ABSTRACT

In their burial monuments, the Stonehenge people achieved an architectural originality that rivalled and perhaps exceeded that of the stone circles. The tombs are certainly more explicit concerning their builders’ attitudes to life and death: they speak of a brooding preoccupation that amounts to an obsession. The bodies of the dead often underwent two funeral rituals and even after the second ritual bones were sometimes fished out for further ceremonies. It would be easy to portray this sort of behaviour as morbid or even necrophiliac but, as we shall see, that interpretation would be wide of the mark. It was not so much the dead that interested the Stonehenge people as death itself, and we can see emerging an elaborate pattern of ceremonial activity based on a continuing interaction with the forces of life and death.