We are all familiar with the phenomenon of pilgrimage as it applies to world religions. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism all contain the practice of pilgrimage. As noted on this website’s introductory page to pilgrimage, the practice is a spiritual, sometimes religious, and often personal journey. Now associated with walking, other forms of transport were also used for longer distances, including horses, wagons, and ships. Pilgrimage is experiencing something of a renaissance in a number of places, including Western Europe, and continues to be popular in Japan. The question looked at here is: can we see evidence for pilgrimage deeper into the past, before the advent of the major religions and prior to the common use of writing?
We can see ceremonial centres in prehistory; some of the earliest of these date back to the pre-agricultural societies in West Asia, such as the site of Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Türkiye, where a series of monoliths carved with a range of depictions, including many of wild animals, were erected on a hilltop site. Archaeologists debate what the significance of the site may have been, but clearly, it was a special place, perhaps imbued with a sense of the divine.
Such places may be associated with a range of attributes that make them distinct and special locations:
- Often, they have developed over a long period of time with increasing scale and complexity.
- They have a central focal structure or point but are surrounded by other structures, including often accommodation.
- Travelling to the place requires a commitment of time and resources from between a few days through to years.
- Rich material culture is associated with the location, and we know from historic and modern situations there is often an equally rich intangible culture, consisting of performance, smells, cuisine, folklore, music, songs, dances, and histories.
- Ceremonial centres need to be— for practical purposes— easily accessible with defined routes to them.
- In many cases, a central aspect of the ceremonial centre is physical and spiritual well-being, health, and healing.[1]
In most cases, the evidence for prehistoric people travelling to such locations was until recently difficult to define and consisted mostly of the presence of artefacts which may have been traded and did not necessarily show that people were travelling long distances. Scientific methods, such as the study of isotopic variations found in human and animal skeletal remains, have revolutionised the study of individual travel.
The archaeologist Tim Darvill has drawn attention to the similarities between historic pilgrimage centres, such as Mecca and Santiago del Compostela, with Stonehenge. The latter was home to a large-scale and long-lived ceremonial landscape with the famous developed stone monument comprising just one aspect. He argues that Stonehenge was a place of pilgrimage during its final phases, dating from around 2500 BCE, drawing on the architectural aspects of the monument, including the distance travelled to bring many of the stones to the site, such as the Bluestones which originated in the Preseli Mountains in Wales some 230km away from where they were quarried. In Wales, there is a connection too between the location of holy wells and quarrying sites for Bluestones, further suggesting a potential link to healing.
More compelling evidence for long-distance travel comes from burials in the vicinity of Stonehenge. An early Bronze Age burial of a man dating from around 2300 BCE was discovered by archaeologists from Wessex Archaeology in 2002, working in advance of a housing development on the outskirts of the village of Amesbury in Wiltshire, about three miles from Stonehenge. His grave is amongst the richest in Europe from this period, and the assemblage of artefacts unprecedented, including five Beaker-style pots, two of which were almost identical with an unusual form of cord decoration, along with a range of metalwork, including two small gold artefacts, the earliest gold objects found in Britain that possibly functioned as hair ornaments, three copper knives, two sandstone wristguards, two flint hoards, and a cushion stone used perhaps in metalworking as a kind of small portable anvil. Although no longer present in the grave as it would have been made from organic material unlikely to survive, there was probably a bow buried with him too.
Dubbed by the media the Archer, he likely died between 35 and 45. Examination of his skeletal remains showed that he suffered from a major injury to his left knee that had ripped off his kneecap and left him with walking difficulties and an infection causing constant pain. He was also suffering from a further infection causing an abscess on his jaw. Isotopic analysis of his teeth revealed that as a child he had lived in the Alps, travelling to Britain at some point later in life. Along the way, he clearly had accumulated a degree of status and possibly authority. His grave likely was timber-lined and may have had a barrow erected over the top, though this later was eroded or removed. A number of boar tusks were placed near his head, perhaps indicating that he had spent time hunting and was an expert hunter. He may also have been a metalworker, perhaps one of the first people in Britain to work gold, a skill likely learned on the continent.
Close to the Archer was another burial of a younger man aged between 20 and 25. Skeletal analysis shows they were related; both had a rare bone structure in their feet. This grave also contained two gold hair tresses. Isotopic work on the younger man’s teeth shows that he grew up in the Stonehenge area but had also spent time in his late teens in either the Midlands or north-east Scotland.
Nearby in 2003, another remarkable grave was uncovered on Boscombe Down, the discovery made during the digging of a water pipe trench. The grave was a fairly normal size but contained the remains of seven individuals, three adult men, a male teenager, and three children. One of the men, who died between the ages of 30 and 45, had sustained a broken left thigh, which would have left him with a significant limp. Buried close to his head were three children aged between 2 and 7, one of whom had been cremated. The eldest child may have been placed into the grave at a later date. Analysis of all the skeletons in the grave showed that the skulls of the men and the teenager were all similar in shape and had an unusual but not rare condition known as Wormian, or intrasutural bones, suggesting that they were all related. Also buried in the grave were eight Beaker pots, the largest number from a single grave found in Britain. Several of these were decorated with plaited cord, which is very rare in Britain but more commonly found on examples from continental Europe. One of the only other examples of this type is mentioned above and was found with the Amesbury Archer. This grave has been dubbed the Boscombe Bowmen due to the flint-tanged arrowheads found with them and a boar’s tusk made into a toggle.
However, isotopic analysis of the Bowman’s tooth enamel shows that they likely came from Wales or perhaps the Lake District when they were children. The isotopic work also shows that the men moved to the Stonehenge area later in life and hence migrated between areas. What is compelling here is that the Bluestones at Stonehenge come from an area that corresponds with these isotopic skeletal results, providing a possible link between the movement of these people and traditions that brought the stones to their final location at the monument.
Evidence from excavations at Stonehenge includes a layer of Bluestone flakes and debris that accumulated over a long period of time, perhaps millennia. It seems that people flaked and chipped off fragments of the stones to fashion objects including axes and discs. It has been suggested by Timothy Darvill that these, along with unmodified flakes, may have been utilised as amulets, talismans or charms.[2] He further notes that it is likely that this most complex of British Neolithic and early Bronze Age monuments was imbued with equally complex meanings and symbolism. It developed from an enclosed cemetery at around 3000 BCE, later becoming a centre for ceremonies associated with a range of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. Darvill states that during the late third millennium BCE, it became a place of pilgrimage for people suffering from a range of ailments who travelled in the hope that their illnesses would be cured.
Andy Hutcheson, October 2025
Further Reading
Wessex Archaeology 2022 The Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen – online articles: https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/amesbury-archer-and-boscombe-bowmen.
[1] Timothy Darvill, Roads to Stonehenge: a prehistoric healing centre and pilgrimage site in southern Britain. In A. Ranft and W. Schenklun, eds. Kulturstraßen als Konzept. 20 Jahre Straße der Romani. Regensburg, Germany: Schell & Steiner, 155 – 166.
[2] Timothy Darvill 2016, Houses of the Holy: Architecture and meaning in the structure of Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK. Time and Mind Vol 9(2) 89-121.