Was Stonehenge a prehistoric Lourdes?

There’s a troubling whiff of counterknowledge about the BBC Timewatch project to excavate Stonehenge to demonstrate that the site was a “prehistoric Lourdes”.

Two professors of archaeology, Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright, “believe they have cracked the conundrum of Stonehenge’s original purpose”. They don’t think it was a place of worship or an instrument for calculating dates; they believe it was a place of healing. “The whole purpose of Stonehenge is that it was a prehistoric Lourdes,” says Wainwright, former chief archaeologist at English Heritage. The Timewatch website explains:

This is revolutionary stuff, and it comes from a reinterpretation of the stones of the henge and the bones buried nearby. Darvill and Wainwright believe the smaller bluestones in the centre of the circle, rather than the huge sarsen stones on the perimeter, hold the key to the purpose of Stonehenge. The bluestones were dragged 250km from the mountains of southwest Wales using Stone Age technology. That’s some journey, and there must have been a very good reason for attempting it. Darvill and Wainwright believe the reason was the magical, healing powers imbued in the stones by their proximity to traditional healing springs.

The bones that have been excavated from around Stonehenge appear to back the theory up. “There’s an amazing and unnatural concentration of skeletal trauma in the bones that were dug up around Stonehenge,” says Darvill. “This was a place of pilgrimage for people … coming to get healed.”

So the ill and injured travelled to Stonehenge because the healing stones offered a final hope of a miracle cure or relief from insufferable pain.

Actually, this is not so much “revolutionary stuff” as guesswork. And it’s true that reputable academics often have to guess, to follow their hunches, in order to make a breakthrough. But there something about the insistent tone adopted by Wainwright and Darvill, heavily flavoured with wishful thinking, that reminds me more of Baigent and Leigh than mainstream archaeology. And don’t forget that this conveniently colourful theory is linked to a TV series and book.

Thanks to cunning and unscrupulous cult archaeologists, respectable researchers now find themselves under pressure to dress up their discoveries in commercially appealing garb. “Prehistoric Lourdes” has a nice ring to it – but is there any truth in the theory?