For hundreds of years, since the word archaeology was first used, it has been the accepted wisdom that hundreds if not thousands of men would have been needed during the construction of Stonehenge.
How else could it have been achieved 4000 years ago? Without wheels or roads or modern lifting equipment of any kind how else could such massive blocks of stone, some weighing up to 45 tons each, have been moved the 20 miles overland from their source on the Marlborough Downs? How else could such massively heavy stones have been planted upright in the ground and how else could the lintel stones have been lifted as high as 28 feet into the air and placed on top of the uprights? How else without a very large workforce, blood, sweat and tears?
Yet this solution raises as many questions as it provides answers, from a population of perhaps no more than 100,000 people scattered thinly from Lands End to the Orkneys how was such an army of men assembled? And from a society of early farmers living at near subsistence level how were these men sustained during their labours, which must have taken many years? And even if such a body of men could have been assembled and fed is it actually possible to move such massive stones by human muscle power alone? Many practical experiments have been mounted by archaeologists in the last 20 years to prove this point, none have been entirely convincing, indeed most have served only to illustrate how impossible the task really is.
As a professional builder this question occupied my idle thoughts for more than 20 years, the more I thought about it, the more experiments I watched on TV, the more convinced I became that Neolithic man must have used their intelligence rather than their muscle power in order to build Stonehenge. Only when I became totally convinced that the stones could not have been dragged overland did I begin see how else it might be done. If the stones were too heavy to drag then the only way they could be moved was if the were picked up. Immediately I could see how this could have been achieved, levers can pick things up with little effort but levers can also be used to move things forward at the same time!!! Arrange enough simple wooden levers each side of the stone and the stone can be picked up, moved forward a short distance and replaced on the ground, the levers can then be reset and the stone moved further forward, again and again all day long. Furthermore this can be done with very little physical effort, just like rowing a boat.
Over the next 10 years I spent many hours experimenting with stones of ever increasing weight, I did experiments into the problem of transporting the stones, erecting the stones and placing the lintel stones. Many of these experiments were filmed by TV news broadcasters (BBC News 24) and documentary filmmakers (Channel 5 and National Geographic Channel).
My main conclusions from these research experiments are surprising and if eventually accepted by archaeologists will mean a total rethink of Neolithic life 4000 years ago. No longer will it be thought necessary for Neolithic man to have gathered an army of workers to transport the sarsen stones to Stonehenge, my experiments prove that even the largest of the uprights could have been transported by as few as 60 men and that these few men could have completed the movement of each of these uprights in less than 6 weeks.
No longer will it be thought necessary for great earth banks to be constructed in order to erect these stones, my experiments prove that by utilising the known profiles of the stone holes at Stonehenge as few as 40 men using simple wooden levers could have erected each of these stones in no more that 3 days.
And my experiments prove that far from being the most difficult task at Stonehenge elevating the lintel stones is the easiest task of all, a task that can be completed by as few as 20 men in less than 1 day for each stone.
In the 1960s Prof G S Hawkins estimated that Stonehenge in the form we see it now represented more than 1,136,000 man-days work and that was just for the transport and erection of the stones. After 10 years of practical research I believe that this figure can now be reduced by almost 1 million man-days to a more believable 196,000 man –days. This figure still shows a tremendous amount of work went into the building of Stonehenge and why it was built at all will perhaps always remain a complete mystery but I believe my research proves that it was not only possible but that it could have been done without blood sweat or tears.
Building Stonehenge A radical new Theory by Gordon Pipes is published by Birchwood Publishers Ltd and is available online at Amazon Books or from all good bookshops. ISBN 9780956280701
