we've now established that Stonehenge was built

in a series of different stages, first of all

shortly after 3000BC.

It begins with a bank and a ditch

but also upstanding features such as standing stones

and timber posts.

It's also at that moment

that people started to use it as a cemetary,

so this is somewhere around 3000 to

2920 BC

and it continued being used as a cemetary for at least two hundred years and

probably five hundred years.

It's then that the next stage of construction was put up

and that is these large sarsen stones, they're a type of sandstone, they come from

the Marlborough Downs about twenty miles away

whereas the smaller stones already in place

had come from the Preseli Hills in West Wales, a distance of a hundred and

eighty miles.

We started work about ten years ago

and our initial

emphasis was not on Stonehenge itself but actually on a nearby henge called

Durrington Walls,

in fact the largest henge in the whole of Britain -

it's about seventeen hectares in extent -

and what we established was that Stonehenge was just one part of this

much larger complex,

linked by avenues

to the River Avon.

What what we discovered at Durrington Walls

were the houses of

what must have been not just hundreds of people but thousands of people,

and it was there that we were able to work out that this was quite probably the worker's camp.

One of our other major advances

was to find out at what times of year people were actually inhabiting this village,

because although it's the largest known settlement from the Neolithic in

northwestern Europe,

it seems to have been occupied only seasonally; people coming in

for particular times of the year, and we can track that

by investigating the culling

of the animals

because thanks to the way that their teeth grow you can age them quite

precisely to within months,

so from spring birth

we were seeing that the majority were killed

around nine months later and then the rest of them some fifteen months from birth,

so this really fixed the occupation of

this large settlement to

the winter time and the summer time

and of course those are extremely important

points within the Neolithic calendar at Stonehenge,

because Stonehenge's main alignment is towards the midsummer sunrise

and in the opposite direction the mid winter sunset.

What we're seeing is at least

five constructional stages at Stongehenge, one shortly after 3000 BC,

one around 2500 BC,

two small phases of rearranging the smaller stones in the next 3-4 hundred years

and then a very last gasp

somewhere around 1500-1600BC,

they dig holes apparently to move stones but the stones are never moved;

whatever they planned never succeeded.

Those last stages of construction also coincide

with a fundamental social change in Britain,

and that's the arrival of what we call the Beaker people,

this is a continental style of ceramics and burial

but also an entirely new lifestyle.

These are people that have been using

metals, the wheel, and other innovations

which had been absolutely absent from Britain

for hundreds of years,

so Britain was basically cut off from the continent

up until the arrival of the Beaker people around 2400BC,

and i think it's their lifestyle, their politics, their social structure

that is so very different

to the host culture within Britain -

they are much more individualizing than the collective power structure

within Britain,

they also are not prepared to work

en masse

for just a few people,

so the great monument building that's going on in Britain at this time, and it's not

just Stonehenge but many other timber circles, stone circles,

earthen mounds of giant proportions like Silbury Hill,

these come to an end within two centuries of

Beaker arrival - they're coming from parts of Europe that don't have

these kinds of traditions at all,

they don't have

these great gathering centres,

it's a much more dispersed, decentralized

social structure,

and as it's adopted in Britain

so the whole rationale for these kinds of

mega constructions simply disappears.

We're starting to think of Stonehenge

not as a temple

where people come on pilgrimages and come to worship on a long-term basis;

all our evidence suggests that

it is used in a very punctuated form over time:

people come, they construct, they feast, they go away,

and this is really changing our notion of

Neolithic religious belief

that it's all in the building,

rather than the idea of building something in order to do something

with it,

which is very much our twentieth century take on the world.

What we have at Durrington Walls, if we're right that this is the work camp,

is that the houses show that we have

entire household groups,

so we're looking at men and women and children being involved in the whole thing,

and they're feasting on

cattle and on pig,

they're barbecuing them, they're boiling them,

and the huge concentration of resources

shows that this is a very sophisticated infrastructure to support them

and by examining the isotopes,

first trontium in the teeth of cattle,

and we're now doing this for the pigs as well, we're finding out that

the range that they're coming from

has exceeded all of our expectations. This isn't just some local construction event

for the people of

the chalklands of southern England - it's not even for the people of southern

England and Wales,

this is for people coming from

the width and breadth of the whole island of Britain.

So it's more than simply unnecessary food miles

to bring those animals from all over the country, it has to be part of a very

deliberate act of unifying

and bringing people together.