societies expressed this common theme in a variety of ways: in Ireland, a tradition of passage tombs led to Newgrange, one of the most spectacular Neolithic monuments of all. Farmers arrived here around 3750 BC, bringing with them pottery and robust rectangular houses as well as cereals such as wheat and barley. Studies of plant remains suggest that the transition was relatively swift. Within a century or two, cereals were grown across the island, while large areas of forests had been axed or burned.
At the same time, people started building simple stone tombs, with a burial chamber defined by five or six large stones plus a flat capstone on top, all covered with a mound of earth. Over the following centuries, the designs became larger and more complex. Whereas the first tombs were too small to enter, later ones had cairns or mounds up to 20 metres across. Passages inside led to inner chambers decorated with art and corbelled roofs, where rituals could be performed.
Irish archaeologist Robert Hensey, who has studied the development of passage tombs in Ireland, sees these sites too as portals. In his 2015 book First Light: The Origins of Newgrange, he describes them as ‘a powerful transcendental network; a chain of monuments which had acted as bridges to other worlds’. Through occupying the same space as the bones of their forebears, he suggests, ‘select individuals could now physically enter the other world, the realm of the ancestors’. Just like in the Near East, instead of using natural features of landscape as doorways to other dimensions of reality, people were building their own.
And as at Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, this journey to the spirit world was deliberately made difficult. Regardless of the size of a tomb, the passage inside was only ever wide enough for one person at once. Reaching the burial chamber often required ducking, crawling or climbing over stones. And as tombs became larger, the burial chambers became more complex, with up to seven recesses, each just big enough for a sitting or squatting adult. Hensey suggests that people might have stayed inside these for long periods, perhaps to facilitate trance states through sensory deprivation (maybe aided by the spooky effect of echoing chants). He notes that in some traditional communities, such as the Kogi of Colombia or the Orokaiva of northern Papua, individuals in training to become spiritual leaders are confined alone, in darkness, for up to years at a time.
At Göbekli Tepe, the link to the sky is unproven. In Neolithic Europe, it’s crystal clear; megalithic monuments here often feature celestial alignments. A survey of 177 dolmen tombs in Spain and Portugal found that every single one faces east, towards a point on the horizon within the arc of the rising sun. The survey author concluded that each tomb was oriented towards sunrise on a particular day, perhaps when construction began. This fits the idea that such tombs were believed to lead to the underworld – where nature regenerates, and where the sun appears to go each night before being reborn in the morning.
In Ireland, not all passage tombs have obvious solar orientations. A few have roof boxes like the one at Newgrange, though – strong evidence that the builders wanted sunlight to enter at certain times. There is also an emerging focus not just on the daily rebirth of the sun but its annual cycle. A 2017 study of 136 Irish passage tombs concluded that more than 20 of them were intentionally oriented towards key dates in the solar cycle, mostly the solstices.
Eventually, between around 3200 and 3000 BC, passage tombs became larger still, often more than 50 metres across, with bigger stones, higher roofs and longer passages. They had other design modifications too, such as art and decorations on the outside of the tombs, public spaces and platforms around the cairns, and flat mounds so that people could stand on top. The empty recesses where people may once have secluded themselves were now filled by ceremonial stone basins.
Together, these changes suggest that the purpose of these sites was shifting away from enabling individual spirit journeys towards public ceremonies, presumably conducted by powerful elites and intended to invoke drama and awe for the watching crowds. The culmination of this tradition was Newgrange, decorated with a gleaming quartz façade: the most impressive passage tomb known in terms of its size, complexity, the quality and quantity of its art, and the accuracy of its alignment.
It didn’t stand alone, however. This piece of land, famously nestled in a bend of the River Boyne, hosts not just Newgrange but two other passage tombs of similar size – Knowth and Dowth (the latter aligned to the winter solstice sunset) – plus around ninety other monuments, including smaller passage tombs, standing stones, timber circles, earth enclosures and a processional way. It was a dramatic ceremonial landscape which would have required the coordinated effort and resources of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
On the morning of the winter solstice, a procession of mourners or worshippers perhaps walked across the river and up onto the ridge before placing human remains in the tomb. At sunrise, the beam of light shone into the burial chamber, symbolising the journey into the dark underworld. But that may not have been the final destination. Lewis-Williams suggests that people may have imagined the sunlight, with the released spirits of the dead who had been placed in the chamber, then continuing up through the high corbelled roof and back to the sky, where they would join the sun ‘in the eternal round of cosmological life, death and rebirth’.
There was a problem, though. No matter how impressive a tomb like Newgrange or Dowth might have looked to the gathered crowds, the main event – the lighting of the burial chamber – could only be witnessed by the handful of individuals inside. Maybe that’s one reason the tradition reached a dead end; passage tombs were no longer built after about 2900 BC. The focus shifted instead to a new kind of monument which took those same illuminations and made them visible to hundreds of people at once.
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Few ancient monuments have inspired as many different interpretations as the worn, tumbling ruin of Stonehenge, set in the open grasslands of England’s Salisbury Plain. Over the centuries, this mysterious giant circle has been described as a druid temple, astronomical observatory, healing centre, war memorial and even a landing point for alien spacecraft. But thanks to a series of recent excavations at Stonehenge and beyond, archaeologists are now in a better position than ever before to tell the stones’ real story.
The site is unique for the sheer epic size of its stones and the staggering distances they were carried. Giant sandstone slabs called ‘sarsens’, weighing 22–27 tonnes each, were probably brought from hills near Avebury, more than 30 kilometres to the north. Smaller bluestones standing among them, weighing several tonnes each, were brought hundreds of kilometres from Wales: one of the most impressive achievements of the entire Neolithic. Adding to the mystery is the monument’s famous orientation to the sun.
Modern excavations and radiocarbon dating show that Stonehenge was constructed in several phases. Just after 3000 BC, a circular earthen ditch and bank (loosely described as a ‘henge’4) was dug from the chalk using antler picks, with a ring of bluestones just inside and an entrance facing towards the northeast. Several sarsen stones were erected inside the ring and beyond the entrance, leading towards a large, unworked sarsen now called the Heel Stone. Several centuries later, the monument took roughly the form we recognise today, as the bluestones were rearranged and the giant sarsens added in a circle of 30 uprights, with horizontal lintels that may have formed a continuous stone ring, 4 metres in the air. At the centre, arranged in a horseshoe-shaped arc, five doorway-like arches called ‘trilithons’ rose nearly 8 metres.
The most complicated astronomical theories suggested for Stonehenge – for example that it predicted eclipses – have been debunked. But it is indisputable that the trilithon arc, plus an avenue leading away from Stonehenge towards the northeast (it later turns and eventually reaches the nearby Avon river), point towards midsummer sunrise. Thousands now gather every year to watch the midsummer sun rise over the Heel Stone, but in Neolithic times, the sun would have risen in line with the avenue itself.
The monument also captures midwinter sunset, in the opposite direction. Whereas the summer alignment is visible from inside the circle,
