Archeologists cannot precisely date all of the stones, ditches, holes, and other features of Stonehenge, but the monument was recently the subject of a large radiocarbon dating program which has led to a new chronology of its construction. The development of the monument is broken into three phases:
Phase 1 (4950 to 4900 years ago) The best dated phase. No stone structures were actually assembled at the site at this time, but a roughly circular ditch about 320 feet in diameter, 20 feet wide, and 4.5 to 7 feet deep was dug. Animal bones, chiefly of cattle, were placed at the bottom of the ditch; dating of the bones indicates that they are 200 years older than the ditch itself, which suggests that they may have been removed from an older ritual location and brought to Stonehenge. Ringing the inside of the ditch was a high bank, built up out of the chalky soil and rubble that had been removed in the excavation of the ditch. Probably also during phase 1, a circle of 56 holes -- named the Aubrey Holes after their discoverer, 17th-century British antiquarian John Aubrey -- were dug inside the inner bank. The holes probably held timber posts.
Phase 2 (beginning approximately 4900 years ago) The earthwork monument is remodeled, and a timber structure built. Holes indicate that timber posts were erected at the southern entrance and at the northeast entrance, where they might have formed a corridor through which the rising sun would shine at mid-summer. By this time the timber posts that the Aubrey Holes once held had rotted away, and the Holes were used as a cremation cemetery; the cremated bones from at least 200 bodies, perhaps many more, were in the top of the holes.
Phase 3 (4550 to 3600 years ago) This last phase of construction is divided into at least three sub-phases. First, two concentric circles of about 80 bluestone pillars, carved and transported from the Preseli Mountains in southwestern Wales (how they were moved is still a mystery) were erected at the center of the monument. Archeologists believe that the entranceway of the bluestones was aligned with sunrise at the summer solstice.
Next, the bluestone structures were dismantled, and a stone circle of standing sarsens -- enormous sandstone blocks, the tallest over 22 feet tall and weighing 45 tons -- was erected, and capped with horizontal sarsens. A horseshoe-shaped arrangement of five pairs of standing stones with horizontal caps (the trilithons) was placed inside the circle.
Later, the previously removed bluestones were placed first into an oval pattern within the sarsen horseshoe and then later rearranged into a horseshoe, and a circle of bluestones was fixed outside the sarsen horseshoe, but within the outer sarsen circle.
Also during phase 3, the station stones and the large heel stone near where the mid-summer sun rises, were probably added to the monument. The avenue, the ancient formal approach to Stonehenge, was constructed at the northeastern entranceway
It is impossible to know what drew the first Neolithic people five millennia ago to the grassy Salisbury plain that would eventually house Stonehenge. Remove the stones, the earthen works, the history, and the site becomes just another field. And yet once the first ditch and earthen bank were built 5000 years ago, Stonehenge became something -- something that drew people there, to build, to modify, to reinvent the site -- although archeologists don't know what that first something was.
By the time the first megaliths were put up, however, Stonehenge had become a site of ritual importance to the local population. Most likely, the rituals involved death. In fact, before the megaliths were added, Stonehenge was used as a cremation cemetery; hundreds of bodies were buried there. That suggests, says archeologist and Stonehenge expert Mike Pitts, that "in the very early years of Stonehenge there was a very strong association with the disposal of the dead and ceremonies involving the dead."
After the bluestones and sarsen stones were added some 4000 years ago, the connection with death continued, although archeologists can't be exactly sure how the site was used and what it meant to the local people. "At the end of the day we are just guessing, because this is thousands of years before people are writing anything down, but there are a number of clues," says Pitts. One of the most obvious -- and most often misinterpreted -- clues is the orientation of the stone monuments to the mid-summer sunrise, on the northeastern side, and to the mid-winter sunset on the southwestern side. "There was clearly something deliberate there. People have all sorts of ideas about what this adds up to, what it means," says Pitts, including theories that the stones represent some sort of astronomical calendar or a mathematical computer. Those theories have no merit, Pitts says. "You'll find very few archeologists who agree with that. The alignment is very much a symbolic one rather than a scientific one, in the same way that Christian churches are aligned east/west, which is approximately sunrise/sunset. That is symbolic -- so symbolic that people have forgotten why it is there."
Another clue is that at the same time that the megaliths were added to Stonehenge, another massive circle was being constructed a few miles to the east -- only in this case, of wood. "Wood is a material that is alive, and stone is dead," says Pitts, "so let's just suppose that the wooden sites are places where people go for ceremonies when they are alive, and perhaps where people who are dead are thought of in some transitional form." After some time, the spirit of that person would move to Stonehenge to join the ancestors in the world of the dead. The stones themselves might have represented those ancestors. "Maybe this happens in some particular way at midsummer," he says, "when the worlds of the living and dead and ancestors are tied up with the movement of the sun and perhaps the moon."
Many of the massive stones had already begun to fall down by 1500 BC. Until the rediscovery and analysis of skeleton number 4.10.4, the Anglo-Saxon man beheaded and unceremoniously buried at Stonehenge, archeologists had no clues about what significance the monument might have had between the last construction there and the 19th century AD. "We somehow imagined that Stonehenge was barely noticed during that time," says Pitts (although references do exist to the monument, including a medieval story that it was the burial place of a legendary king).
"When we identified this execution as an Anglo-Saxon event, it changed everything." Although the word "stonehenge" means "stone gallows" in early English, archeological evidence indicates that executions were not normally conducted there in Anglo-Saxon times. "So there was something exceptional about this event, that could have been quite powerfully frightening and mythologically very important. The feelings these people had toward Stonehenge at that time, not least the poor bloke who had his head cut off, were obviously very real and significant, and until now we had no idea at all."
You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or
interesting stories for the world to read and respond to Click hereScroll all the way down to read replies.Show all stories by Author:  15070 ( Click here )
Spring is coming |
