 Welcome and thank you for coming to our free lunchtime lecture today. My name is Susan Greeney, and I'm stepping in today for the honorary secretary, Heather Sabir, who has two very good excuses for not being here today. One is that she's not very well, and the other is that she's got a day packed full of meetings. So I am her deputy today. So before we begin, I'd just like to tell you a little bit about the Society of Antiquaries for those who might not know. It was founded in 1707 in a pub, which is always a good place to start things, isn't it? For the purpose of investigating and debating material remains of the past found in Britain. And we're here today broadcasting online from Burlington House, where the society moved in 1874. And the society is charged with the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquaries and history of this and other countries. And today, the society remains focused on those core objectives, and as a charity committed to sharing its collections and work with the public, which we do through public lectures like this one. So before we start, and I introduced the speaker, just a little bit of housekeeping. We're delighted to be back at Burlington House delivering our lecture programme. This is a hybrid event. So we have an audience here in the room, which is lovely and online. There'll be a question session at the end. And so we encourage you to think of questions throughout. And if you're online, please type your questions into the chat function on Zoom or on YouTube, and we'll ask as many of those as possible at the end. Now, today's lecture is going to be given by Mike Pitts, Mike is an archaeologist and award-winning journalist. And really, I guess this is a bit of a boom time for Stonehenge, at least in London, I guess, because we have currently on at the British Museum just down the road. The very first exhibition that the British Museum has hosted dedicated to the topic of Stonehenge. It's on until the 17th of July, and I would hugely encourage you if you haven't yet been. I'm sure you probably all have, but if you haven't managed to go and visit it, please do. I highly recommend it. It has a whole wonderful array of objects from the Mesolithic to the Lake Bronze Age, from Orkney to Portugal to Germany. It's a really fascinating and beautiful display. And it sets Stonehenge in its wider context. Now, in probably a very clever bit of marketing and publicity thinking, Mike launched his own new book the week that that exhibition opened here in London. And the book was launched here at the Society of Antiquaries that same week. Here's the book, just in case you haven't seen it. I highly recommend it. I've nearly got to the end. I tried to finish it on the train on the way here, but I'm not quite at the end yet. How to build Stonehenge. Today, Mike's going to be talking to us about one aspect of that research and that book, which is a slightly unusual topic. Some might think of Stonehenge and the British Empire and overlooked debt. Now, throughout the book, Mike definitely kind of weaves personal insight and the work of recent researchers, but also antiquarian accounts and the accounts of colonial administrators who in various parts of the empire were collecting all kinds of activities going on, building, moving stones, moving wood. And their accounts of these had a real lasting impact on how we see Stonehenge. So over to Mike. Thank you Sue. Thank you all for coming today and welcome if you're watching this online. It is built which as Sue said was the topic of my book is not a question that has occupied many academics, but it is the topic for a visiting public and a host of independent researchers seeking their own answer to an apparently insoluble problem. Among those who brought real insights to this quest are several people who drew on their experiences in British colonial Asia, especially India. In diaries, talks, books or articles scattered across titles such as Antiquity Folklore and the Empire Forestry Journal, colonial personnel describe people working stone and moving and raising megaliths and other large objects and made explicit comparisons to the great monuments at Hathbury and Stonehenge. Who were these people? What were they doing observing engineering with their minds half in a colonial country and half in prehistoric Britain? What did they record? And what can we learn from their records about these two very different worlds? These are not really questions anyone seems to have asked before. And I don't promise comprehensive answers. This is an expedition to an unknown territory, which demands further research. I'll focus on the stories of four men and one woman. And of the people who inspired them to think about ancient megaliths in Britain. The servers range from a school inspector in 19th century India to an anthropologist whose field work changed in 1942 from filming megaliths to leading a local force against the Japanese army. The people they saw taught them ideas about engineering, ritual and social practices that heavily influenced 20th century notions of Stonehenge and now offer critical material to help us think about megalith Britain. How do I move to the next slide? It's not responding. Now these are obviously deep waters. The work I'm about to describe is now working. Right, thank you. The work I am about to describe occurred during the years of the Raj when the British crown claimed the right to rule India between 1858 and 1947. In passing, I should note that I will often use place names of the times. British observers expressed a range of perspectives and cruel patronising ignorance to nuance empathy. They use language that can