Excavating the CA archive

In my columns to date I have barely mentioned Stonehenge. This is deliberate: for all that I worship archaeology, I am an atheist about this most famous of sites. I do not denigrate the emotion that it arouses, but personally it leaves me cold. There are so many other prehistoric places that I prefer. But to tell the story of the archaeology of the British Isles and conclude in Wiltshire without speaking of Stonehenge is impossible, and it is by sheer volume the single most mentioned location in the history of the magazine. Below, therefore, I provide some highlights from this coverage.

The 1960s and 1970s (issues 1-69)

One of the interesting things in tracking the story of Stonehenge through the pages of Current Archaeology is that the changes observed over the years reflect trends within the magazine as well as in wider society. In the 1960s and 1970s, the politics that the site is mired in today are largely absent. This is partly because the magazine at that time was not so interested in reporting on them, and partly because divisions in opinion over the site’s management had yet to become so impassioned. The first big mention of Stonehenge thus comes in CA 5 (November 1967), in relation to the exploration of Durrington Walls on the eastern edge of the World Heritage Site (WHS). There is discussion, too, of the site’s dating in CA 32 (May 1972), and of the sources of the stones in CA 16 (September 1969). But the first overtly political discussion does not come along until CA 55 (March 1976), when the editorial lambasted what remains a sensitive subject to this day: the control of access to the stone circle itself in response to ever-growing visitor numbers (at the time, around 700,000 per year, compared to a pre-COVID peak of 1.6m in 2019). This was amid wider discussion of both visitor facilities and traffic management, and there were replies in support and opposition alike in CA 65 and 67 (February and June 1979).

The 1980s and 1990s (issues 70-166)

Reporting in the 1980s and 1990s followed the theme of the previous decades – one senses a determination from the editors to focus on the science not the society. There is steady correspondence about the origin of the bluestones and phasing of the site to be seen in CA 127, 128, 143, and 151 (December 1991, March 1992, June 1995, and February 1997), and of finds within the wider WHS, notably that of the Wilsford Shaft near Amesbury, in CA 118 and 307 (January 1990 and October 2015). The politics of this period creep in around the edges, though, particularly in CA 96 and 98 (April and October 1985). The former sombrely discussed the access report produced at this time, which is also discussed in an interview with English Heritage Chairperson Lord Montagu in CA 129 (May 1992). The latter was in more ebullient form on solutions to managing the growing numbers of people attending the summer solstice. The next steps on both these issues came in CA 134 and 145 (May 1993 and November 1995), the second of which includes the first, brief mention of the biggest debate of them all: whether to divert the A303 into a tunnel beneath the site and, if so, how long that tunnel should be.