Sounds of the Stone Age: ‘rock’ music at Stonehenge
Stonehenge will never give up all its secrets. But a team from London’s Royal College of Art have used an entirely new approach to help answer the mystery of why the builders of the historic monument chose to haul some of its giant bluestones 200 miles away from Wales to Salisbury Plain.
Writing in the journal Time & Mind, Paul Devereux and Jon Wozencroft reveal the initial results of the ‘Landscape and Perception Project’, an attempt to uncover what Stone Age eyes and ears would have perceived in and around Carn Menyn Ridge, Mynydd Preseli, South-West Wales.
This discovery comes at a timely moment, with a new £27m visitor centre set to open at Stonehenge on 18 December, just ahead of the winter solstice.
Local legend has it that the Preseli Bluestones possess magical and healing properties, but what Devereux and Wozencroft have now discovered are the extraordinary ‘sonic properties’ of the bluestones, which might have led to their use in Stonehenge. When struck, some make a range of metallic sounds, ‘from pure bell-like tones to tin drum noises to deeper gong-like resonances’.
After testing over 1,000 rocks at points all along the Carn Menyn Ridge, the Project found that on average, between 5–10% of the rocks ‘ring’ when hit. In localised places, the figure rises to 15–20%, ‘with a few very small “hotspots” up to double that percentage again’.
Being in ‘no doubt that the source area of the Stonehenge bluestones is a noteworthy soundscape’, the team travelled to Stonehenge itself, where they were given unprecedented access to the ancient site by English Heritage. The sonic properties of the bluestones were tested in situ, the first time this had ever been done.
Was sound a key reason behind the otherwise inexplicable transport of these stones from Preseli to Salisbury Plain – whether they were to be rung at Stonehenge, or simply because the megalith builders associated them with the magical properties of the astonishing Carn Menyn soundscape? Stonehenge will never tell us for certain. But given all that the Project has discovered, such a suggestion may well ring true with further research.
Read the full article online here: http://www.tandfonline.com/rtam
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