Archaeological excavations at the Neolithic site of Arthur’s Stone in Herefordshire have uncovered unprecedented remains that will transform understanding of the monument, and of the first farming communities in Britain nearly 6000 years ago.
The project – led by The University of Manchester, University of Cardiff and Herefordshire Council’s Archaeology Section – represents the first investigation of the site, which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument cared for by the charity English Heritage.
Professor Julian Thomas from The University of Manchester, one of the excavation directors, says
“Arthur’s Stone is a well-known and much-loved monument, it has become tied up with Arthurian legend, and provided the inspiration for Aslan’s table in C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. However, it has never been excavated before, so we have not clearly understood how the stones visible today relate to the monument in the Neolithic, until now.”
The team expected the site to be poorly preserved, as many upstanding monuments like this were targeted by antiquarians and looters in the 18th and 19th century. But to their surprise, the excavations, permitted by English Heritage and Historic England, uncovered substantial new parts of the monument inches below the surface, and completely undisturbed Neolithic deposits.
Dr Nick Overton from The University of Manchester, another of the project directors, said
“The stone-build architecture found in our excavations reveal a complex history of construction. The stone monument began as a ‘dolmen’, made up of the giant capstone sitting on upright stones that is visible today, surrounded by a circular bank of stone with a single entrance at the north end, marked by two large upright stones. There are other dolmens from the period in Britain, mainly in the west, but this is, to our knowledge, the first with a bank and entrance. Interestingly, there may be similar examples in Denmark. This was then surrounded by a larger trapezoid-shaped long cairn bounded by dry-stone walling. On the western side of the cairn was an entrance to a passage, leading to a small stone chamber, formed in part by the entrance stones of the earlier phase. After a period of time, the floor of the chamber and passageway was sealed by stoney deposits, and the entrance was blocked up.
Excavations around the entrance, and within the passageway and chamber recovered Neolithic pottery and stone tools, including a piece of worked rock crystal, most likely from North Wales, and a piece of pitchstone, from the Isle of Arran in Scotland. The excavations also recovered deposits of human bone containing multiple individuals; they were most likely introduced to the monument as fleshed cadavers, and later re-arranged, mixed together, and deposited in discrete piles. The local geology is acidic, so the recovery of well-preserved human bone was not expected, and very exciting.
