Roll Me a Great Stone: A Brief Historiography of Megalithic Construction and the Genesis of the Roller Hypothesis

Abstract

Summary The idea that prehistoric, megalith‐building communities used cylindrical, wooden rollers to transport enormous stones – the ‘roller hypothesis’ – is ubiquitous within archaeological literature and public discourse on megalithic architecture. The likelihood that such devices were actually used to transport megaliths during prehistory remains highly questionable, yet the roller hypothesis has now dominated discussions of the subject for some 400 years. At its heart lies the assertion that fewer people were needed to transport large stones with rollers than without them. A review of experimental and ethnographic studies of megalith transport casts doubt on this central claim and suggests that simpler, better‐attested and more reliable methods were probably used. So when and why did the roller hypothesis become so popular? The historiography of the idea reveals how its advocates succeeded in rationalizing it within wider, paradigmatic beliefs about their contemporary worlds and the deep past. The roller hypothesis is bound up in outmoded, even jingoistic perspectives of megalithic construction and the evolution of technology. To advance our understanding of megalithic construction a more critical stance is herein advocated.

Building Stonehenge? An alternative interpretation of lipid residues in Neolithic Grooved Ware from Durrington Walls

“…While this reconsideration of the lipid residues at Durrington Walls supports the ‘greased sled’ theory as an explanation for the movement of the Stonehenge megaliths (Harris 2018), there are still many questions that need to be addressed. The most obvious concerns the impact of differential preservation on the quantities of lipids recovered from archaeological ceramics.…”

“…The construction of Stonehenge remains an ongoing question of considerable academic and public interest (Harris 2016). The monument consists of large sarsen triathlons, each up to 8m in height and 30 tonnes in weight, and smaller bluestones, up to 3m high and weighing 1-2 tonnes.…”

“…The most recent experiments indicate that 10 individuals could move a one-tonne stone at a pace of around 1.6km per hour using a sledge system; hence, 20 individuals could easily have moved Stonehenge's smallest stone. This system involves placing logs on the ground as sleepers and pulling the stone, mounted on a sled, over the top of them (Harris 2016). Ethnographic examples of a similar technology can be found in West Sumba, Indonesia, where there is an ongoing practice of megalithic tomb construction (Adams 2009).…”

Measuring the Complexity of Past Social Systems: a Task Analysis Approach to the Study of Late Prehistoric Monumentality in Iberia

“…This occurs because there are multiple alternative methods for transporting megaliths (Fig. 4) and there are no adequate inferential means to determine, with a high degree of probability, which of these methods was chosen in a specific case (in fact, this has long been a subject of speculation, experiment, and controversy in prehistoric studies ;Harris 2018;Parker Pearson et al 2015;Parry 2000). 9 If the aim of a study is to evaluate differences in the degree of hierarchical complexity at the level of the tasks involved in the construction of one or more structures, the difficulty of knowing the likely nature of the subtasks or sub-subtasks into which a main task may be decomposed, pose problems for the analysis.…”

“…900 metric tons, which implies that their quarrying and carving must have involved a large team of well-organized workers (see Bonetto et al 2014 and contributions therein); 3.2 Transport (team: 3 p): implies the transfer of the megaliths from the quarry to the construction site; as already mentioned, there are different ways of transporting megaliths; of the five variants represented in Fig. 4 and in Table 1, the least likely (at least for orthostats and capstones) are variants a and b, since they are useful and practicable for the transfer of stones of smaller dimensions (a) or of elongated format, with a rather wide base (b); another variant that is unlikely because of its limited ethnographic support and relatively poor performance (experimentally demonstrated) is e, which is based on the use of sledges sliding on loose wooden rollers (see discussion in Harris 2018;Parry 2000); variants c and d are those with the greatest empirical support in the ethnographic record, being particularly well suited for the transport of big megaliths, so they are considered as the most likely used in this context (however, the use of variant a for the transport of the pillars cannot be completely ruled out); tentatively, this subtask can be decomposed into the following sub-subtasks:…”