After 10 Years of Research Archaeologists Solve The Mystery of Stonehenge
After the largest program of archaeological research ever mounted at Stonehenge, researchers have concluded that Stonehenge was built as a monument to unify the peoples of Britain, after a long period of conflict and regional difference between eastern and western Britain.
Its stones are thought to have symbolized the ancestors of different groups of earliest farming communities in Britain, with some stones coming from southern England and others from west Wales.
Then there’s this: Parker Pearson and the SRP team firmly reject ideas that Stonehenge was inspired by ancient Egyptians or extra-terrestrials.
That’s good to know.
UPDATE: Heh.
Really like to know the logistics. Since it was Neolithic, I suppose the folks could get together after harvest, which seems to agree with the mid-winter dating of various lunch box detritus.
Not much freezes hard there, coming out of the Holocene Maximum, in a predictable fashion allowing the stones to be snow-slid along, so this would be done in mud. Shudder to think of it. Maybe they prepared all-weather roads, some of whose remains might be discernible.
But roads go in the logical places and the next folks to come along would likely build on top of earlier roads. Still….
Comment by Richard Aubrey — June 26, 2012 @ 2:27 pm
I was thinking something similar with the winter thing, somewhat similar to the Egyptian situation: some of these large ‘public works’ projects can be done in the non-agricultural season to give people something to do, as it were. In Egypt, they did a lot of building (at least the tasks that required mass labor)when the fields were inundated and the populace wasn’t actively farming (i.e., producing taxes).
Comment by acagle — June 26, 2012 @ 4:04 pm