What is stonehenge

Indeed, many of the springs and wells in southwest Wales are still believed to have healing powers and are used in this way by local adherents to traditional practices. Evidence that people made healing pilgrimages to Stonehenge also comes from human remains found in the area, most spectacularly from the richest Neolithic grave ever found in the British Isles.

The bones of the Amesbury Archer tell a story of a sick, injured traveler coming to Stonehenge from as far away as the Swiss or German Alps. Just 15 feet from where the Amesbury Archer was buried, archaeologists discovered another set of human remains, these of a younger man perhaps 20 to 25 years old. Bone abnormalities shared by both men suggest they could have been related —a father aided by his son, perhaps. Had they come to Stonehenge together in search of its healing powers?

Remarkably, although Stonehenge is one of the most famous monuments in the world, definitive data about it are scarce. To strengthen their case for Stonehenge as a prehistoric Lourdes, Darvill and Wainwright needed to establish that chronology with greater certainty. Had the bluestones been erected by the time the Amesbury Archer made his pilgrimage to the megaliths?

Such questions could be answered only by an excavation within Stonehenge itself. Darvill and Wainwright were well placed for such a project. Following these guidelines, Darvill and Wainwright requested official permission for the archaeological equivalent of keyhole surgery in order to study part of the first bluestone setting on the site. Over the previous weekend, the team had set up a temporary building that would serve as a base for operations and marked out the plot to be excavated.

The trench that Darvill and Wainwright marked out for the excavation was surprisingly small: just 8 by 11 feet, and 2 to 6 feet deep in the southeastern sector of the stone circle. But the trench, wedged between a towering sarsen stone and two bluestones, was far from a random choice. In fact, a portion of it overlapped with the excavation carried out by archaeologist Richard Atkinson and colleagues in that had partially revealed though not for the first time one of the original bluestone sockets and gave reason to believe that another socket would be nearby.

The GPS-guided versions were able to pinpoint some of those discoveries to within one centimeter. The Gaffneys believed that Stonehenge scholarship needed a massive magnetometer- and radar-led survey of the whole site. Around the same time, an Austrian archaeologist named Wolfgang Neubauer, now of the Boltzmann Institute, was hoping to conduct large-scale projects all over Europe using tools including GPS magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar.

Suddenly, instead of waiting weeks or months to see what the machines had found, it was possible to cover several acres with magnetometers and radar in a day and to display that information on a screen almost instantaneously.

One of the areas Neubauer wanted to scan was Stonehenge, and in the spring of he contacted Vince Gaffney. A few months later, the Boltzmann Institute and the University of Birmingham—plus several other British and European universities, museums and companies that contributed expertise and resources—began their collaboration at Stonehenge. All-terrain vehicles dragged the magnetometer sensors on long strings.

Delicate instruments covering hard, uneven ground kept mechanics and technicians busy. In a multimedia room at the University of Birmingham there was a vast touch screen, six feet by nine, on which a new map of the Stonehenge landscape appeared. Gaffney pointed out the key features. There was Stonehenge itself, marked by the familiar circles. To the north was the long, thin strip called the Stonehenge Cursus or the Greater Cursus, which was demarcated by ditches, and ran east to west for nearly two miles.

The Cursus was given its name by the antiquarian William Stukeley in the 18th century because it looked like an ancient Roman race course. Its construction predates the first building work at Stonehenge by several hundred years. Gaffney also pointed out the Cursus Barrows—hillocks containing mass human graves—just south of the Cursus itself, and King Barrow Ridge to the east.

Scattered all over the map were blotches of black: features without names. These were new finds, including the more than 15 possible new or poorly understood Neolithic monuments. Standing in front of this constellation of evidence, he seemed unable to decide where to start, like a child at the Christmas tree.

These things we know nothing about. He saved his greatest enthusiasm for the discoveries that had been made in the Cursus. Because the Cursus runs east to west, archaeologists have always believed that its presence owes something to the passage of the sun. The monument must be significant: It was dug in the fourth millennium B. First of all, they found gaps in the ditch, in particular a very large break in the northern side, to allow people to enter and exit the Cursus.

Centuries of fieldwork since show the monument was more than a millennium in the making, starting out 5, years ago as a circular earthen bank and ditch. A complicated pattern of wooden posts was replaced in about B. These huge sandstone blocks, each weighing around 25 tons, were transported some 19 miles 30 kilometers to create a continuous outer circle with five trilithons pairs of uprights with a lintel on top forming a horseshoe within.

It's been estimated that it took well over 20 million hours to construct Stonehenge. Modern debate over the monument's meaning has two main camps: those who see it as a holy site, and others who believe it represents a scientific observatory.

Both camps base their theories on the site's celestial influence, with alignments to the sun and moon taken as evidence of rituals linked to the changing seasons and the summer and winter solstices. Alternatively, alignments identified particularly with stars point to a megalithic calendar used for working out dates or to reflect or predict astronomical events such as solar eclipses.

Recently a radical new theory has emerged—that Stonehenge served as a "prehistoric Lourdes" where people came to be healed. This idea revolves around the smaller bluestones, which, researchers argue, must have been credited with magical powers for them to have been floated, dragged, and hauled miles kilometers from west Wales.

Excavations at Stonehenge co-directed by Darvill in bolstered the hypothesis, also based on a number of Bronze Age skeletons unearthed in the area that show signs of bone deformities.

Competing to solve the enduring prehistoric puzzle is Sheffield University's Mike Parker Pearson, co-leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is partly funded by the National Geographic Society.

Discoveries by the project team supported Parker Pearson's claim that Stonehenge was a center for ancestor worship linked by the River Avon and two ceremonial avenues to a matching wooden circle at nearby Durrington Walls. The two circles with their temporary and permanent structures represented, respectively, the domains of the living and the dead, according to Parker Pearson.

The theory is that Stonehenge is a kind of spirit home to the ancestors. For centuries, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over the many mysteries of Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument that Neolithic builders toiled over for an estimated 1, years. While many modern scholars now agree that it served as a sacred burial ground, they have yet Like most of the bargain-hunters who packed the Palace Theatre in Salisbury, England, on the afternoon of September 21, , Cecil Chubb was looking for a deal.

Legend says the wealthy year-old lawyer had been dispatched by his wife to purchase a set of dining chairs, but Stonehenge was built in phases. Around B. Inside the bank were 56 pits, which became known as the Aubrey Holes, after antiquarian London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom and one of the largest and most important cities in the world.

The area was originally settled by early hunter gatherers around 6, B. Buckingham Palace is the London home and the administrative center of the British royal family. The enormous building and extensive gardens are an important site of ceremonial and political affairs in the United Kingdom, as well as a major tourist attraction. But for a monarchy Westminster Abbey is one of the most famous religious buildings in the world, and it has served an important role in British political, social and cultural affairs for more than 1, years.

In spite of its name, the facility is no longer an abbey, and while it still hosts To this day, countless theater festivals around the world honor his work, students Queen Elizabeth II has since served as reigning monarch of the United Kingdom England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and numerous other realms and territories, as well as head of the Commonwealth, the group of 53 sovereign nations that includes many former British