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- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:26]
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- [02:10]
Tristan Hughes
Hey all, I hope you're doing well. I'm currently at a service station on my way down to the south coast for the History Hit summer party. So with the Ancients team and the the rest of the History Hit crew, it is a day of celebration. The team work incredibly hard to make sure that the Ancients keeps pumping out episodes twice a week every year since 2020. So incredibly grateful to them as I am to you for listening. Without you, this podcast would not be able to function. Today's episode is all about Seahenge, in my opinion, one of the most extraordinary prehistoric discoveries made in Britain in recent decades. And yet its story is feels much lesser known than other monuments such as Stonehenge. And I only learned about this monument a couple of years ago when it was a star attraction of a new exhibition at the British Museum. But it blew me away back then and so I thought we've got to dedicate an entire episode to its story. Our guest is the one and only Dr. Sue Greenie. Sue is a leading expert on the prehistoric monuments in Britain. She's been on the podcast before to talk about Stonehenge and she's back to to talk all things sea Heng. She's a wonderful speaker. This episode was so intriguing and I know you're going to absolutely love it, so let's get into it. In 1998, an extraordinary discovery was made along Holm beach in North Norfolk. The remains of 4,000 year old wooden posts. A prehistoric timber circle that had been hidden beneath the sands for millennia and was incredibly well preserved. The name Seahenge quickly stuck, linking it to the infinitely famous Stonehenge. To have a wooden monument survive for millennia is extremely rare. Seahenge is one of Britain's greatest archaeological discoveries of recent decades, and yet its story feels little known. Today we're going to address that this is the story of Sea Henge with our guest, Dr. Sue Greaney. Sue, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.
- [04:29]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Oh, thank you. It's great to be here.
- [04:31]
Tristan Hughes
Last time we did all things Stonehenge largely in the Neolithic period, didn't we? Today we're talking all about Seahenge, which feels a bit more mysterious, but it's intrigued me ever since I saw this or parts of it at the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago. My first question has to be, what exactly is Seahenge?
- [04:52]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Seahenge is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's not really a henge, a bit like Stonehenge. It's a name that was given to the site when it was discovered by the local papers and it stuck. Actually what it is is a timber circle, a very small timber circle, and it was discovered in 1998 off the north coast of Norfolk when some sands and peats had been washed away by the sea and it sort of suddenly got noticed that it was there and then it was excavated the following year. So the name Seahenge, often by archaeologists, we prefer to call it Holm 1 timber circle, which isn't quite so evocative.
- [05:27]
Tristan Hughes
So it's not a henge at all, is it? But it was found near the sea. The sea part is at least a little bit accurate.
- [05:32]
Dr. Sue Greaney
It is fairly accurate. When it was built, it would have been more inland than how it was discovered. It was actually discovered in the tidal zone, kind of eroding out of the sediments. But when it was built, it would have been slightly more inland and actually in a kind of Freshwater wet area just behind a load of sand dunes.
- [05:48]
Tristan Hughes
Can you tell us a bit about the whole discovery of Seahenge? Because it feels quite recent. It's not like Stonehenge that's been known for centuries. Seahenge is quite a recent phenomenon.
- [05:56]
Dr. Sue Greaney
That's right. It was possibly known about in the late 1980s. Local people had seen these timbers, but people thought maybe it was a shipwreck or, you know, something fairly modern. But it wasn't until 1998 when a local man, John Lorimer, managed to identify it and reported it to the local Norfolk archaeology service. And they came out to have a look and said, no, this is really significant, this is important. And it's actually quite a small timber circle. It's only six, seven meters across. So we're talking about, you know, not something enormous that would be visible for miles away, but you'd really have to stumble across it and look at it carefully to know that it was a circle.
- [06:28]
Tristan Hughes
And is it really remarkable that a timber circle, of all things, has survived down through thousands of years?
- [06:36]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, and that's why it's really exciting as a monument, because we so rarely get timbers preserved from this period of prehistory. There were really unusual conditions where very soon after it was constructed, it got covered by peat and other sediments. That meant it was in an anaerobic condition, which means that the timber's preserved, whereas every other timber monument we have from this period and earlier only survives as post holes. Sometimes we get the odd trace of a tiny bit of post in the bottom of a hole. But really, to have the actual timbers surviving and surviving above ground, as in the bit that would have been visible in prehistory, is still visible to us today, is really astonishing. And so it can tell us so much about people's prehistoric attitudes to wood and to timber and what these monuments actually look like above ground.
- [07:23]
Tristan Hughes
And how long was it after the discovery, after the reporting of this monument, did it take for research to start going on Seahenge and then figuring out things like how old this monument actually was?
