Archaeologists have concluded that Stonehenge, the ancient circle of standing stones erected on Salisbury Plain, is likely to have been a monument to unify the people of Britain.
Researchers from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth and UCL formed the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2003 in an attempt to test various hypotheses -- including one that it was a monument to the dead.
However, that was rejected after a large programme of archeological excavation and inspection of the social and economic context around its construction, pointed towards evidence that the stones are likely to have symbolised the ancestors of farming groups.
The monument is thought to have been built mainly between 3,000 and 2,500 BC -- at the end of a long period of conflict between the people of eastern and western Britain. "When Stonehenge was built," said Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, "there was a growing island-wide culture -- the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used from Orkney to the south coast. This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries."
Parker Pearson added: "Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification."
Unlike the modern day, when crowds converge on Stonehenge in midsummer, it seems that people tended to congregate there during the winter. Parker Pearson said: "We can tell from aging of the pig teeth that higher quantities of pork were eaten during midwinter at the nearby settlement of Durrington Walls, and most of the monuments in the Stonehenge area are aligned on sunrise and sunset at midwinter rather than midsummer."
However, originally, the monument's solstitial arrangement may have begun with a coincidence. The natural shape of the land around the monument aligns -- by chance -- with sunrise in midsummer and sunset in midwinter.
Parker Pearson said: "When we stumbled across this extraordinary natural arrangement of the sun's path being marked in the land, we realised that prehistoric people selected this place to build Stonehenge because of its pre-ordained significance. This might explain why there are eight monuments in the Stonehenge area with solstitial alignments, a number unmatched anywhere else. "Perhaps they saw this place as the centre of the world."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