be easy today to misunderstand and about which we might sometimes feel uncomfortable with good reason. It's not my task today, however, to judge, defend or take sides. I want to chronicle things that happened. We find a remarkable world of monument building that was well known to 19th century Antiquaries and early 20th century ethnographers in Britain. But then mysteriously fell off the scene. Their records have immense value today to understandings of ancient Britain and recent India. My first observer is Henry Haversham Godwin Austin, born in 1834 and died in 1923 aged 89. Some fellows may recognise the name. His father was a geologist, Robert Godwin Austin, who had contributed to the excited debate in the 1840s and 50s that culminated in proof of human artefacts associated with Ice Age animals. HH was also a geologist and a surveyor, a skill he learned at Sandhurst. He made a call to his grandfather, General Sir Henry Godwin in the Second Anglo-Bermes War in the 1850s and later joined the Trigonometrical Survey of India, mapping the Himalayas for a time K2 was known as Mount Godwin Austin. He's also known for his records of mollusks and birds and he was an early European convert to Buddhism. His small shrine in Surrey may be the first of its kind in Britain. Now I don't think Godwin Austin saw megaliths being moved or raised, but he gave two lectures at what is now the Royal Anthropological Institute in London that set the tone in 1871 and 1874. In the first, he talked about the Kasi Hills and in the second, the Naga Hills, both once in Assam now in northeast India and on the border of India and Myanmar respectively. In his very first words, he compared, and I quote, the customs of semi-civilised races in distant quarters of the world with the state of those races who dwelt in Europe in early historic times. It's a completely separate issue here about how these ideas about primitive people have affected our view of the world through our understanding of ancient Britain, but I'm not going to talk about now, but I will address later in the year or possibly next year in a follow-up talk. The Kasi Hills, he said, were among the very few who erected monolithic monuments, a fact, quote, that has not escaped the attention of different travellers, officers of the Indian service and others who published papers going back to 1792, most of which he seemed to be unimpressed by. He later found the custom of erecting stones also in the Naga Hills, apparently not noted before, in full force, and it was, he said, fast dying out in the Kasi Hills. In terms of engineering, we learn little more than a brief description of a sledge used by Kasi people to move a stone from its quarry, quote, strong curved limbs of trees roughly smoothed and rounded into a sort of cradle. Stones had apparently been wedged out of the face of a step in exposed sandstone on the side of a hill. He saw stones in the Naga Hills that have been brought up from a riverbed 600 metres below. Kasi people paid skilled workmen to cut stones, which were dressed and sometimes decorated, but otherwise labour was contributed free and under obligation by the whole community. But we get descriptions of standing stones in many years. Kasi stones are the larger, one weighing over 20 tonnes and standing over seven metres tall, taller than the tallest at Stonehenge. We hear about rituals and reasons for raising stones to honour ancestors among the Kasi's to commemorate feasts among the Naga's. And while Godwin Austin himself didn't discuss a Europe, Stonehenge was mentioned in audience comments. Colonel Lane Fox, later Augustus Pitt Rivers, deemed his Kasi talk, and I quote, one of the most important contributions to archaeology. He imagined a once continuous megalithic culture reaching from Britain across to India, so that what could now be seen in the East might be a survival of what once occurred in the West. These megaliths were frequently discussed. Major Philip Gordon, for example, the Deputy Commissioner in the District addressed them in a monograph about the Kasi's in 1907, comparing them to Stonehenge, as you may just have noticed at the bottom of the first photo. By then, only small stones were being erected and many had fallen in an earthquake in 1897. I never thought any similarities between Indian megaliths and those in Avery were coincidental, due to quote, light conditions among primitive peoples totally unconnected with one another. Charles Baron Clark, a botanist and a contemporary Godwin Austin who died in 1906 made a notable contribution, and he is my second observer. I couldn't find a picture of him. But he named after Joseph Hooker, botanist and friend of Darwin, and an illustration from Hooker's massive Himalayan journals published in 1854 of what he called the Stonehenge of Nurtyn. Clark taught maths in Calcutta, rose to inspector of schools in India, and was briefly, and was briefly superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden. Later he worked at the gardens in Cew. Genora of flowering plants and fungi celebrate his name. In 1873, introduced by the prominent antiquary and Member of Parliament, John Lubbock, a paper was read out for him at the Anthropological Institute. It describes stone monuments in the Carsey Hills in some detail. He seems to have written most of it before Godwin Austin's talks, and his observations may be the earliest important ones we have. He thought they might throw light on Stonehenge because quote, the erection of these Indian monuments is now in full practice, and he noted a proposal to send out a commission from England to survey them. I guess that never happened. Here's how a few look