The turf is scarcely back over last month’s excavations at Stonehenge, but already a new theory is being published about how the monument was designed and laid out.

Unlike many previous ideas, which posited precise measurements and astronomically exact orientations by people once called “a race of Neolithic Einsteins”, Anthony Johnson’s idea uses nothing more complex than two men, a few wooden stakes and a piece of rope.

In Solving Stonehenge he suggests that every period of Stonehenge, from the early circle of “Aubrey Holes” just inside the bank and ditch to the great sarsen trilithons, was laid out using simple but highly effective geometry based on the square, circle and hexagon. In the beginning, two stakes along the baseline and the rope were used to scribe arcs on the ground and construct a perpendicular at right angles; then a circle was drawn from where these lines crossed, a square drawn within and touching it, and a second square at 45 degrees superimposed to construct an octagon.

From the angles and mid-sides of this, the 56 Aubrey holes could be positioned, again using nothing but the stakes and rope. Similar methods were used to plot all the more complex aspects of the plan of Stonehenge, Johnson argues, including the circuit of sarsens with their lintels and the horsehoe of even taller trilithons standing inside.

Last summer he demonstrated that this could be done by laying out a full-sized plan in a field at Noke in Oxfordshire: the entire exercise could be done in two and a half hours by two people, he found. That people in the third millennium BC did construct such complex geometries from simple starts is proved, Johnson argues, by analysing the pattern on the famous Bush Barrow gold plaque found near Stonehenge in July 1808, and on a second plaque, also of gold, lozenge-shaped and decorated with concentric-lozenge designs, from Clandon in Dorset.

“Ideas had progressed far beyond the geometry of circles to create hexagons, accurate right angles, and the investigation of other geometric forms including decagons and pentagons,” he says.

“The cumulative evidence conspires to tell us that the internal integrity, precision and symmetry reflected in the design of Stonehenge was of paramount importance, clearly a vital and fundamental aspect of contemporary cosmology.”

Johnson believes that both the gold pieces and Stonehenge were planned “on a drawing board” before they were created. “It should be possible to work back to the original concept of its design and the methods used in its surveying,” he says.

Simple geometry within the monument itself, rather than external sightlines and astronomical orientations beyond that of the solstitial sunrise and sunset, is the key: the elaborate precision argued for by Professor Alexander Thom a generation ago (The Times, June 1, 1974; March 13, 1975) was, in Johnson’s view, unnecessary, as is Thom’s idea of a “megalithic yard” of 2.72 feet (in reality the approximation of a human stride).

“It is difficult at first to appreciate that the Neolithic surveyors set out the stones to the accuracy of a few centimetres — but they did, using nothing more than a piece of cord and a few marker pegs,” he concludes. Premeditation and prefabrication were the key to creating one of the most noted, most controversial, and still least understood of our prehistoric monuments.

— Solving Stonehenge, by Anthony Johnson, is published by Thames & Hudson