- [07:36]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah. So there was an initial evaluation shortly after the discovery, which took place in late 1998, and that established it that it was definitely a prehistoric timber circle. And then a full excavation was planned the following year. It was quite controversial at the time because some people, particularly local people, wanted to keep it, but it was actively eroding out of the peat and you could see that the seawater and the inundations and the tides were just destroying the timbers. There was actually two timber circles holm One is Seahenge. There was another one, Holm, which was left in situ and it was in far worse preservation conditions and it was excavated, but it was left in situ rather than being removed. So what they did in 1998 was a rather extraordinary project where they had to excavate between the tides. So they only got about between one and four hours a day to actually go in and excavate. And they had to use several pumps to make sure that the water was removed from. If anyone's ever dug a hole on a beach, you know, that water just appears quite quickly. So it was a bit of an extraordinary project to try and do, and they had to record it as carefully as they could, looking at things like debris from the woodworking that had taken place, making sure that they rescued the timbers. And immediately those timbers were then transported to a local site called Flag Fen, which is just near Peterborough, where they had lots and lots of facilities to preserve the wood. So they put them straight into water tanks so that there was no further decay and they didn't start to dry out and crack. And then really the conservation of those timbers started from then, which was a process of drying them out slowly and using different chemicals to kind of impregnate them and preserve them, basically the same as they do with things like the Mary Rose and things. So that's when the research started and amazing amount of work was done on site by Mark Brennand, who was the archaeologist, but also by Maisie Taylor, who is a prehistoric woodworking specialist. So she was able to examine all of the timbers and look for signs of the marks where the axes had actually been used to trim the trees. And looking at the history of, you know, which trees had been used and how they'd been divided up around the circle, and all kinds of really interesting detail about how the monument had been built.
- [09:37]
Tristan Hughes
Fantastic. So many details that we can delve into. It also sounds like I'm just thinking straight away about coastal archaeological discoveries and almost a race against time, with. With the tides and so on. So my mind immediately went to, like the Haisburgh footprints or something like that, those 900,000 year old human footprints, the earliest in Britain, similar with that one. A race against the clock to ensure that they're preserved, that they're recorded. And it seems similarly with Seahenge's discovery, it was done quickly but effectively to then record all of these details.
- [10:06]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, I mean, luckily in that part of East Anglia we have a real cluster of excellent archaeologists who are used to dealing with waterlogged conditions in the Wash and round kind of the flat areas of Peterborough and things. So the experts were there, ready to jump into action. But yeah, it was definitely a team effort. And it was, as I said, it was quite controversial at the time. So there was protests at the site during the excavations because people wanted it to be kept in position.
- [10:30]
Tristan Hughes
Wow.
- [10:31]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So the archaeologists had to deal with that and of course the media. It was on the front page of one of the major newspapers and so it became, you know, a real place for reporters to go and take photographs and have interviews and things. So they were trying to deal with all that as well as do the best job they could with the archaeology.
- [10:45]
Tristan Hughes
Well, quite frankly, when a name like Seahenge emerges, it sticks. And that gets the media interested, doesn't it? Well, let's delve into that first part of the research, which is the dating of this monument. This is extraordinary to how old did they figure out was Seahenge?
- [11:01]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So Seahenge was built in the late spring or early summer of 2049 BC.
- [11:07]
Tristan Hughes
2049 BC almost a pinpoint precise date there. That is extraordinary knowledge.
- [11:14]
Dr. Sue Greaney
It is amazing, isn't it? So this is because we can use, because it's timber, we can use a technique called dendrochronology to look at the timbers and look at the tree rings. And this is a really well established technique for dating timber. By counting and looking at the different tree rings and matching that across to known date timbers, different seasons and different climate change through the years, you can actually basically map this kind of growth of trees. And so they were able to do that for these particular trees. And of course, they had so many posts and also a central large trunk that they were able to get a complete sequence and really precisely date the timbers.
- [11:47]
Tristan Hughes
When we think of something like Stonehenge or the Ring of Brodka or other great monuments from that time period or a bit earlier, you see people saying, oh, this would have taken years to build. But if you've got a particular date for Woodhenge, do we think then that it took much less time to build a timber circle like that?
- [12:04]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, it's a much, much smaller and simpler monument. There's some estimates in the publications about how many people it would have taken, perhaps 50 people or so, working for a couple of weeks. You know, it's really a very short term thing. And unlike monuments like Stonehenge, for example, it was built in one go, one phase, and then not altered. So unlike other monuments where we see phases of change and lots of different building projects coming and altering and Changing and revisiting sites over millennia. Sometimes Seahenge is a kind of snapshot, one off monument built and then very quickly covered.
- [12:36]
Tristan Hughes
So 2049 B.C. is that correct, Sue?
- [12:39]
Dr. Sue Greaney
That's right, yeah.
- [12:40]
Tristan Hughes
So about 4,000 years ago it was built. Can you set the scene of what Britain looks like at that time? What should we be imagining with all of these monuments at that time and the monumental world that Seahenge sits in?
- [12:54]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So that particular date is within what we call the Early Bronze Age. So this is a period of time when people have got metal tools. So some of the tools that were used to build the monument were bronze axes, which is kind of the bronze is the go to metal of this period, obviously being the Bronze Age. The Early Bronze Age, though, is actually really similar to the period before that, the Late Neolithic period, the Late Stone Age, in terms of how people are living and their lifestyles at this time. People are generally thought in this period to be relatively mobile farmers and pastoralists. So they have herds of cattle, herds of pigs, sheep and goats. And evidence for settlements in this period is really quite rare. So we think that people are still probably moving on a seasonal basis, perhaps moving between different settlements, relatively ephemeral settlements, so things that don't leave much of a trace behind. This is in contrast to the Middle Bronze Age period, which comes a little bit later, when people. We do start seeing the first roundhouses and the first kind of permanent settlements and farms and field systems and things. So in this early Bronze Age people, in terms of monuments, people are building round barrows. I'm sure lots of listeners will be familiar with, with the round barrows that you can see scattered across quite large bits of Britain. And this is the go to monument for this period, really. So that's how they're burying their dead.