today. Charles Clark saw quarries in two types of sandstone. One was shaped into stones with iron tools. The other, which was full of joints, was split out with wooden wedges and left undressed. A large area of the shillong plateau, he said, was covered with scattered blocks of granite. This was too hard for iron tools. Monoliths made from it, he said, were giant flakes. He found one that rose over eight metres above the ground, removed from a block by heating it along a line with fire and pouring on cold water. To move a big stone, wooden rollers were put under it, and a large number of men pulled it with ropes. To erect it, one end was slipped into a hole while the other was tugged by ropes. To lift a stone above others for a mania, it was pulled up a bamboo ramp. It was very heavy, the ramp was made of earth. It is, of course, he added, highly probable that similar resources were used in ancient times. Such reports became common currency among antiquities. In 1888, Arthur Evans gave a talk at the Ashmolean in Oxford about Stonehenge. What he called the modern Stonehenges, which Godwin Austin had described, he said, the best living expositors of megalithic construction and the religious ideas that underlie it. Here we move on to our next observer and a key moment, Edward Herbert Stone. Born in 1848, Stonehenge was the epitome of the imagined Indian civil servant, a railway engineer. I don't think this is him. Again, I haven't been able to find a photograph of him that I'm convinced it is him, but the station is on a line he worked on and it gives us a bit of flavour. He studied maths and science at King's College London and spent most of his career working in Asia. First at Simla and Calcutta, then on the Rangoon Railway in Burma, finally as chief engineer of the East India Railway based at Hyderabab. It looks as if he played a major role in what is now the Nehru Setu railway bridge. He built the longest in India and said to be the second longest in the world. On projects like that he will have visited Stone quarries. He described one at Hyderabab. Here is granite broken up with stone hammers that he called mawls. And here is another view in the same quarry where steel hammers have been used, which one imagines many seeing the photo at the time in Britain would have read as a European order and efficiency, but look closely on the left side. Here is a native what he called stone mawl. These were used to split off a layer of granite for building use. A row of men each holding a mawl between two hands above his head stood along the stone face. At a signal from a foreman they brought down their mawls simultaneously and a crack would open up. Back in England the railway engineer found natural stone near where he lived, that could have been used in the same way. Indeed in his local museum there were some that had been used in the same way. Stonehenge nerds will know where this is going. Here are some of these stone mawls in the world of Stonehenge exhibition, which I'll echo Sue is definitely one to see if you haven't at the British Museum. These were used to dress meglis at Stonehenge. Herbert Stone retired from India on a public works pension to Bath. He moved to Devises in 1913 where he built his own house and he became obsessed with Stonehenge. He wrote articles, he gave talks with models in his book The Stones of Stonehenge, was published in 1924, three years before he died aged 79. Until my own book How to Build Stonehenge came out this year, The Stones of Stonehenge, a snappy title from Mr E.H. Stone, was much the most detailed consideration of how this monument was created. Stone watched men splitting sarsen with hammers and wedges, sarsen being the stone out of which most of the stones at Stonehenge are made. Splitting sarsen with hammers and wedges out on the downs in Wiltshire, he consulted a local monumental mason and he quoted extensively from the literature and he drew on his experiences in India as well as those of others. Meglis he said was split by hammering with stone walls aided by setting a line of fire which would be doused with cold water. They were put on wooden rollers and pulled by men on ropes. They were raised with sheer legs. To raise one stone onto another an earthen ramp was built and the stone pulled up on it. He showed these models when he was giving talks as far as I know they no longer exist. It would be nice if they were to turn up somewhere. Now all of that apart from the moles of Hyderabad and the sheer legs which he seems to have added himself perhaps from his railway experience could have come straight from Charles Clark's observations in the Cassie Hills. Indeed he quotes Martha Evans' talk noting the Cassie use of fire and breaking stone. These tropes shaped modern ideas about how Stonehenge was built. Some 30 years later Richard Atkinson wrote the book that drew Stonehenge for the second half of the 20th century. There's a good chapter on construction which, as he acknowledged, closely followed Herbert Stone's ideas. We have mawls and fire and water to split sarsen. This is one of my favourite Stonehenge illustrations drawn by Brian Hope Taylor for a 1960 National Geographic feature. We have rollers. This is a model outside the Stonehenge Visitor Centre today. Here are some film clips, if this works, from a buried treasure programme broadcast by the BBC in 1954 and featuring Richard Atkinson. In this extract, Glyn Daniel's bow tie, we have ropes and sheer legs raising stones and a ramp for lifting lintels. There is sound here if there's a way of turning it up. I'll try and give a commentary. Those are Richard Atkinson's hands and he's using sheer legs to raise a large