Like generations of Britons before him, freelance archeologist and writer Mike Pitts has always been captivated by Stonehenge. Pitts recalls first visiting the legendary monument as a child. “When I was a kid, I used to get my Mum to take me to see castles and cathedrals. On one of these trips we went to Stonehenge, and a few years later I came across a book about Stonehenge by Richard Atkinson, who had excavated there in the 1950s. It was fantastically well-written, like a detective story, and I was aghast at the possibility of being able to explore the past and make new discoveries and write history. Reading about Stonehenge then, propped up in bed on my pillow in the school dormitory, was a key moment in my decision to become an archeologist.”
Years later, after Pitts had actually become an archeologist and was working as a curator at the museum at the Averbury stone circles, not far from Stonehenge, he had a chance to work at Stonehenge itself. “Events rushed me into a small dig there and I followed up the next year with another one,” he says. “These digs, small though they were, turned out to be extremely important for Stonehenge. I was very lucky — a child’s dream come true.”
Pitts revisited the work he’d done during those excavations, back in 1979 and 1980, when he researched his book HENGEWORLD, published in 2000, in which he probed the question of what Stonehenge was for. “I was just following up on things that had worried me, and one of the biggest discoveries I made was a huge collection of human skeletons, literally hundreds, that archeologists had excavated in the 1920s and 1930s,” Pitts says. “The whole lot were believed to have been destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941, during the war. And it turned out they had all survived.” Not only had they survived, but one of them — the skeleton known as 4.10.4, a decapitated man whose tale is told in the SECRETS OF THE DEAD episode “Murder at Stonehenge” — would help rewrite the history of Stonehenge during the past 3,000 or so years.
The partial skeletal remains had been languishing for years in the basement of the Natural History Museum in London when Pitts finally rediscovered them. The dead man’s name will never be known, nor his history, nor the crimes for which he was executed. Yet Pitts admits that finding the skeleton, and uncovering some of the secrets of how he died, was a profound experience. “There were one or two times when we were filming, for example when Jackie McKinley and I were with the skeleton in the Natural History Museum, when I did feel quite emotional about it,” he recalls. “We were looking at the bones and trying to figure out how he’d got the wounds, and it was obvious that we were talking about a real man. The tragedy now is that we cannot tell his personal story: he remains an unknown victim of early English politics and justice, a symbol more than an individual.”