- [14:09]
Tristan Hughes
And, sorry, sue, could you explain quickly what a round barrow is for those who might not know what actually a round barrow is?
- [14:14]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So, in the Early Bronze Age, people are building round barrows, which are relatively small mounds of earth, covering sometimes one burial, covering sometimes multiple burials, and often surrounded by a ditch. They come in different forms, bell barrows and bowlbarrows, but in essence, they are mounds under which people are buried. And this is a tradition that comes into Britain at the start of the Early Bronze Age, so around about 2400 BC, perhaps 400 years or so before Seahenge gets constructed. And at that time we have a big shift in what happens in Britain. So although the lifestyles stay the same and the kind of the farming and the livestock and the mobility stays quite similar. We have new people coming into Britain at that time from the continent. So this is what often get called the Beaker People or the Beaker Folk. And these people come into Britain at that time with the first metals, with different types of pottery, with probably new ideas about burial and religion, language, all those kind of things. And so what you're seeing in terms of the people who built seahenge is about 400 years after that period of immigration, when people are much more connected with the continent and they are making things like beaker pottery and they're burying their dead under round barrows. And by that point, about 2000 BC, people are fairly well integrated, that immigration has happened. The people are kind of quite a mixed population and fairly settled in terms of kind of their lifestyle.
- [15:33]
Tristan Hughes
And so in regards to the monumentality. So you have the round barrows, you have these new people who have come in a few centuries before Seahenge is built. The landscape of Britain at that time, would there have still been stone circles and timber circles in use? Because normally you'd think with stone and timber circles, you think the Neolithic, you think the end of the Stone Age, but of course, this is the early Bronze Age. But would people going around the UK at that time, would timber circles, stone circles still be very recognisable points in the landscape?
- [16:03]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Certainly, yes. So in the Late Neolithic period in particular, there was a whole load of stone and earth and timber monuments constructed across much of Britain, and these would have been still known about and still present in the landscape. Timber circles were built in that period as well. So particularly large timber circles and also things we call palisaded enclosures, which are great big areas of land surrounded by thousands of posts, which we can talk about a bit later. So, yes, timber monuments and stone monuments would have been present and known about in the landscape. The interesting thing about timber monuments is, of course, they don't last. So if you set up a timber post, even if it's a substantial timber post, it's not going to last more than, say, 100 years or so. So what you might have had by this period is a whole series of timbers, slightly decaying monuments, if you ever go. And on the Isle of Arran a few years ago, they built a replica timber circle and then left it. And it's really interesting to go there and see it kind of part rotten, part fallen down, because that's what might have been quite familiar to people in the early Bronze Age, as these monuments that had been once really spectacular and the center of kind of ritual activities actually now maybe a bit more abandoned and sort of decaying in the landscape.
- [17:09]
Tristan Hughes
I guess that goes back to what we were saying at the beginning with how extraordinary Sea Henge is, is that you still have the timber Post Surv this episode is sponsored by Rocket Money with prices going up on just about everything lately, being smart with your money isn't just a good idea, it's essential. But managing subscriptions, tracking spending and cutting costs can feel overwhelming. Lucky for you, Rocket Money takes the guesswork out of it so you can easily make smart decisions. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bill so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money's dashboard gives you a clear view of your expenses across all of your accounts, so you can easily create a personalized budget with custom categories to help keep your spending on track. It allows you to see your monthly spending trends in each category so you know exactly where your money is going. Plus, you can get alerts if bills increase in price, there's unusual spending activity, or if you're close to going over budget, help pay off bills, put away money for a house, or just build your savings. Rocket Money makes it easy. Rocket Money is over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in cancelled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features. Why not be one of them? Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com the Ancients today that's RocketMoney.com the Ancients RocketMoney.com the Ancients.
- [19:00]
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- [20:12]
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- [20:53]
Tristan Hughes
Foreign how many examples of timber circles there were in Britain at that time? Is it quite a difficult task sometimes finding those post holes in the soil and trying to identify the remains of where a timber post once stood?
- [21:10]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, we do have quite a few examples of timber circles, but you're right, you have to find those through excavation, through geophysical survey. They obviously don't survive above ground anymore. And so we know that people built large timber circles and timber monuments all the way through the Neolithic period. But by the early Bronze Age a lot of the timber monuments are actually associated with burials. So these round barrows which are associated with burials, often if surveys are done, they show that there is a ring of pits underneath. So round barrows can be kind of multi phase in that the first burial might have been just surrounded by a simple timber posts and then they added a mound later. So what we're seeing is that small timber circles like Seahenge were often associated with with burials and were part of the kind of sequence at round barrows.
