Rules · Cities · Materials · Use
Build the circle of the living in timber, which decays, beside the settlement; build the circle of the ancestors in stone, which endures, apart from it; and join the two by avenues and the river.
Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, three kilometres apart, were in use at the same time, around 2500 BC. Durrington had timber circles and hundreds of houses, heaps of pig bones from midwinter feasts and plenty of pottery; Stonehenge had no houses at all, but many cremation burials. The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, drawing on the ethnography of Madagascar, proposed that timber stood for living flesh and stone for the permanence of the dead: a funeral procession would pass from the one to the other by the river Avon and the Stonehenge Avenue.
The idea is an interpretation, not a record, but it explains why the two sites mirror each other: the Southern Circle at Durrington faces the midwinter sunrise, while Stonehenge faces the midwinter sunset; and the stone circle repeats in sarsen the joinery of a timber frame (Joints of carpentry worked in stone).
A beam is squeezed along its top and stretched along its bottom; stone resists squeezing well but stretching badly, so a stone lintel must be deep in proportion to its span and cannot be long. Doubling the span quadruples the stress from its own weight.
σ ≈ ¾ ρ g L² ⁄ d (self-weight) · + ≈ 0.43 ρ g L³ ⁄ d² (a wall above)
At Stonehenge each lintel is pegged to its uprights by a mortise-and-tenon joint and locked to its neighbours by tongue-and-groove joints, and each is curved to follow the circle: the joints of a timber frame reproduced in dressed sarsen.
In a megalithic chamber the room can be no wider than the largest slab the builders can raise over it; the upright stones are set to suit the capstone, not the other way round.
Enclose the gathering place with a circular bank of chalk and dig the ditch on the inside of it, so that the earthwork marks off a sacred interior rather than defending it; leave causeways of undug ground for the entrances.
Run a straight, banked or surfaced avenue from the entrance of each monument down to the river, on the monument’s solstice axis, so that the approach itself is aligned on the sun.
Set up forked stakes, weave twigs between them and daub the walls with mud; roof them with reeds and leaves, steep enough to shed the rain.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Timber for the living, stone for the ancestors”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/timber-for-living-stone-for-dead. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.