The Winter Solstice is now thought to be of greater significance to Stonehenge due to the changing society and the seasonal farming influences.
This idea that Stonehenge was built to mark the midwinter solstice is an enduring one and it has firmly entered into the public consciousness. Today, many people visit the site on the shortest day of the year.
Gerald Hawkins theory suggests that Stonehenge was a celestial computer to track, not the sun, but the moon and the Aubrey holes mark moon phases.
It wasn’t just the public that embraced Hawkins’ ideas. His work also inspired a group of so-called archaeoastronomers, who would in time, come to challenge the basis of his thesis.
A movement known as cultural-historical archaeology. It included the idea that all advanced ancient knowledge must have spread from the Near East.
And just as their theory of the Mycenaean connection was being discredited, so the British Empire was crumbling around their ears.
The controversy to identift the Stonehenge builders rumbles on; the Romans, the Druids OR a Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation of the Eastern Mediterranean.
William Stukeley’s Druid theory has lingered on in the public consciousness despite a century of archaeological evidence to the contrary. Its tenacity demonstrates the power of a romantic idea. Sometimes a fiction is simply more appealing than the truth.
Experimental Archaeology like the project in Raising Stonehenge helps scientists understand the challenges ancient man would have faced.
What’s interesting with experiments at Stonehenge is that almost all of them have been done for television. So we get this great visual spectacle and a wide public thinks about how Stonehenge was built.
How the bluestones travelled from the Preseli Mountains in Wales to Salisbury Plain is a contentious issue.
The debate between some geologists and the archaeological community continues to this day, and it will probably never be completely resolved, as each side interprets the evidence differently, finding support for their own theories.
Moving the massive bluestones to Salisbury Plain has long been a mooted point. Richard Atkinson has a novel theory.
Richard Atkinson’s experiments proved that moving the bluestones would certainly have been possible. But in time, new evidence would emerge that cast doubt on the whole theory that humans were involved in moving the stones at all.
Stonehenge is one of the great British monuments. Standing on Salisbury Plain it has been the source of myth, legend and much controversy over its origin.
Dr Alice Roberts trawls through the BBC archives to try and establish the latest truth behind this historic edifice.
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