If, when you think “England’s earliest cremation cemetery,” you immediately blurt out “Stonehenge,” well, you may have another, older think coming.
Flagstones, a burial site in Dorset, on the English Channel, may actually be the earliest known large circular enclosure in Britain, according to new research by experts from the University of Exeter and Historic England, a government body tasked with protecting historic sites. Whereas the first Stonehenge was, according to Historic England’s timeline, erected around 3000 B.C.E., new radiocarbon dating has revealed Flagstones to date to about 3200 B.C.E. It was previously thought to date to about 3000 B.C.E.
Flagstones may have even served as a prototype for later sites such as Stonehenge, which is located just 45 miles to the northeast, said the experts, who have assigned the new date based on radiocarbon analysis of artifacts including charcoal, red deer antlers, and human remains. Results of the study were published in the journal Antiquity.
“Flagstones is an unusual monument; a perfectly circular ditched enclosure, with burials and cremations associated with it,” said Susan Greaney, a specialist in Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments and a lecturer in Exeter’s department of archaeology and history. “In some respects, it looks like monuments that come earlier, which we call causewayed enclosures, and in others, it looks a bit like things that come later that we call henges. But we didn’t know where it sat between these types of monuments—and the revised chronology places it in an earlier period than we expected.”
Greaney and Peter Marshall, formerly coordinator of scientific dating at Historic England, called on laboratories at ETH Zürich and the University of Groningen to help with the carbon dating. They found that the digging of pits on the site commenced as early as 3650 B.C.E. The ditched enclosure was created around 3200 B.C.E., with burials placed in it at that time. The scientists were also intrigued to find that a young man was buried under a large stone at the site fully a millennium later.
Roadwork in the 1980s led to the discovery of Flagstones, revealing a circular ditch measuring more than 300 feet across. Half the site lies under the Dorchester bypass those crews were building; the other half lies under Max Gate, the former home of Thomas Hardy, renowned English author of works like Tess of the d’Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure.
“The chronology of Flagstones is essential for understanding the changing sequence of ceremonial and funeral monuments in Britain,” said Greaney. “The ‘sister’ monument to Flagstones is Stonehenge, whose first phase is almost identical, but it dates to around 2900 BC. Could Stonehenge have been a copy of Flagstones? Or do these findings suggest our current dating of Stonehenge might need revision?”
