Aubrey Burl – Stonehenge’s Breton Connections
Aubrey Burl was principal lecturer in archaeology, Hull College of Higher Education, East Riding of Yorkshire. He has published numerous books and articles on the subject of the various stone circles of the British Isles and especially on Stonehenge.
Burl has postulated two controversial theories concerning the construction of Stonehenge – one is that the bluestones were transported to the Salisbury Plain by the glaciers, as opposed to human transport from Wales; the other is that the persons who constructed Stonehenge were strongly influenced by the customs of Brittany, across the English Channel.
To quote Burl, “The array of non-British features in it suggest that Stonehenge was probably the handiwork of a powerful and intrusive aristocracy from somewhere in western France, perhaps Brittany.” (Keys, “Stonehenge is French Imposter”) In general, Keys states that comparative studies have shown that Stonehenge has very little in common with other British Neolithic sites, however it shares many features with sites in north western France, especially Brittany.
Stonehenge was not built at one time or even over a short period of time. Construction began as early as 3200 BC and continued off and on until almost 1000 BC. To put this in perspective, it is like we just abandoned a structure we began building during the Second Punic War! Burl contends that, among other things “Carvings of bronze axes and metal daggers on stones at the east and south are matched by carvings of rectangular figurines on stones at the west. Such representations are rare in the British Isles but quite common in the prehistoric tombs of Brittany, north-west France, where the axes, daggers and figurines seem to have been associated with a ghostly, weapon-bearing female guardian of the dead. The strong links between Brittany and southern Britain in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC suggest that the Stonehenge carvings belong to this same period.” (Burl, “Stonehenge”)
Burl also believes the configuration of the central trilithons is similar to that of 16 sites in Brittany, as compared to only eight or nine sites in Brittan, all in Scotland, over 500 miles to the north (Scarre, “The French Built Stonehenge?”) This same article states that Burl believes four stones at the monuments edge are aligned in such a way as to parallel a site at Crucuno in Brittany.
Chris Scarre’s article in Archaeology was quite derogatory towards Burl’s theory. He states that the Breton carvings are a thousand years older than those at Stonehenge and thus unlikely to be related. His primary problem with Burl’s theory is that there are no Breton sites comparable to Stonehenge – no trilithons or mortise-and-tenon joints. Scarre goes on to state that Burl’s theory is the most recent attempt to attribute “foreign” origins to the monument. He compares Burl with a twelfth-century Welsh cleric who claimed Merlin used magic to bring the stones from Ireland, a seventeenth-century architect who claimed it was built by the Romans and some scholars from the 1960′s who suggested it was constructed by Bronze Age Greeks!
I find this sort of nationalistic muckraking to be somewhat comical. There was no Brittan or France during the huge period of Stonehenge’s construction. To get into such trivial nationalistic spats denigrates the Neolithic/Bronze age men and women who built this structure. Their’s was not a static world, and there was no doubt considerable trade in ideas as well as goods across the channel even at this early date.
Aubrey Burl. “Stonehenge.” In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://0-www.oxfordartonline.com.lrc.cod.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T081623 (accessed January 18, 2010).
David Keys. “Stonehenge is French imposter.” In The Independent, Saturday, 1 March 1997, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/stonehenge-is-french-imposter-1270254.html (accessed January 18, 2010).
Chris Scarre. “The French Built Stonehenge?” In Archaeology V. 50 No. 4, July/August 1997, http://www.archaeology.org/9707/newsbriefs/stonehenge.html (accessed January 18, 2010).
