Let’s get things done together, like the builders of Stonehenge did

If somebody said to you, “take the summer off, come down to Wiltshire with everyone else you know, and let’s build a stone circle together”, would you do that? For me, that’s a tempting offer, but I’m a big fan of stone circles. I share my megalithic enthusiasm with Dr Susan Greaney, lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter, and a specialist in prehistoric monuments.

When I asked Sue what her Life Lesson from History is, she suggested that we could learn a lot from the communal enterprise of the Neolithic stone circle builders. Commentators often opine that one of the things that we lack today is a sense of community. It seems clear that in the Neolithic period in Britain, community was at the forefront of society, or else they would never have been able to construct the enormous monumental structures that we can still see in the landscape today. So how did they do it?

The monument-building frenzy

Sue describes the main period when Stonehenge was built (the third millennium BC) as a time of intense activity: “There’s a frenzy of monument building that happens all across Britain and Ireland at that time.” That frenzy must have brought people together: “These are monuments built of stone, built of timber, built of earth, and they often cluster together in what we call monument complexes - places in the country where they attract more and more monuments in one location. And it seems to be where people were gathering in large numbers to carry out these building projects, but also to take part in feasts and rituals that were related to the monuments.”

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I’ve visited lots of these places. I’ve been wowed by the scale of Stonehenge; awed at the avenue of Avebury; been boggled by Silbury Hill; and marvelled at the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar. It's hard not to impressed by the sheer size of these centres of monumentality: “These are extraordinary projects. I can only compare it to something like building HS2, the great big high-speed rail line. The amount of planning, equipment-sourcing and people-persuading and organisation that has to happen at this period is really interesting,” says Sue.

The scale is even more remarkable given the apparent lack of hierarchy: “From this period, we don’t have really any evidence for social hierarchy. Everything seems very egalitarian in terms of the sizes of houses, in terms of how people live.” The archaeology does not reveal grand burials or obvious rulers, but rather a society where, as Sue notes, “everything seems to point to people being relatively equal and yet they managed to achieve these great big building projects.”

Why build Stonehenge?

Why did these communities invest so much effort in monuments like Stonehenge? Sue’s view is that “Stonehenge is a temple aligned with the movements of the sun. In my mind it’s a culmination of a number of monuments that are built in timber. It’s actually a timber structure built in stone – it’s got woodworking joints that fitted together. For prehistoric people, they would have looked at it and gone, ‘Look, they’ve done a timber monument in stone, how radical and interesting.’”

We can research the when and the how of the building of Stonehenge, but getting to the why is a harder task, As Sue explains: “It’s so difficult to know why they built it, but it must be something to do with needing to communicate with their gods. And they’re presumably related to the sun. The solar alignment is crucial to understanding Stonehenge. Perhaps they were going through a climate issue, perhaps a crops and health issue: something that meant that they were really trying to get their gods to listen to them and do what they want. It’s a kind of negotiation, it feels like, with land and with their gods and what they believe.”

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How was it organised?

Let’s park the motive and think about the logistics. Perhaps the most striking lesson from Stonehenge is how people managed to get things done together, on a scale that seems almost inconceivable today, and without the kind of social hierarchy or coercion often assumed necessary for such feats.

“There must have been some people who were in charge of planning, whether they were people who had high status all of the time, whether they just adopted that status for the purpose of building the monument, we don’t know,” Sue says. “But some of the aspects of the project would have needed some planning in terms of time. So for example, take the feasts that happened at Durrington Walls [the seasonal settlement near Stonehenge where we assume the builders lived]. People were bringing their animals, their pigs to the feast ready to be slaughtered. Now that means you have to have those animals ready. So you have to have been organising farrowing your pigs at the right time and having enough of them to bring from your local settlement to the feast site.”

Perhaps the most striking lesson from Stonehenge is how people managed to get things done together, on a scale that seems almost inconceivable today

The logistics didn’t end with food. “Also, they needed lots of equipment. They needed antler picks to dig the stone holes and lots of rope and timber to move the stones and to erect them. That would have taken quite a long time to procure and make. Baskets were probably used as well, so there’s not just the building and the moving of the stones, but all the planning that goes into what you need, feeding everybody, looking after the children, providing places where people could sleep.”

