an entire room devoted to recovered tombstones. I didn’t have time to photograph all of them, but here are some.
This is the tombstone of a scribe- you can tell from the scroll he's holding.
Part of a really cool tombstone with a dog on it that's bringing in a deer.
More fragmentary tombstones.
As you can see, these are pretty elaborate memorials. These are often upper-class Romans, many of them soldiers or religious figures. And then we have this guy.
Even without looking at the sign, I guessed that this was an older adult male skeleton.
The sign told me he was a man in his 50s from Syria. See, I did learn something in forensics. They’ve got him laid out, then his shroud beneath him, and then his stone sarcophagus set in the floor, roughly in the location it was found. A good deal of the stuff he was buried with surrounds him. Now, there’s certainly no public outcry over him. Nobody’s asking for him to be returned to the ground, or for his remains to be repatriated. So what’s the difference between him and the cremains? Is it that we can learn something from his skeleton, more than we could from the cremains? Is it that he’s on display so that the public can see him and learn from his bones? Is it that he’s not an ancestor- he’s not a Celt, or really even a Roman. He’s all the way from Syria.
A few final things to ponder: Who has the right to decide what to do with the graves, grave goods, and bodies beneath? The archaeologists who dig them up? The government? Their descendants? What do you think? How would you feel if it was your remains on display?
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