Note 2219 — STONEHENGE
Reading edition
Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., xxxiv, 1900, p. 197. See also xxxv, 1901, pp. 194, 219; xxxvi, 1902, pp. 131, 579; and Joseph Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times: the Bronze and Stone Ages, p. 118. As I have already remarked (p. 207, supra), the date of many English circles remains uncertain; and I admit that some may be of locally late neolithic age, though I doubt whether any were erected before the oldest bronze implement was introduced into Southern Britain. Mr. H. St. George Gray (Archaeologia, lviii, 1903, pp. 461-98) regards the well-known monument of Arbor Low, near Bakewell in Derbyshire, as belonging to ‘the period of transition from stone to bronze’. This circle has been excavated to a considerable extent. No metal was discovered, nor any pottery that could be assigned to the period of construction; but a barbed and tanged arrow-head was found on the bottom of the ditch. Arrow-heads of this kind were probably first manufactured later than the non-barbed varieties (see p. 81, supra), although many specimens of the latter were contemporary with the former. As I have already pointed out, the mere absence of bronze in a circle is not sufficient to prove that it did not belong to the Bronze Age: the excavation of Arbor Low was necessarily incomplete; and all that can be said with certainty is that it is not older than the period to which Mr. Gray ascribes it. The reasons which he gives (Man, vi, 1906, No. 101, p. 159) for presuming that the Stripple Stones in Cornwall were of the same date appear to me equally inconclusive.
[I find that Mr. Gray (Report of ... the Brit. Association, 1902 [1904], p. 465) admits that ‘Arbor Low has not been disproved to be of Early Bronze Age date’, and that his conclusion rests ‘on somewhat meagre evidence’. It has, however, been pointed out (ib., p. 466) that ‘a Bronze Age tumulus was certainly constructed out of material derived from a portion of the original structure of the earthwork enclosing the stone circle’, and therefore that ‘it is reasonable to assign the date of construction of the circle to a period not later than the early Bronze Age’.