Fascinatingly, it’s clear that people came from far and wide to participate. “We know from the isotope evidence – the chemical signatures in the teeth of the pigs and the cattle that were eaten at Durrington Walls – that those came from a whole range of different geological areas of southern Britain and possibly even into northern Britain. So people were coming from some distance away to take part in this project. I like to think of it as being a bit like Mecca in that you might once in your lifetime spend three months taking part in the great big communal building project and then you would go back to your local village and go back to your ordinary life.”

Why did people join in?

How did the builders of Stonehenge persuade so many people to join in? Was it coercion, religion, or simply the joy of working together?

“There’s no evidence for coercion,” reckons Sue. “The evidence from Durrington Walls where they’re feasting in large quantities – they’re basically chucking away meat, they’ve got so much of it – suggests it’s quite a good time and that maybe they’re rewarding the people at least, so that taking part comes with beer, food, good company and a reason to take part in the project.”

That makes me think that one of the primary drivers for this collective action was, in fact, that it was simply fun – an excuse for a knees-up and a get-together. Sue’s also found that when she has got involved in experimental archaeology projects where like-minded people come together and construct prehistoric houses, or attempt to move stones around as they did in the Neolithic. Hard work, for sure, but maybe also a good laugh.

What can we learn for today?

So, what can we take from this for our own lives? This is Sue’s take: “I think for me, the modern day, at least here in the west, in Britain, is really individual. Everybody’s striving to get ahead in their career or their personal life or their social lives. Everything comes down to the individual, how you can do better, how you can improve your life, how you can exercise, eat, sleep better. We don’t really focus on how we can be a better society.”

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“How we improve our lives, to me, must be more to do with how we connect with our local society, with the communities that we live in, with the workplaces we are in, and how we behave in those situations.” Let’s not imagine that there weren’t unhappy times in this period of prehistory – there is evidence of violence, for example – “but on the whole, in the late Neolithic, they seem to have achieved really extraordinary things by working together. And you think, well, if they were able to do that in the late Neolithic with limited resources and people, we could achieve so much more than what we do currently in the world.”

It’s interesting that this focus on the individual over the communal is one that’s becoming a feature of these Life Lessons. Historians and archaeologists, or at least the ones who I’m inviting to choose a lesson for me, have referenced this several times (I’m thinking of my chats with Dr Jess Venner and Dr Ian Mortimer). The problem we’ve got today, if we are overly individualistic, is that we lack a collective mission. So let’s return to motive. We can’t be sure what that mission was for the Neolithic monument builders, but there was surely something that was driving these people to build Stonehenge and the other sites. For Sue, religion has to come into it.

It’s interesting that this focus on the individual over the communal is becoming a feature of these Life Lessons. The problem we’ve got today, if we are overly individualistic, is that we lack a collective mission

“The people building Stonehenge were doing it for religious reasons and there’s an element of negotiation there, and they were doing something because they thought they would get something back. They’re trying to achieve a better harvest or a better relationship with their sun god or something.”

Who are we negotiating with? What’s the mission that will bring us together and get us working communally? Countering climate change seems like a good one, fronting up to the reshaping of society from AI might be another. Those are massive global concerns, and they will probably either pull us all together or rip us all apart. Maybe the key thing we can take from the Neolithic for us today is the value of the physicalness of a building project in bringing people together – working practically with other people might be the collaboration hook that we need. It might answer some very modern problems too: digital isolation is a thing, social anxiety is a thing, so maybe meetings of people with the focus on an activity rather than socialising for socialising’s sake might be a win in itself.

As Sue puts it, “I think building is one of those things that does bring people something practical and, with a concrete result, does help people to get involved in things. There’s something about working on something practically with other people, learning and collaborating, that is part of being human, I think. And maybe we’ve lost some of that as well in our modern lives.”

So, let’s go build a stone circle, or a village hall, or a solar array, but let’s do it together, and try not to fall out while we’re at it. And let’s have a feast together after, as that’s what the Neolithic monument builders would have done. If it’s good enough for Stonehenge, it’s probably good enough for us.

This article is from HistoryExtra's Life Lessons from History Substack, where leading historians share life lessons from the past to help you live a better, happier and healthier life today.