Skeleton Challenges Ideas on Stonehenge

L O N D O N, July 14, 2000 -- A mysterious execution some 1,300 years ago could force historians to rewrite the history of Stonehenge, and even rethink their ideas about early English society, an archaeologist said today.

Mike Pitts believes the bones of a decapitated Saxon man could shatter the established theory that Stonehenge was abandoned as a relic about 1,500 BC, and show the site still held a dark power over Britons about 700 AD.

A Significant Beheading

“This man’s execution was a unique event at a unique moment in British history,” Pitts said, after carbon dating suggested the bones were from the late seventh century.

“To be important enough to be taken there for execution, the man may have been a king or someone who transgressed early law in some severe way.” Pitts said.

Stonehenge still draws thousands of visitors each year to Salisbury Plain in southwest England, and modern-day druids have fought for years for the right to worship at the stones on the summer solstice.

Analysis of the man’s bones has shown that he was about five feet five inches tall (1.62 metres), and between 30 and 40 years old. Studies on his spine suggest he was decapitated from behind, probably at an execution ceremony rather than as a sacrifice, Pitts said.

Clues of Societal Change

“At the time this man was killed, English was starting to be widely spoken, Christianity was being adopted over paganism and the roots of our modern legal ideas of right and wrong were emerging,” Pitts said.

“This body could yield vital clues about our society at that time.”

The fact that the man was taken to Stonehenge to be beheaded shows not only that the victim was not the average Saxon but that the circle was still a special place, Pitts said.

“Stonehenge must still have been a place outside the usual boundaries of life, a place associated with power and evil,” Pitts said.

The bones were unearthed in 1923 but archaeologists thought they had been destroyed in war-time bombing.

They came to light again last year when Pitts stumbled across the skull, spine and leg bones in a box in the basement of London’s Natural History Museum.