ABSTRACT
When, in 1986, I was writing an account of the society that produced Stonehenge, I emphasized that Stonehenge would only make sense when it was viewed within its cultural context. The way to the truth about Stonehenge seemed then to be to forget about Stonehenge in the first instance, to study the archaeology of other sites and then to piece the whole culture together like a jigsaw puzzle, starting with the edges and working in towards the centre. That centre was, of course, Stonehenge.1 Even though that was not the prime intention, the writing of The Stonehenge People clarified my ideas about Stonehenge: I began to see it as through a dispersing early morning mist. More recently I compiled a gazetteer of the neolithic sites in Britain, mainly as a companion volume to The Stonehenge People to show the sort of archaeological site data that were available to justify and substantiate the more general statements in the earlier book, but something else happened.2