- [21:55]
Tristan Hughes
That's a nice hint to where we'll get to later on in the chat when we talk all about its purpose. If we go back specifically to Seahenge now, Susan, can you also give us a sense, you hinted at it earlier as well, of what the landscape around the area of Seahenge in East Anglia, in Norfolk would have looked like some 4,000 years ago when it is built.
- [22:16]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So they did lots and lots of environmental work when they did the excavation. So they looked at things like pollen, they looked at the sediments, they looked at survival of things like beetles and all kinds of other. Yeah, really amazing kind of insects and things that get preserved in the sediments and from that they were able to tell that Seahenge had been constructed in basically a sort of freshwater sort of boggy area not that far from the coast, but not right on the coast because of course the Norfolk coastline has changed since the Bronze Age and has become more inundated. And that means that it was built on relatively dryish land, but perhaps just at the interface where the dry land was becoming wet. And what we know is that nearby there was quite a lot of oak woodland. And so the timbers that were actually used to construct the circle were probably from the very local area.
- [23:03]
Tristan Hughes
Well, let's now explore those timbers themselves, sue, and explore the monument itself. So it feels like Seahenge is made of two particular parts, the outer ring and then the centre. It's almost like we did with Stonehenge, where we talked about the various parts of the monument in our church. Let's start with the outer ring, first of all. Can you tell us about that?
- [23:22]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So the outer ring is 55 timber posts. Originally, they would have perhaps been 2 to 3 meters tall, but when they were actually excavated, they are up to a meter in length, still surviving. And basically these are trimmed smallish trees. So they are perhaps 50 to 100 years old or something like that. All oak. The whole monument is built of oak. And they were set in a. In a circle. It's actually a very sort of slightly oval shape. It's about 6 meters by 7 meters. And these were set very close to each other, so almost forming a complete continuous fence line. And they were set up with the bark still on the trees and they were split posts. So they were sort of half moon shaped posts and they were set up with their bark on the outside of the circle. So if you would look at the monument, it would almost be like looking at an enormous tree because they were set up very close together, access was provided. One of the posts was a little fork. It was a forked branch, so a tree that had forked into. And you could have stepped between those two to get access to the inner part of the circle. Really interestingly, the analysis they did of these posts afterwards showed that several of them had come from the same trees. They think maybe 15 to 20 trees were used to. To build it. And some of the timber posts were the same timber, the same tree as the one that ended up in the middle, which we'll talk about in a minute. So it's a really interesting thing in that some archaeologists have suggested that this was almost like setting up a recreation of a tree with the bark on the inside and the bark on the outside and the bare wood on the inside. And that stepping into this circle would have been a bit like stepping into a tree, which is quite fun.
- [24:59]
Tristan Hughes
And is there a ditch or anything outside of this Ring of trees or anything like that, like with Stonehenge?
- [25:04]
Dr. Sue Greaney
No, they carefully looked for evidence of a ditch when they did the excavations, or a bank or anything. It didn't find any evidence for that. So it looks like it was simply just freestanding. They're just digging holes down to take the posts and then setting them upright.
- [25:16]
Tristan Hughes
It's also so interesting because mentioned Stonehenge there, that there's always the talk about where particular stones came from and people now being able to kind of pinpoint particular locations where the stones were sourced. If you're saying that the wood for these timbers seem to have been largely from the same trees, or only. Only a few trees, is it different with dendrochenology? Can we not pinpoint exactly which, you know, prehistoric forest they came from, or how far away they came from? Or is that just information we can't ascertain?
- [25:45]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, we. Unfortunately, there's no techniques for doing that. But handily, these particular trees were noted to be really gnarled and quite kind of irregular in shape. And the idea is actually that these trees were being affected by seawater. So these trees were not necessarily the healthiest oak trees, but they had been basically kind of had their growth stunted and a bit more kind of affected by sea. So the point when they were constructing this timber circle was probably one of landscape change, was probably one where the coast was changing and that established oak woodlands were perhaps being inundated for the first time or in the lifetime of the people that were building the monument. And that's one idea again, about, you know, are they building this in response to that change? And so that's why we think the trees came from very locally, because they've got this effect which suggests that they're being impacted by seawater.
- [26:37]
Tristan Hughes
So this is my favourite part of the whole story of Seahenge, which is if we now go to the center of the monument and this bizarre piece of timber right in the middle. Sue, what is this?
- [26:49]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So really interestingly, what they put into the middle of this timber circle was an upside down tree. So they took the base of a tree with all the roots and things. So we think this is a tree that had fallen over or perhaps been felled by pulling it down. So perhaps in a storm or something like that, and they put it upside down in a great big pit in the middle. So what you would have seen stepping into that space would have been a tangle of roots and basically the bit of a tree that you never normally see, which is the bit that would have been below ground this is really exciting because if we just found this as a normal archaeology site, we'd have just found a big pit. We wouldn't have been able to know that they were putting a tree upside down in the middle of a timber circle. So it's really evocative and it really kind of makes you think, well, why on earth were they doing that? Why did they invert this tree? It's a very odd thing to do. And we can begin to speculate about why they might have done that and why this particular tree. But, yeah, that's what they set up in the middle.
