Remembered and imagined belongings: Stonehenge in the age of first metals

Alasdair is first and foremost a scholar of the Neolithic, so an
offering for his festschrift on events from the later third and
second millennium BC demands explanation. So, to follow
good legal defence, one can first cite precedence. Alasdair’s
research has, on occasion, strayed into later periods. Early
on this was determined by post-doctoral employment,
as with his analysis of the Iron Age pits from Danebury
(Whittle 1984), or the writing up and publication with
Humphrey Case of a range of later prehistoric and Roman
excavations on the Thames Valley gravels around Oxford
(Case and Whittle 1982). But even his Cardiff days have
seen involvement in projects that took in later archaeology,
work on the Severn foreshore being a case in hand (Whittle
1989). The second part of our defence involves a sleight of
hand, in that this paper deals with aspects of the life of that
most pre-eminent of Neolithic monuments, Stonehenge,
albeit in the time of first metals. Bradley has highlighted
how the sequence of constructional events at this monument
presented an image of timeless order in the face of external
change (Bradley 1991), and so even in the Bronze Age it
might be fair to say Stonehenge carried with it many of the
core concepts of a ‘Neolithic’ world.
Stonehenge has not escaped Alasdair’s attention.