This epic show about the world’s most famous stone circle will go down as a landmark exhibition in the British Museum’s impressive history. If I could, I would give it 7 stars. Because of its imaginative sweep, emotional generosity and the sheer stash of treasures it assembles from ancient Europe (430 objects, mostly unseen in London before). And in a tribute to the Pleiades, the constellation of stars known as the seven sisters. Neolithic farmers took their cues from them, the babylonians used them to determine when to take a leap year to align their lunar and solar calendars – and here they are, twinkling brightly in a blue bronze sky in the 3600-year old Nebra Sky Disc, the world’s oldest celestial map and one of the many star treasures on show.
The actual Stonehenge of course remains in Wiltshire, cordoned off between the traffic-jammed A303 and crowded visitor centre. It’s a disappointing trip: not much space to contemplate the heavens or ancient past. And that’s exactly where this exhibition shines, illuminating everything that’s fenced off at the actual site – an epic sweep of history, art and meaning.
It starts in around 5000 BC in hunter-gatherer Europe, with awesome grave goods including deer skull head dresses, one from a female shaman whose bones show she suffered from a neurological condition which caused trances. It tracks the rise of the farmers, who hewed down woodlands with handcrafted axes, in a monumental wall of stone blades - one for every generation. It commemorates a collaborative picnic attended by both, in the remnants of a meal containing hunted venison and farmed beef. Then there are impressively bog-pickled wooden tracks from Avalon Marsh near Glastonbury, erected on plinths. Could makeshift roads like these have helped cart Stonehenge’s inner bluestones 180 miles from the Preseli Hills in 3000 BC, in another extraordinary act of collaboration?
An epic sweep of history, art and meaning
The deep effort and time spent by humans carving meaning into the physical world is palpably visible everwhere here: from the deeply cut grooves on a boulder used to sharpen those gorgeously honed axes, to the whorled, thumbprint-like patterns carved into chalk grave goods, domestic objects and decorative arts, to the erection of Stonehenge and the swirl of ritual sites around it, a project that took perhaps 1,500 years.
The show may not have the Stonehenge stones, but it shares and communicates their central focus: the sun, which is captured everywhere in the exhibition, and especially in the 4,000-year-old Sea Henge. This family-sized circle made of 54 oak pillars surrounding a topsy-turvy oak tree, roots pointed at the sky, was uncovered on a remote Norfolk beach 20-odd years ago. Like Stonehenge, it was aligned with the solar day and year. In the museum it’s re-erected with a glimmering light installation casting rays through the gnarly pillars of the entrance. As time winds forward, the sun worship becomes more about showing off and less about sharing; it’s commemorated in cases full of golden pointed wizardy hats and shiny crescent-shaped torques, designed to reflect the sun’s rays back on the high status individuals who owned them. Moving into the Bronze Age (the age of Homer’s epics) there are shattered, broken human remains, and dazzlingly butch, blingy armour, showing the rise of warriors.
There are too many treasures to describe. But Stonehenge is clearly depicted here as so much more than a circle of stones for fake druid solstice parties; it’s a vortex and lens at the centre of thousands of years and tracks of migration, pilgrimage, quests, spiritual meaning and exchange. The human, emotional landscape and the mystical experience are equally conveyed in a way that’s personal, enriching and genuinely wondrous. Unmissable.