In CA 55 (February 1976), a review of Aubrey Burl’s The Stone Circles of the British Isles hailed the work as ‘scholarly book of the year, at least for prehistorians’ – no small praise, particularly given that Burl (1926- 2020) had not originally intended to study megalithic monuments. While he had been casually interested in prehistory since the 1950s, it wasn’t until 1965 that he embarked on more formal studies, beginning a part-time MA in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. His research had a somewhat rocky start as, during discussions of potential subjects that he could pursue, both Burl’s first and his second suggestion – Beaker pottery and Grooved Ware – were rejected because other students were already working on them. His third, human pathology, was also turned down because there was no suitably qualified member of staff at the university. Finally, recalling a recent visit to the Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire–Warwickshire border during a cricket tour, he suggested stone circles – and this topic was approved. The rest is (pre)history.
Burl’s dissertation (ultimately accepted in 1974, by Richard Atkinson, the long-term director of excavations at Stonehenge) formed the basis for the publication of The Stone Circles of the British Isles two years later. It was not his first scholarly work on the subject, however – indeed, Burl’s first published article about stone circles can be found in CA 12 (January 1969). ‘Stone Circles Again’ is a dialogue between Burl and Euan MacKie, discussing Alexander Thom’s then-recently published (and much-debated) Megalithic Sites in Britain, with its ideas of a ‘megalithic yard’. Further papers followed, including in The Archaeological Journal, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and Archaeologia Aeliana; an academic outpouring that prompted Evelyn Hutchinson to invite Burl to write a book about stone circles for Yale University Press.
The result was, of course, The Stone Circles of the British Isles, and it was immediately recognised as revolutionary, many years later being described by Alex Gibson as having ‘brought the study of stone circles into mainstream archaeology, with a rigorous academic treatment of the subject and the compilation of the first systematic corpus and comparative study.’ As the review in CA 55 noted, ‘Here, for the first time, someone has looked at stone circles and treated them in the ordinary scholarly way, making a corpus of the 900-odd examples, and applying the usual procedures of classification, dividing them up into different types and showing the regional variations. It all sounds very elementary, but no one has done it before, and the result is a triumph.’