- [27:44]
Tristan Hughes
And I'm trying to picture it as well, like roots going everywhere, like curly hair just looking really bizarre and weird, you know, to people who. Many people who may well not have seen anything like that before. The big question then, sue, what are some of the theories? Why did they decide to put an upside down tree, roots and all, in the center of this timber circle?
- [28:02]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Well, it's a really difficult question to answer because we can't really get into the mindsets of somebody in the Bronze Age. But if you think about it being an inversion of a tree, you're basically sort of thinking about the underworld and thinking about below ground. So perhaps it was some way of kind of communicating with the underworld or representing the underworld. People would have seen these kind of roots. Quite commonly, when trees blow over in a forest, you get what we call a tree throw, which is when trees fall over and they bring up lots of material and you can see all the roots. But to have that completely upside down suggests that the rest of the tree almost is below ground and that you've completely inverted your world. So perhaps it's to do with communication with underworld spirits, or perhaps it's to do with rituals that relate to the trees themselves. So trees are amazing metaphors even in the modern world. You know, about growth, about maturation. Oak trees in particular, you know, they last 600, 700 years easily, so they far outlast a human lifetime. So trees are, like, really significant for prehistoric people. I mean, people have even suggested that the Stone Age, for example, should be called the Wood Age, just because wood and managing woodland and using wood in lots of different ways for fuel, for tools, for building structures, would have been an everyday thing. You would have been highly kind of attuned to the properties of trees, the properties of different species of trees and what their capabilities were. So perhaps this was a known tree, perhaps this was a landmark tree. Often trees mark places or mark root ways. So perhaps this was a special tree. That was particularly important to the people of this area. Perhaps it was felled in a storm, perhaps, you know, it was taken down deliberately. But maybe that tree, you know, was known and was inverted for some. Some ritual purpose. But it is quite difficult to know exactly why it was done.
- [29:56]
Tristan Hughes
Might start having to position people to recall the Stone Age to the Stone Wood and Bone Age. But maybe that doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way. But when we get to the Iron Age, I remember, you know, certain Roman writers, I think Julius Caesar does as well, talks about, when exploring, like Iron Age Britons and so on, their love of the forests, sacred groves and so on, the importance of nature and natural areas for them and their beliefs. Do we think there could have been a similar idea with these early Bronze Age people? Do we know what Bronze Age people thought about trees? I never thought I'd say that statement, that question, but here we go.
- [30:34]
Dr. Sue Greaney
In archaeology at the moment, there's people who really keen on the idea that people in prehistory wouldn't have known the difference or recognized the difference between nature and culture in the same way that we do, and that actually trees would have been seen as living beings to be, you know, negotiated with or perhaps placated. We know that, for example, some Native American tribes, before they felled a tree, they would make offerings to it. They would, you know, ensure that things were done in the correct way. That because, you know, taking things from the environment was about giving back as well as just exploiting things. So it's quite possible that people had really interesting and direct relationships with trees and that they would have seen trees as living beings that had to be involved in social relations in some way or another. So we can't know that for sure. But certainly some of the activities that people did throughout the prehistoric people in relation to trees may suggest that. So, for example, in archaeology, we often find tree throws, so basically the great big pits where a tree has fallen over. And then often things get deposited in those hollows. So we have examples, for example, from the Avebury landscape, where an aurochs bone was stuck upright into a tree throw hollow. We have other examples where lots of bits of pottery and things get deposited in these places. So, you know, people are making offerings potentially to the underworld or to the tree itself or something in relation to the forest. And so there's a real suggestion that people would have had a much more intimate relationship with woodland and with trees than what we have now in the modern world.
- [32:01]
Tristan Hughes
And so what do we think then, if it is the Bronze Age, if we believe trees are very important to these people, if Seahenge, you know, it isn't as grand as one of those earlier monuments like Stonehenge, but evidently still important. What do we think was then the purpose or purposes of the timber circle, the Seahenge?
- [32:23]
Dr. Sue Greaney
So the original excavators suggested that potentially it was somewhere that was used for burial. And in fact, they suggested that the upturned tree, the roots, could have been a platform on which excarnation could have happened. So excarnation being when you lay out the dead body, and it can be a place where it decays or gets picked by, clean by birds and things, that it may have been a burial monument or a monument somehow involved in the funerary activity. But we don't actually have any direct evidence for that. There's no human bones from the site. You know, we don't have any of the evidence that that was taking place. But there is a suggestion that maybe this is to do with life and death. And it's the idea of the tree being a metaphor for kind of life and death. And we know that in this period, people were using wooden coffins in some of the brown barrows elsewhere in the country. People were hollowing out logs to put their dead into. And so trees, or perhaps even the interior of trees, may have been seen as a place where people went when they died or where they came from before birth. And so there's this idea that, you know, timbers and trees may have been involved in some sort of life and death rituals. The other thing, of course, is timber decays visibly over time. This is not necessarily a monument that was built to last forever and ever. They knew it would have eventually decayed. In fact, they probably would be surprised that it survived thousands of years. But that decay process, you know, was an obvious observable phenomena where people could visit the site and see that it had been, you know, beginning to decay. The posts would have fallen over, that rotting, and animals and things like that would have destroyed the monument. So maybe that was also part of it. The visible decay of the monument was also kind of part of what it was about. But, yeah, we can't really say that much more than that. Interestingly, the other timber circle, Holm 2, had a slightly different setup in the middle. So it was another oval, slightly larger of timbers, timber posts, but within the middle were two sort of logs almost set in parallel to each other, which looked like they would have been. They had notches cut into them as if they were going to support something in the Middle and people have suggested maybe that was a coffin or a bia or something related to somebody being placed there for burial. Again, though, we don't have that surviving, so it's only speculation. But it's quite possible that even if these weren't for burial or for ex carnation or something similar, that they were related to those funerary rituals in some way.