sarsen in one of the trilithons. The little posts at the bottom of the stone on the edge of the pit are to stop the ground from breaking down and being crushed. They were observed, stakes like that were observed at Megalys in northeast India in the 19th century. They are also evidence at Stonehenge itself from excavations. Then he brings in a ramp to get the lintel onto the top of the stones. In this case, not constructed of bamboo but of wood that you could probably find on Salisbury Plain at the time. The lintel is rolled up the ramp with ropes. There we go. This is how that looks in English Heritage's current Stonehenge guidebook. There's just one significant change in the way lintels were raised. By the time he wrote his book, benefiting perhaps from years of excavation at the site, Atkinson dismissed ramps as something for which there should have been physical evidence but wasn't. Here is an extreme illustration of ramps prepared by Leslie Ashwell Wood in 1938 for a boys magazine called Modern Wonder. It reads as a booster phetrum from top left back from the right in the middle returning across the bottom from the left. Now look at these details. This is clearly derived from Herbert Stone. Here we're raising a megalith with sheer legs. We're pulling a lintel up a ramp and we're lifting the lintel into position believers ramps survived into at least the 1960s. Here's an illustration from Treasure magazine in 1963. And some fabulous scenes from a 1961 Ladybird book where we can see splitting, rolling and ramping. And these are by John Kenny. But Atkinson proposed what he called timber crib. This is from the Ministry of Works guidebook in 1959 drawn by Alan Sorrell. A lintel was rocked with levers and timbers placed under it alternatively at either end so that successive platforms could be laid beneath. A system he says urged by George Gold, an engineer who among other things was responsible for building concrete tunnels for hydroelectric project on the Machcund River in Odisha, eastern India. And here if Henry Godwin Austin's observations in the Karsey Hills, but while specialists were paid to cut stones. Labour was otherwise contributed free under obligation by all the community inspired a scene in a 1909 book by GF Scott Elliott. Scott Elliott was a well traveled botanist born in Calcutta. The science of early British life, among several books he wrote is a fantasy often comical in its absurdisms and anachronisms. There's a chapter called the building of Stonehenge. The great king offers the people the privilege of volunteering to help in building Stonehenge. The work went on for years, neither slave nor volunteer. He put that word in quotation marks, ever returned to his native village. He was surprised from a quarry with wooden wedges and dragged over giant rollers. Lintels are pulled up sloping embankments. They eat unleavened, I'm not making this up, they eat unleavened bread rather like the chapattis of India. When it's done, they drink wine. Vines were sedulously cultivated but never very successful. My Lancelot speed, who among other things illustrated Edward Bull were litans the last days of Compey. This is not a huge distance from Alan Sorrell's vision drawn for the ministry of works 50 years later. So it all seems sewn up. But civil servants continue to work in India and some of them wrote about megaliths. The next observer was more than just an officer of empire who happened to take an interest in stones. He became a well-known anthropologist. He was John Henry Hutton. Born in Yorkshire in 1855, Hutton joined the Indian Civil Service in 1909. In 1931 he became commissioner for the Census of India in which post he encouraged officials as his Royal Anthropological Institute of Bitary put it in 1968, quote, to produce descriptive accounts of the tribes and backward communities with which they were familiar. His own work was mostly in the Naga Hills. In 1936 he resigned to forge a career at the University of Cambridge, where he succeeded Thomas Hodson as professor of anthropology, who had himself spent seven years in the Indian Civil Service, partly in Assam. He was dismissed in 1901, we are told, quote, for shooting a native who fortunately recovered deep waters. Through Hutton's friendship with Henry Balfour, an archaeologist and first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, a significant collection of Naga artefacts went to Oxford. The museum also has 15 wax cylinders of songs and over two and a half thousand of Hutton's photos. He wrote many articles about Naga ethnography and two monographs both published in 1921. Now in the present context, his great gift was that he not only left a comprehensive ethnography, but people who among many other things occasionally erected megaliths. He also recorded stones being transported and raised in vivid detail. Among his photos are around 100 showing Angami Naga creating megaliths, mostly unpublished. This is an excuse to show you some more stones which are extraordinary. Hutton said that no one can remember what these ones meant. He called this a stone table. Enemy skulls, he said, were exposed on it, each one marked by a small standing stone. He grew a cactus on top of the mound. It is a large archive yet to be examined for these purposes, but we do have two articles published in 1922 and 1929, in which Hutton wrote about both the meaning of the megaliths and how they were erected. The second piece is in antiquity where it is where I would have been aimed at archaeologists. The most striking about these reports, apart from the lively descriptions, is how much creating megaliths was a social and ceremonial event, and one that at