Stupendous: The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum reviewed

This exhibition is Hamlet without the Prince, and all the better for it. Stonehenge is not there; it remains in Wiltshire. But 430 astonishing artefacts from the neolithic and bronze ages fill a hairpin course like a Roman chariot-racing circuit in a vast room. It is blessedly free from videos of prehistoric Britons tugging on ropes to move monoliths.

There is a henge on display, though. (The word in its technical sense was invented in 1932 by Sir Thomas Kendrick, later director of the British Museum.) This is the Seahenge that emerged on the shore at Holme-next-the-Sea in 1998: 55 big oak posts round a two-ton upturned rooted trunk. Gloriously, being trees, they can be dated to a year: 2049 BC. It was sad that it had to be dug up, but here it is, anatomised in a museum. Like Stonehenge it is aligned with the sun.

In a generation, such fortuitous archaeological discoveries, combined with the finds of metal detectorists, have transformed knowledge of the centuries when Stonehenge throve.