- [34:41]
Tristan Hughes
It's interesting that we focused on, you know, the funeral and burial aspect with this monument and yet with other earlier monuments. Once again, I go to Stonehenge because it's the most famous one, but we were recently at Newgrange Passage tomb and did Macel a couple of years ago. Up in Orkney. There's always talk about a link to the solstice or a solstice alignment. That idea of the astronomical interests of these early farmers. Could there be any potential astronomical link with Seahenge?
- [35:09]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, there is some indications that an alignment to the solstice was important. So that forked trunk that I mentioned, which was kind of the entrance into the timber circle, was on the southwest side of the circle and directly opposite there was one post that was with its bark facing inwards rather than outwards like all the others, and that was to the northeast, and those would indicate the solstice directions. So the sort of summer sunrise in the middle of June and the midwinter sunset. So that orientation is quite common. That general orientation is often seen in timber monuments from the late Neolithic. So it's sort of no surprise that there's a hint of it here at Seahenge as well. It's such a small monument, though, it's only six metres across, that you're not talking about a kind of long an alignment through which you could actually precisely see on observe solstice events. So it's probably much more what we see more generally with monuments in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, which is that they're sort of aligning their monument to their cosmos, to their key directions. But it's not a precise observation monument. It's more about just making sure that it fits and it's in the right way. Interestingly, just on either side of that one post on the northeast side, some of the timbers there were actually the timbers that had come from the central tree and they were squared off slightly differently to the other posts. Instead of being split, they were actually kind of cut down to be large sort of timber square posts. So that suggests that also that part of the monument was significant and they were marking that out in some detail to refer to the central tree being in that direction. So yeah, there's a lot of detail in just looking at the timbers and working out which trees they come from. That kind of tells us that that difference, that astronomical alignment might have been important.
- [36:56]
Tristan Hughes
Being a bit spiritual here, but bear with me in this. But if you were going into the monument itself, past the ring of timber posts with the bark pointing outwards, I know that with some stone circles, for instance, when I went to see the Ring of Brodgar, the massive stone circle up on the Orkney mainland, how there may well be a sense that you were almost going from, I don't want to say one realm to the other, but going almost into a closed off space. When you entered past the ring of stones, do you think there could be something similar with the bark pointing outwards and the inverted tree in the middle? Could there be this idea that you were walking, if you walked past the outer ring, you were walking into almost a different world in their mindset?
- [37:40]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, definitely, I think so. Particularly because the posts were so close set, you couldn't have seen out and people couldn't have seen in. So it would have been a very enclosed space. And in fact the people who visited them were part of the excavation did say it had a particular feel to it. It was very kind of enclosed. You couldn't hear, it was some muffled sounds from outside and that kind of thing. So it was very much a different world, but also a really small world. I think it's only six meters across. You've got this great big oak tree upside down in the middle of it. You'd have had to kind of edge round, you know, there wouldn't have been room for that many people inside this space. It's a very intimate space. So whether that meant that only certain people could go in, or perhaps it was only a certain family that was involved, you know, in the construction and the use of it. So it's a much more, I guess, intimate or small scale monument than a lot of the ones that we're more familiar with.
- [38:28]
Tristan Hughes
Does that affect the acoustics at all as well? If all the timber posts are close together, surrounded, if you're inside. I know, once again, it's quite difficult to envisage. Well, maybe not, but the fact that you've only got one timber circle surviving with the posts, would that have affected the acoustics when you went inside too?
- [38:45]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. It probably did. And in fact, I'm working at the moment with some acoustic specialists to think about Woodhenge, which is another timber circle from prehistory which using computer modelling and digital model to recreate the timbers, what that would have done to the acoustic. So it's certainly a research question that would be really interesting and in fact for Seahenge, because we have got the surviving timbers, we actually could perhaps do some modeling on that, but I don't think that's ever been done yet. So research question for the future.
- [39:18]
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- [40:44]
Tristan Hughes
So the people themselves. Do we know much about the community that built seahenge some 4,000 years ago?