least superficially people wanted to be part of. In another 1922 article Hutton described the erection of wooden posts associated with sacrificing cattle and as feasting memorials in 15 pages. Hutton said that the stones are about actually carving and raising the posts. When it comes to stones, we see much of interest. Hutton witnessed a pair of stones being raised by an Angami naga community. The stones were male and female. The male, the larger, at six feet long and weighing a ton and a half similar to a smaller bluestone at Stonehenge. This sled from the fork of big tree was brought to the site of the selected stones. They were left on and lashed to the sleds with creepers. Day two began with ceremonies. Just a few pullers were needed for the female stone wearing everyday dress as Hutton put it there for business. The male stone got all the attention. At least 200 people were there. Men were tricked out in full gala costume. Many of the younger men were too beautifully adorned with elaborate headgear to pull very much. Every possible male of the clan had turned out including the smallest boys. At another location he said where some of the megaliths weighed 20 tons stones must have been brought from at least 10 miles away. But here the journey was only three or 400 yards along a level path. At the end was a steep short ascent where the rope broke pulling the main male stone. There were more ceremonies. Nothing happened on day three, on day four they dug the pits and so on and so on. Now what's curious about all this is that despite published articles that must have been seen by archaeologists in Britain, none of it has entered Stonehenge folklore. 19th century records of megaliths in the same districts as we saw seem to map closely to the world of Stonehenge conjured by Herbert Stone and later reworked by Richard Atkinson. But where are the fork sledges, male and female stones, men in full gala costume and elaborate headgear, ceremonies. Now I'm not suggesting those things have to be at Stonehenge but there are things that could have been discussed and just weren't. Carrying stones. In one area said Hutton smaller monoliths, particularly where the ground was rough, were carried. The stone was tied to the centre of a huge rectangular framework of poles and lifted into the air. An easy job for 60 men also. There was a lot of variety in meaning and practice and things changed over a century of observations. For example in the past Hutton said monoliths were associated with water, but now in the 1920s that connection was rapidly disappearing. Older stones were elaborately carved. Hutton compared some to chessmen and often called them phallig. In rarer cases a separate bulbous top was attached to the cylindrical stem with a mortise and tenon joint. Where is any of that. At one point Hutton mentioned the then newly discovered woodhenge, noting that in the Naga Hills, all the monolithic erections have their wooden counterpart. He saw the translation of timber into stone as achieving a permanency previously sought by means of wooden symbols. British prehistorians will know this timber stone dichotomy is a strong thread in the world of Stonehenge. I've never seen Hutton's observations brought into the debate. A particularly telling subject is how the stones were erected. At Stonehenge, men hauling on long ropes with sheer legs in this illustration depicted as the grass skirt theory drawn in 1970. 1970 lies behind almost every believable proposal or demonstration made since Herbert Stone first made his models in the 1920s. The trouble is except perhaps the atypical case of the trilithons, it would have been impossible. The reason is simple. Stonehenge was a building site, not an empty field. Now here is a plan of the monument with stones lying flat, ready to erect, coloured white and their standing positions brown around the outside. Now we all agree that the trilithons, those five inner pairs which are standing here, must have been erected before the circle. Once that's done, there's no scope for raising the circle using long ropes. You can't pull out with stones lying down on the inside as you can see in this diagram. There's no room to lay the stones down. And you can't do it the other way as this modern illustration by John Sibic demonstrates. Now Sibic has chosen the longest space for the sheer legs and pullers, a diagonal into the trilithon horseshoe. It's cramped there and in fact he's moved the trilithon stones out to make more space. But clearly you couldn't fit them in at all between the trilithon stones in the circle at the back. Hutton had an alternative. Here is part of his description of a stone going up. While the base of the stone was kept in place by long poles pushed by a number of men to prevent it slipping into the hole too soon, the other end was raised by inserting levers, raising it a fraction, wedging it, prizing it up a little more, then wedging it again. The wedges were sections of trees of gradually increasing lengths inserted between the end of the stone and the ground. When the stone was high enough, they attached a rope to it. Thus pulling from in front and prizing from behind, the longer wedges every time the stone was raised, they gradually lifted it to an incline of about 45 degrees. The stone then slid off the sled into the hole as the noose pulled the stone upright and those behind pushed with their hands with everyone forming a sort of scrum. As the stone touched the vertical, a great cry went up and then it went off to the pub. Hutton was quite moved by it all. It was as though it had touched in me some obliterated memory of a similar triumph handed down through uncomprehending