Neil Oliver takes a final look at how Stonehenge might have been used by ancient peoples by inspecting animal remains at Durrington Walls.
But despite all the competing theories, innovative experiments and new discoveries, Stonehenge still holds on to some of its most precious secrets. And in the end, perhaps it’s that enduring mystery which keeps Stonehenge alive in our collective imaginations.
Stonehenge long considered a solar or lunar observatory is now considered by Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright to be a place of healing.
The idea that Stonehenge was a place of the ancestors is explored by Ramilisonina from Madagascar trying to relate the monument to his beliefs.
As a shrine to the dead, Stonehenge takes on a mystical air and a feeling of unearthly power.
Interpretive archaeologists brought to bear a new set of thinking about the past and it stands in stark contrast to the New Archeology that went before it.
Many an antiquarian theory has led to Stonehenge being excavated repeatedly destroying much crucial evidence in the process.
The idea put forwards by Aubrey Burl that Stonehenge was somehow linked to death and burial was taken a step further by another group of archaeologists in the 1990s.
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.
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