- [40:51]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Not really. We know it was a small group, an estimate of perhaps 50 people or so involved in kind of, there's quite a lot of work involved. Even though it's a small monument, felling the trees, cutting them up, we know that quite a lot of them had trimmed bases. So they weren't just trick cutting them and getting a kind of classic V shape that you get when you fell a tree with an axe. They were trimming them quite well. And so there was a fair amount of effort involved. We think they're probably local. They were obviously well aware of the changes to the coastline and were building these monuments probably in relate in, you know, in reaction perhaps to what was happening to their changing landscape. You know, there's an idea that perhaps they were building these monuments to kind of placate the gods and say, no, we don't want to lose our landscape or we don't want to lose this lovely forest that's disappearing into the sea. Who knows? But we know that there are some other Early Bronze Age round barrows very close by, just inland. So there were certainly communities that were there and burying their dead in round barrows in the local area. But this is the. The timber monuments are slightly different, being in their location in the coast and also them being not barrows necessarily, but these timber structures.
- [41:55]
Tristan Hughes
So we know that they were using metal axes by this time, which feels unusual when we're thinking of timber circles and stone circles. I know you mentioned that. Of course, we're in the Bronze Age now, but surely it takes some time for metalworking to pass down to some of these communities. But we know for a fact that this community had access to bronze or copper. I don't know. Please explain at that time to create this monument.
- [42:17]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah. So metalworking arrives in Britain around about 2400 BC, and the first metal artifacts are copper and gold. And they're very much decorative. You know, they're small artefacts that get placed into burials, like little earrings and hair tresses and copper axes, which wouldn't have actually been that much use. You know, if copper is very soft, it wouldn't have been particularly useful compared to the stone axes that they were used to using for things like felling trees. But by this period, around about 2200 BC, people perfect the art of making really good bronze, and they're combining copper with tin from places like Cornwall. And, in fact, Britain is really at the forefront of bronze production at that point, and it goes sort of then back across Europe in a wave of kind of innovation. So by 2000 BC, ish, which is when Seahenge is constructed, they have really perfected making very, very good tools out of bronze, and they really stopped using stone axes at all. You know, they were still using flint to make small artefacts, small scrapers and arrowheads and things, but for axes, they'd switched entirely to bronze.
- [43:21]
Tristan Hughes
Because even if the trees that they use, you know, there's examples of some sea rot, you would still need a bronze axe rather than a copper axe to fell a mighty oak tree or something like that.
- [43:29]
Dr. Sue Greaney
It's much more efficient and much quicker. Yeah. The tools are sharper and easier to sharpen themselves.
- [43:36]
Tristan Hughes
And also to recap what you said there as well, sue, so although there is another timber circle right next to Seahenge, we don't think that this was part of a larger monumental complex like maybe what we see near Stonehenge. And maybe we shouldn't be imagining timber circles aligning the East Anglian coastline of today that are yet to be discovered.
- [43:54]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yes, certainly. It's not part of A larger complex of monuments, as far as we know. I suspect there were a lot more timber monuments than we know about, obviously, just because of the difficulties of them disappearing. So we've got a kind of fairly unique situation here where they've survived and then been revealed by erosion. So, yeah, it's. But they don't seem to be part of, as we say, kind of monument complexes elsewhere, where you get lots and lots of monuments being built over a long period of time.
- [44:17]
Tristan Hughes
And so if Seahenge is constructed some 4,000 years ago, but right at the end of this age of great timber and stone circles, what do we think happens to it? If, you know, wood does decay in the grand scheme of things, not very long after it's built.
- [44:31]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah. So in these examples, if they'd be on dry land, it may be that people would have come back to them and buried somebody there, erected a barrow over the top of them, you know, by mounding up the earth over the timbers once they decayed, perhaps, you know, that would be a kind of typical sequence we might see. But here, quite unusually, there was. Very quickly the area was inundated with seawater, with sediments and with peats, which meant that the timbers got preserved. So it's around about this time that really people stopped building great big monuments. And in fact, these are typical of this building period in that they're small scale, they're much more kind of community scale monuments rather than great big henges and great big stone circles that perhaps people were used to building in the previous period in the late Neolithic. So this is in a way typical of that much smaller scale focus on monuments being a family or a small community endeavour, rather than large communal projects.
- [45:25]
Tristan Hughes
Have there been any discoveries of tools or bones or anything within Seahenge, within its vicinity, within its area? Or was it just the timber posts that have survived? And, of course, the inverted tree stump in the middle?
- [45:36]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah. So there wasn't that much found. When they excavated, they found quite a few wood chips, so they could see where the timbers had actually been shaped and worked. They found some pottery from the Early Bronze Age, just a few sherds, really. Interestingly, in the base of the tree trunk. Should have said this before, but the tree trunk had actually got two holes bored into it to facilitate pulling it along to drag it from wherever it was growing.
- [46:01]
Tristan Hughes
Wow.
- [46:02]
Dr. Sue Greaney
And within those holes was preserved two considerable lengths of honeysuckle rope. So rope that had been made by twisting together strands of honeysuckle and which had been used to drag the tree into position. So again, a really interesting preservation of something organic that we wouldn't normally see, but shows the kind of technologies and things that people were using at that time. But other than that, it is quite an empty monument. It doesn't seem to have been a place where people were depositing animal bones or human bones particularly. It's probably something that was only in use for a very short period of time anyway. But it seems to be a place not for deposition of offerings or anything like that, but very much about just the tree and that experience of the life and death of the tree.