generations from some neolithic progenitor of the remote past. It was a very different vision from the one conjured by Herbert Stone. We see it loosely in these images. On the left, the Great Shrylif on Stone halfway up in 1901 under William Gowlan's direction in a photo from the Wellcome Collection. On the right, another illustration by Brian Hoke Taylor. It's not just about engineering, there's an intimacy between people and stone, a slow carefulness that contrasts with the remote force of a gang hauling shear legs. And here's the thing, buried in William Gowlan's report of his raising of that stone on the left, and his accompanying excavation is a description of how Stonehenge might have been built. A stone of 20 tonnes could be carried. As he says occurred in some of the hill districts of India. It was shaped with malls. His excavation was the defining moment for these tools at Stonehenge. And he was raised with ropes, levers and timber structs, much as Hutton described. I came across other colonial British officers when I was writing my book. I came across two of, for example, a tea planter in Assam in the 1920s, who recorded the use of anti-friction stakes and stone pits in the Naga Hills, comparing them directly to such features as Neolithic Apry and Stonehenge. And Ted Garfit, he worked for the Malayan Forest Service, escaping to Sumatra by boat in 1941 before Japan invaded and joining the Royal Indian Naval Reserve. Ted Garfit quoted a 1920s report by Mr Arnott, Malayan Conservator of Forests, and drew on his own forestry experience. He proposed a permanent wooden trackway for moving stones to Stonehenge. It's an idea I have adopted for moving the Great Sarsons there. And I'd like to highlight, as an observer, Ursula Graham Bauer, distractingly dubbed the Jungle Queen or Naga Queen, for helping to organise men against Japanese soldiers in the Second World War. Her contribution to the memory of Naga culture is immense. Born in 1914, the same year as Ted Garfit, she spent nearly a decade among Naga people in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I'm cheating a bit here. She wasn't a civil servant, but her brother was working in northeast India in one way and another. It was through him that she ended up among the Naga. Here is the opening to a play about her life, performed by Joanna Perslow in 2017. Now, if we haven't got the audio, this isn't really going to tell you much, but no, okay. It's only a few seconds. It ends up with her chanting ancestors, ancestors, ancestors. Now most of the stuff I see about Ursula Graham Bauer is, shall we say, a bit weird. But when she died in 1988, she left an extraordinary record, an autobiography and like Hutton, a mass of archival material, part of which is now in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. And she recorded stones being moved. In particular, she filmed it. As well as thousands of photos, her archive includes significant colour film shot on a bell and howl camera. Some of it was digitised in a pioneering project at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s, led by Alan McFarlane, who was born in Assam, and whose parents worked on tea plantations by the Naga Hills. Because of the early date of this digitisation project, computer memory and costs were big issues. Just 30 minutes of more than six hours of film was scanned, and the online images are very low resolution. Some short clips, mostly just seconds long, can be found on the Digital Himalaya project website. I've joined a few together here to make a very short little movie. And I think you will agree, if you haven't seen this, it is quite extraordinary. People are carrying a megalith. This was not an experiment for TV. This was the creation of a monument. Okay, how do we get to play that? Is there any way we can play this video? Oh, that's a shame, we can't play it. Okay, sorry about that. It won't play. Pretty fuzzy. Now, when I wrote how to build Stonehenge, I realised for the first time quite how many significant reports made in colonial Asia had informed or could do so our understanding of Stonehenge. And equally that we possess archives about megaliths a potentially great interest of people in Asia. However, preparing this talk, I learnt something more. It seems to me that much of the 20th century vision of the monument was inspired by 19th century records of Northeast India in particular, channeled by Herbert Stone, and later perhaps unwittingly by Richard Atkinson. We see this especially in public reconstructions and television films and don't underestimate the formative power of children's books and magazines, media that archaeologists have largely ignored. That vision is still strong. There is much other relevant material, however, some of it richer and better informed, collected since then. This seems to have been almost totally overlooked by archaeologists in Britain. So Stonehenge archaeology, I think, has much to gain from a closer study of these records. But that is not all. For Asian people, some of them perhaps directly descended from individuals who feature in the records, and more generally for those whose villages or people or loosely related worlds can feel a connection with the past inhabited by those individuals. These records are also invaluable. They matter to people like Teotishi Jamia, head of the Department of History and Archaeology at Nagaland University and his colleagues, who have themselves recently noted that European megalithic research, in their words, has insufficiently recognised the extraordinary high density of and variability in recent megalithic building activities in northeastern India. As they own these