Free Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson

indoors. Along the west wall were the foundations for a wooden box bed, with another one opposite it along the east wall. Colin had studied exactly the same arrangement in the Neolithic houses in Orkney. 4 Chemical tests there had shown that the area around the bed furthest from the door had higher levels of phosphorous, which has been explained as the result of babies and small children wetting the bed.
    Against the north wall of the large house, opposite the doorway, were the foundations of a piece of wooden furniture, narrower than the beds, with two end uprights and another in the center. Thanks to the surviving stone-built Orcadian furniture, we know exactly what this was—a wooden “dresser” formed of two shelves, one on top of the other, and divided into left and right sides. Perhaps this was where the house’s special belongingswere kept, or the clothes and fabrics. At the end of the east bed, tucked into the southeast corner, was another square storage area. The ashy layer left on top of this part of the house when it was abandoned was littered with tiny pieces of broken pottery. The plaster floor in this corner was also heavily stained by ash, no doubt from countless rakings-out of the fire. Here was the kitchen area, and this box in the corner must have once contained cooking items and perhaps food supplies.
    To cap it all, we found two knee prints close by, on the south side of the fireplace, where someone had spent long hours kneeling by the fireside, tending the fire and cooking food in flat-bottomed Grooved Ware pots. I initially wondered if these knee prints might actually be footprints, made by someone squatting on their haunches as people do the world over in cultures where there are no chairs or tables—but there is no doubt that these hollows were shaped by a pair of knees. The house floor had been kept fairly clean and the only complete items we found were an arrowhead and a bone pin that had both fallen behind the furniture and escaped whatever served as a Neolithic broom. In the northwest corner of the plaster floor we found two teacup-sized holes full of the tiniest flint flakes and chippings. Perhaps these little dustbins were used to dispose of unwanted splinters that could inflict deep wounds on bare feet.

A laser scan of the floor of House 851, showing the beam-slot indentations where wooden furniture once stood around the edge of the plaster floor. To the left of the circular hearth a pair of indentations, made by someone’s knees, are also visible.

    Colin and I had seen this exact layout of furniture before, in the largest house at Skara Brae. 5 In fact, you can overlay the internal plan of Skara Brae’s House 7 on the large house at Durrington: They are exactly the same in size, shape and the positions of internal furniture. The only differences are that House 7 was built on a different orientation, its hearth—like all Orcadian hearths—was square and not round, and it had two stone boxes for storing shellfish. But the two houses are more than five hundred miles apart—how can they be so alike?
    Although Skara Brae was founded before 3000 BC, House 8 was not built until near the end of the village’s occupation five hundred years later. So the two houses are just about contemporary. Was Durrington Walls built by prehistoric Scots from the Orkney Islands? This is pretty improbable, though the people of the Stonehenge area might have been heavily influenced by fashions that originated in Orkney. It is very likely that Grooved Ware was invented in Scotland, if not in Orkney itself, and then spread southward. 6 It seems not to have been adopted in Wessex until around 2800 BC, four hundred years after it first appeared in Orkney.
    Archaeologists have recently uncovered a large settlement in Orkney at the Ness of Brodgar, with hall-like buildings and a thick boundary wall separating it from the Ring of Brodgar, Orkney’s version of Stonehenge. This complex was built before 3000 BC, so