- [46:41]
Tristan Hughes
I'm so glad you mentioned the rope there, because, of course that's the other big thing that we need to think about, isn't it? It's how they transported the big planks of wood, the big trunks, to the place where they ultimately set up the monuments, like we do with the stone circles. That's extraordinary that you have that organic rope material surviving as well.
- [46:58]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah. And actually East Anglia is great for this kind of preservation, because there's been a site, you've probably heard of, a Must farm, not far from Peterborough, where excavations have taken place over the last few years. And there, because the houses that these are middle Bronze Age, so slightly later than Seahenge because of the way that they burnt down and then basically landed in water, they've been preserved and we've got amazing preservation there. Wooden tools, you know, wooden bowls, textiles, amazingly fine textiles that people are making out of things like nettle and hemp. Just really shows you the kind of missing majority of archaeologically what we miss, really, from most of our sites, where all of these organic materials don't survive.
- [47:38]
Tristan Hughes
I did not realise that Peterborough was such a rich area of Bronze Age archaeology. But, you know, I must go and visit Mustfarm in the future because that's another of those extraordinary sites.
- [47:46]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Yeah, Go to Flag Fen and see. I think Mustfarm itself is now under a quarry, so you can't visit the site itself, but the actual artifacts and things are on display, I'm sure, in the Peterborough Museum, things like that.
- [47:57]
Tristan Hughes
Given that it was only discovered some 20 years ago, and given how much research has been done, the fact we have the timber posts themselves surviving, do you think it's almost inevitable that with more scientific advancements, with more research, that we can learn even more about this monument and how it fitted into that Bronze Age world 4000 years ago?
- [48:15]
Dr. Sue Greaney
I think there's certainly a growing awareness that timber monuments were really significant. Lots and lots of kind of antiquarian research has focused on the stone monuments because they survive. But actually, we can't really understand the stone monuments, including Stonehenge, unless we know about timber monuments, too. A lot of my research focuses on timber monuments from the Late Neolithic period, and that's doing things like really detailed radiocarbon dating to establish the chronologies of these monuments. And the things that they're building out of timber in that period are absolutely extraordinary. Great big enclosures with 1,400 posts, huge, great big tree trunks used to set up and create monuments, which are just as much effort and just as much energy and resources needed as for a stone monument. But because they don't survive above ground, we haven't really been focusing our research in that area. So it's certainly somewhere that there's much more research to be done. And in terms of the techniques that we're able to use, things like dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and really detailed analysis, careful analysis of things like tool marks and. And how these timbers were used and shaped is certainly an ongoing area of research, particularly for sites like Must Farm. It's just extraordinary to see how much people understood about the different qualities of different species of wood, how they were managing woodland, how they were just real experts in using wood and timber to its full extent.
- [49:38]
Tristan Hughes
I'm never a huge fan of using the word unique, but I guess in terms of the fact that it has survived and its preservation does make Seahenge feel that way in regards that, you know, that you do have the timber post surviving. Sue, do you think there's any chance that we might see future Seahenge equivalents emerging, being discovered in the future? Could there be other ones within coastal areas today, below the sand, that have survived because of that? Any chance of that, do we think?
- [50:06]
Dr. Sue Greaney
I think so, yeah. Certainly. Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts are eroding at some rates. And there's also other areas that Severn Estuary, for example, south coast of Wales, where we've got extraordinary preservations of things like mesolithic fish traps and other activities that were kind of happening on the coastline. So I wouldn't be surprised to see other small timber monuments like this emerge at some point in the future from one of those coastlines and things like the Haisburgh footprints that you mentioned early on. You know, a lot of these coastal peats and intertidal wetlands and things do preserve extraordinary evidence from, you know, millennia ago in terms of the human occupation of Britain, but also relatively recent. Interesting timber things, wooden boats, for example. You mentioned you'd done a program about Newgrange. There was a log boat found recently in the Boyne, which had been preserved in the river. Not on the coast necessarily, but a boat from the same period that Newgrange was constructed, which again was a chance discovery. So there's certainly lots more preserved wood out there for us to find in future.
- [51:05]
Tristan Hughes
Sue, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Lovely to have you back on the podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to mention about Seahenge before we completely wrap up?
- [51:13]
Dr. Sue Greaney
No, just that if you want to see Seahenge, it's on display in the Lynn Museum in King's Lynn. So if you want to go and have a look at the timbers yourself, then yeah, go and visit.
- [51:22]
Tristan Hughes
I can't believe I forgot that. Absolutely great to mention that as well, Sue. It just goes to me to say what a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.
- [51:31]
Dr. Sue Greaney
Thank you.
- [51:35]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there you go. There was Dr. Sue Greenie talking through the extraordinary story of Sea Henge. I hope you enjoyed this episode, shining a light on what I think is one of the most extraordinary prehistoric monuments ever discovered in Britain. Thank you for listening to the episode. Please follow the Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you leave us a rating as well. Well, we'd really appreciate that. If you also want to hear about my thoughts what I thought about that episode, well I'm starting to put up videos on my sub stack and the first video is my reaction to this episode all about Sea Henge. So if you want to hear my thoughts a bit more about what I thought about the episode, then head over to Substack and you can see that there. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe now. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.
- [52:43]
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