An artistic interpretation of Flagstones
An artistic interpretation of what Flagstones might have looked like shortly after it was constructed Jennie Anderson
Researchers have found that a prehistoric burial site called Flagstones is one of the earliest known large circular enclosures in Britain.
Located in Dorset, Flagstones dates to around 3200 B.C.E., about two centuries earlier than experts previously thought, according to a new study published in the journal Antiquity. That makes it older than Stonehenge, its more famous counterpart.
“Flagstones is an unusual monument; a perfectly circular ditched enclosure, with burials and cremations associated with it,” co-author Susan Greaney, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, says in a statement.
The site was first studied in the 1980s, when archaeologists conducted excavations ahead of construction of a highway bypass. The site features a central burial pit surrounded by intersecting ditches. Only about half of the site has been excavated, and the other half lies beneath the garden of Max Gate, the former home of the Victorian author Thomas Hardy.
Flagstones in the 1980s
The excavation of Flagstones in the 1980s Dorset Museum
Human burials at Flagstones lie beneath large stone slabs known as sarsens. Some adult remains had been cremated or partially cremated, while the remains of three children hadn’t been cremated.
Using organic material uncovered during excavations at Flagstones, including human remains, red deer antlers and charcoal, the researchers conducted 23 new radiocarbon tests to accurately date the site.
These tests indicate that the earliest digging at the site—likely done with the antlers—occurred around 3650 B.C.E. Following a gap in activity that lasted several centuries, the circular ditched enclosure was likely created around 3200 B.C.E., just before the human burials took place.
That would make Flagstones a few hundred years older than Stonehenge—which was built in many stages beginning around 3000 B.C.E.—complicating a widespread understanding of how funerary monuments evolved in prehistoric Britain.
Flagstones was built during “a time when relatively few large-scale monuments were constructed, in comparison to the earlier and later Neolithic,” the authors write in the study.
Red deer antler
Red deer antler used for radiocarbon dating University of Exeter
“In some respects, it looks like monuments that come earlier, which we call causewayed enclosures, and in others, it looks a bit like things that come later that we call henges,” says Greaney in the statement. “But we didn’t know where it sat between these types of monuments—and the revised chronology places it in an earlier period than we expected.”
Greaney and her co-authors place Flagstones in a middle stage between simpler ceremonial ditches and more advanced henge structures—the monumental arrangements we associate with the term today.
“The chronology of Flagstones is essential for understanding the changing sequence of ceremonial and funeral monuments in Britain,” Greaney adds.
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy with a sarsen stone at the site now known as Flagstones Dorset Museum
Structures like Flagstones and Stonehenge may have taken inspiration from burial sites in eastern Ireland, like the Mound of Hostages in County Meath, as Jack Knudson writes in Discover. Contact between prehistoric Britain and Ireland may have helped spread these cultural practices on both isles.
“Tracing those lines of connection, and the networks of shared ideas and practices, is now an imperative task that must be underpinned by robust and precise chronologies,” the authors write.
The new radiocarbon results call into question longstanding assumptions about which sites may have influenced others, which sites evolved independently and which sites demand further study.
“Could Stonehenge have been a copy of Flagstones?” says Greaney. “Or do these findings suggest our current dating of Stonehenge might need revision?”