records as much as we do, they are better favoured to conduct new field work and local research. Their eyes would see things we cannot. And by we, I don't just mean archaeologists, but the wider British community, which includes of course, of course people with strong links to Asia. This photo shown Nagamen on the left, raising a house post photographed by Ursula Graham Bauer. And on the right, archaeologists at the Neolithic site of Mount Pleasant in Dorset, raising a palisade post photographed by Dave Buckley. Ursula Graham Bauer befriended a Nagaman called Namkia. She always wished I could hear Namkia, she wrote, who had dragged and super intended the dragging of many stones in his time. Give his expert opinion on Stonehenge and Avebury. Empire joined colonists and colonised to create a legacy that now infalls Stonehenge. It is a common legacy, a joint project perhaps of distant societies linked by a shared interest in large stones reaching across millennia. Thank you. Fascinating. I knew the work of William Gowland and his records of what we observed in Japan, which informed his view of malls and hammer stones and dragging stones, but most of that was all new to me. So fascinating. And I think we're going to have to update some of our reconstructions in the future. So time for questions. First, we will take questions from the room if there are any. Please raise your hand. We've got a microphone that will come around. Don't be shy. Thanks. It's not really a question. I mean, it was amazing. Thank you. Fantastic. I really loved it. I'm struck by the photographs as images of labor. And I wondered whether the reason, and that made me think of the imperial gaze in bold news photographs and the imperial gaze, I think, or I hypothesize prefers to see labor that's productive. That's productively employed. And I wonder how much Hutton's images, which are more about play and estivities, were not the right sort of image of labor for that imperial gaze. And perhaps that's one of the reasons why they weren't preferred, maybe. It's really interesting. I just don't be honest. I really don't know. I think one factor for us is the impact that Richard Atkinson's book had. I think it. I think in the first half of the 20th century, and of course in the 19th century, archaeology was still very much a preserve of. Amateurs, you know, there were very few archaeological jobs. And so there was a great role for people like retired civil servants to write about and to do this sort of work. When Richard Atkinson wrote his book in the 1950s and was appearing on television, it was at a time when in Britain archaeology was working very hard to define itself to identify itself as a profession. And the whole of British prehistory was kind of divided up, as I'm sure you know, among a small handful of mostly men. And Richard was one of them, and he got Stonehenge, as it were. And so he wrote this book about Stonehenge. And I think what happened is one of the things that happens. A lot of archaeologists wanted that to be the kind of professional statement about Stonehenge. And so stopped. And these kind of colonial records were for professional archaeologists or would be professional archaeologists were in their minds tainted by associations with what they thought of as amateurs. Nine to do with the colonial issues, but simply the amateur who sort of writes green tinted in letters and things. From Hutton's perspective, I think it's really interesting that I don't feel at all that he was ever imposing his own views of labour on the way he recorded these things. And he makes a big thing, a big point of saying how many more people were on these projects and were needed in purely engineering or logistical terms, but he never says there's anything wrong with that if anything he celebrates it. He celebrates the ceremonial and the social side of work, which of course is not something that you normally associate with colonial attitudes to labour. That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, that maybe Hutton isn't presenting an image of work that is preferred, both under the empire, but also I think the professional thing is really interesting professionals by definition of paid for productive work, you know, and that's, yeah, perhaps they are, perhaps they do look amateur, those kind of playful things that Hutton was presenting. I don't know, I think it's really fascinating, though, of course, slavery, another big image of work that's important in the imperial gaze perhaps for the sorts of images that might be preferred in that period. Thanks, that was a fascinating talk. Has there been any dating of the raising of the great megaliths in India? I don't know a lot about the archaeology of this. There is active research taking place, of course, these things were being observed, you know, that they were being created in the 19th century and well into the middle of the last century, and I suspect there are still places where megaliths are still being created for similar reasons, for religious and social reasons. How far back they go is an issue I can't answer. That would be fascinating because you were saying that in the 19th century the assumption was that Asia learned from what was happening at Stonehenge that somehow the technology went east, which of course it very likely could have gone the other way. Yes, I mean, there's a huge amount of confusion and misapprehension and imposing colonial ideas on the way people were thinking about this at the time, and of course there's ways that now we wouldn't occur to us to think like this. And that does need taking apart when we look at this, this history of this material. But it doesn't, whatever people were thinking, it doesn't even validate these records as records, and I think they're immensely precious to people all around the world, not just here, and not just us thinking about Stonehenge or megaliths. And there are huge archives of this material, so much of which is not published. And I think would, you know, would be a great interest to people, not just in Britain. Yes, thank you. Thank you. You're going back to the mall stones, so were they a different type of stone, why didn't they crack themselves if they were repeatedly bashed against other rocks. