Stonehenge started as enormous cemetery

British researchers have anticipated a new hypothesis for the genesis of Stonehenge: It may have started as a huge interment land for leader’s families around 3,000 B.C. New studies of cremated human leftovers excavated from the site propose that about 500 years before the Stonehenge we know today was built, a larger stone circle was erected at the same site as a society graveyard, researchers said Saturday.
"These were men, women, children, so presumably family groups," University College London professor Mike Parker Pearson, who led the team, said."We'd thought that maybe it was a place where a dynasty of kings was buried, but this seemed to be much more of a community, a different kind of power structure."
Parker Pearson said archeologists premeditated the cremated bones of 63 individuals, and whispered that they were obscured around 3,000 B.C. The spot of many of the cremated bodies was initially marked by bluestones, he said. That earlier rounded field, which deliberate around 300 feet (91 meters) across, could have been the burial ground for about 200 more people, Parker Pearson said.
The team, which included intellectuals from more than a dozen British universities, also put forth some theories about the point of the second Stonehenge - the tombstone still footing in the geography in southern England today.
Assorted theories have been anticipated about Stonehenge, counting that it was a place for Druid worship, an observatory for astronomical studies, or a place of curing, built by early residents of Britain who roamed around with their herds. Parker Pearson said the latest study recommended that Stonehenge should be seen less a temple of worship than a kind of construction project that served to unite people from across Britain.
Scrutiny of the remains of a Neolithic arrangement near the monument indicated that thousands of people traveled from as far as Scotland to the site, bringing their livestock and families for huge feasts and merriment during the winter and summer solstices.
"We don't think were living there all the time. We could tell that by when they were killing the pigs - they were there for the solstices," he said. The researchers consider that the builders converged seasonally to build Stonehenge, but not for very long - likely over an era of a decade or so.
The mass tombstone construction is idea to end about the time when the"Beaker people," so called because of their typical ceramic, arrived from continental Europe, Parker Pearson said.

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New Theory Explains Stonehenge Mystery

After 10 years of archaeological investigations, researchers from the Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP) 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.
The SRP team explored not just Stonehenge and its landscape but also the wider social and economic context of the monument’s main stages of construction around 3,000 BC and 2,500 BC.
“When Stonehenge was built”, said Prof 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. 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.”
Stonehenge may have been built in a place that already had special significance for prehistoric Britons. The team has found that its solstice-aligned avenue sits upon a series of natural landforms that, by chance, form an axis between the directions of midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.
“When we stumbled across this extraordinary natural arrangement of the sun’s path being marked in the land, we realized 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,” Prof Parker Pearson said.
Although many people flocked to Stonehenge yesterday for the summer solstice, it seems that the winter solstice was the more significant time of the year when Stonehenge was built 5,000-4,500 years ago.
“We can tell from ageing 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. At Stonehenge itself, the principal axis appears to be in the opposite direction to midsummer sunrise, towards midsummer sunset, framed by the monument’s largest stone setting, the great trilithon.”
Prof Parker Pearson and the SRP team firmly reject ideas that Stonehenge was inspired by ancient Egyptians or extra-terrestrials.
“All the architectural influences for Stonehenge can be found in previous monuments and buildings within Britain, with origins in Wales and Scotland. In fact, Britain’s Neolithic people were isolated from the rest of Europe for centuries,” the archaeologist explained. “Britain may have become unified but there was no interest in interacting with people across the Channel. Stonehenge appears to have been the last gasp of this Stone Age culture, which was isolated from Europe and from the new technologies of metal tools and the wheel.”
Previous theories have suggested the great stone circle was used as a prehistoric observatory, a sun temple, a place of healing, and a temple of the ancient druids. The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s researchers have rejected all these possibilities after the largest programme of archaeological research ever mounted on this iconic monument. As well as finding houses and a large village near Stonehenge at Durrington Walls, they have also discovered the site of a former stone circle – Bluestonehenge – and revised the dating of Stonehenge itself.
All these discoveries are now presented in Prof Parker Pearson’s new book “Stonehenge: exploring the greatest Stone Age mystery”.

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