title: Cult, Religion, and Pilgrimage
title: Archaeological Investigations at the Neolithic and Bronze Age Monument Complex of Thornborough, North Yorkshire
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Harding, Jan
Publisher: name: Archaeology Data Service
Year: 2020

description: Council for British Archaeology Research Reports, 174
description: This volume describes the results of two university field projects at the Neolithic and Bronze Age monument complex of Thornborough in North Yorkshire. This complex is focused around three large henge monuments which all survive as upstanding earthworks; a variety of other monuments are situated in the surrounding landscape. The Vale of Mowbray Neolithic Landscape Project (1994-99) and Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund Project (2002-04) undertook geophysical prospection, topographic survey, and excavation at the central and southern henges, two round barrows, an oval enclosure, double pit alignment, and pit cluster. A large part of its landscape was fieldwalked and some of its lithic scatters test-pitted. Collectively, the evidence demonstrates the long and intricate story of Thornborough's remarkable growth from a relatively modest monument complex into what can be described as a regionally important 'sacred landscape' for later Neolithic communities. General interpretive themes are considered first. The building of three giant henges, and another three nearby, suggests different intentions, motivations, and strategies to other monument complexes. These can be grasped only by acknowledging that Thornborough was a place of intense religiosity - and then by understanding how sacred architecture speaks to people and acts on social reality. A 'double mediation' between monument and worshipper is essential to interpretation. This is followed by an account of how biographies of knowledge about Thornborough have developed in the recent era. Whilst this sacred landscape is likely to have held special significance during the medieval period, the following centuries saw its alienation from local people through landscape reorganisation, and from prehistorians through neglect. Previous archaeological investigations and other sources of information are considered fully. The monuments and broader patterns of activity across the immediate landscape are then described. The results of fieldwalking suggest repeated activity in the later Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic on higher ground near to wetland and forest resources. A triple-ditched round barrow, built and remodelled in the second quarter of the 4th millennium BC, may have been a 'founder monument'. Excarnated human body parts were deposited here. Thornborough's role was then transformed through the construction of the cursus. Built across the plateau, away from ancestral places, it brought into being a greater level of order and alignment, changing the way people moved around and experienced this landscape. New relationships and identities were created through building the earthwork and its inner features. The cursus was succeeded by the erection of three henges whose positioning suggests a carefully planned vision, or sacred geometry, was at play. They represent a major escalation in monumentality and their layout, chronology, and relationships with the surrounding landscape are more complex than hitherto thought. Impressive architecture and the regionalisation of their setting were employed to ensure that experience was highly choreographed. Sacredness was enlivened by restricting occupation to the landscape's fringes, where a mosaic of specialised flint knapping, short-term settlement, and other activities emerged. These patterns continued into the Bronze Age, with at least ten round barrows clustering around the axis of the henges. An impressive timber alignment was constructed alongside the southern henge for accessing the monumentalised plateau, or what was now a place of the ancestors and distant dead. The volume concludes with a discussion of Thornborough's regional significance. Strategically sited on an important routeway between people's homeworlds it became a place where exchange and interaction could freely occur. The circulation of Cumbrian polished stone axes and Yorkshire flint was especially important to its role.