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. The mall stones, were they a different type of stone, as in why didn't they break themselves if they were being repeatedly used. Exactly, they were. I mean, the malls at Stonehenge, we know more about these than we do about the malls at Hyderodav, are sarson, the same type of rock as the megaliths that they were used to dress, but it's a different type of sarson. The megaliths occur in great tabulo boulders, and the malls, that type of sarson, it's a finer sarson, and it occurs as nodules, so you can find roughly lumpy sarson that are the right size for them all, and these stones are incredibly hard, much harder than the stone in the megalith. Holly trusted us. Thank you for the great talk. I wondered if the large heads at Easter Island were at all relevant to your fascinating research. I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. Holly asks, I wondered if the large heads at Easter Island were relevant to your fascinating research. That's funny you should say that. You should ask that. Maybe you've seen the book, but I mean, one of the things I drew inspiration from for this way in which the megaliths, the big megaliths at Stonehenge were raised was an experiment that was conducted for Tor Hyderdal on Easter Island in the middle of the last century. When he asked Islanders if they could remember how these heads were raised or bodies were raised, and they said, oh yes, we can do this for you and over a few weeks, they raised a fallen statue. I think it's critical by slowly piling lumps of rock underneath it, just sticking levers and wobbling it from side to side and pushing stones under it and gradually building up a pile of rock underneath this, this head, until it was nearly upright and then giving it a yank with a rope. It's similar to the way that Hutton describes raising a megalith, although in Hutton's case they're using timber, and I think if we think of this as in terms of Stonehenge they're more likely to be using timber than rocks or earth or chalk. But that idea comes in there and this particular carving at Easter Island that Tor Hyderdal saw being raised actually weighs very much the same as one of the sars and megaliths at Stonehenge. Ian asked, Mike Parker person's work on Stonehenge has been influenced by megaliths in Madagascar, once a French colony. Does the Asian experience differs significantly from the Madagascan? That's a good question. I mean, we have other recordings of there are people today creating megalithing monuments on Madagascar. There are also people in parts of Indonesia doing the same thing. So scattered around the Indian Ocean. And there's a history of megalith construction that continues to this day. What Mike emphasized particularly on Madagascar was the social element, the partying, the sacrificing, the sheer numbers of people who are drawn to a megalithic construction project far in excess of the numbers that are actually physically needed because people want to take part. This is something we see exactly the same thing in the records for Northeast India. It's something we see on Indonesia, particularly on the island of Samba. And I'm quite sure it's something we would have seen if we were able to be there at Stonehenge. The idea of ideas about how stones were raised and moved at Stonehenge are often discussed by retired engineers in this country today, almost exclusively then. And the idea seems to be to find a way to do this using as few people as possible and as quickly as you can. And I think that and what Mike's working Madagascar, what the Northeast Indian Records, what's happening on Samba today, what they all show is that there's an alternative way of approaching it. To say, actually, these are social events, these are political events, and the part of the purpose of creating a great megalithic monument is to bring huge numbers of people together to give this opportunity for people to come together on a single project, to contribute their labour and all sorts of things happen when they do that. One of the things is they set up debt. So if you take part in raising a megalith, you have contributed to something, some social good that you expect or you hope that sometime later on you will receive something in return for. You want to be seen to take part in something that has some kind of prestige and so on. And so, and to a large extent, this type of social behaviour, I think we can imagine actually driving the impetus to create these these monuments. That's a really important thing. And it's just not something we see in the traditional archaeological vision of how these these monuments were created. I think that's probably all we've got time for. Just to let you know that the next of these lunchtime lectures will be on Tuesday, the 5th of July, online only this time at 1pm, and it will be Hope Walker speaking about Hans Ewarth and Netherlander in London and Antwerp. So all that remains is for me to thank you all for coming, both online and here at Wellington House, and thank you very much to Mike for fascinating to it.