Every year, a million visitors are drawn to England to gaze upon the famous circle of stones, but the monument's meaning has continued to elude us. They were pulled from the Aubrey Holes and theriverside, and rearranged, perhaps enshrined, inside the sarsens.Movingthe sarsens was just one challenge for the builders of Stonehenge. During the time of Stonehenge, people were skilled atcarving stone and wood, and could have produced all these components.Bythe 1960s, people had embraced the monument as an observatory used by ancientastronomers to track the sun and moon. Legend has it that Ambrosias and his brother Uther, King Arthur’s father, are buried there as well.Many modern historians and archaeologists now agree that several distinct tribes of people contributed to Stonehenge, each undertaking a different phase of its construction. Some astronomers even claimed themystery of Stonehenge had been solved.Today,all that remains are traces of postholes, but their size indicates some heldtree trunks 15 feet high, weighing several tons. Most archaeologists have remained cool toward the glacial theory, however, wondering how the forces of nature could possibly have delivered the exact number of stones needed to complete the circle.More recently, signs of illness and injury in the human remains unearthed at Stonehenge led a group of British archaeologists to speculate that it was considered a place of healing, perhaps because bluestones were thought to have curative powers.While many believed Monmouth’s account to be the true story of Stonehenge’s creation for centuries, the monument’s construction predates Merlin—or, at least, the real-life figures who are said to have inspired him—by several thousand years. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, two miles (3 km) west of Amesbury.It consists of a ring of standing stones, each around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, seven feet (2.1 m) wide, and weighing around 25 tons.The stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred tumuli (burial mounds). This probably happened around2500 B.C., when the giant sarsens were installed in the center of the monument.Thesepits probably held the bluestones, brought all the way from Wales. Lintels may have been pulled up ramps and levered into place. Granted exclusive access to the dig site at Bluestonehenge, a prehistoric stone-circle monument recently discovered about a mile from Stonehenge, NOVA cameras join a new generation of researchers finding important clues to this enduring mystery.IfDurrington Walls marked the realm of the living, and Stonehenge the realm ofthe dead, perhaps the physical link between the two was the River Avon.Acircular ditch and bank surround the stones. A quick scan of maps showing maximum ice extent reveals that one map has stonehenge exactly on the edge. These range from seven to more than 40 tons.Anarmy of archaeologists deploys around Stonehenge.Stonehengeis an expenditure of labor on a grand scale. Located in southern England, it is comprised of roughly 100 massive upright stones placed in a circular layout. According to one longstanding theory, Stonehenge’s builders fashioned sledges and rollers out of tree trunks to lug the bluestones from the Preseli Hills. Stonehenge’s Multiphase Construction . While many modern scholars now agree that Stonehenge was once a burial ground, they have yet to determine what other purposes it served and how a civilization without modern technology—or even the wheel—produced the mighty monument.
Its age was eclipsed by a new technology, anew way of being.