A 10-year research project into the origins of Stonehenge has concluded that the famous array of stones was built as a monument to mark the growing unification of culture in Britain at the end of the Stone Age. The boulders may 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.

Previous theories have suggested the great rock circle was used as a prehistoric observatory, a sun temple, a place of healing, or a temple of the ancient druids. But research teams from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth, and University College London — collectively called the Stonehenge Riverside Project — rejected those theories after studying not just the stones themselves, 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, 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,” said Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield. “This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries,” he said.

“Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labor 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,” he added.
Stonehenge may have been built in a place that already had special significance for prehistoric Britons. The SRP team have 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,” said Professor Parker Pearson said. “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 center of the world.”

The researchers suggested that the winter solstice was the more significant time of the year when Stonehenge was built 5,000 to 4,500 years ago.

“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,” Pearson said. “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.”

Pearson and the 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,” he said. “In fact, Britain’s Neolithic people were isolated from the rest of Europe for centuries. 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.“

The Stonehenge Riverside Project’s researchers also found houses and a large village near Stonehenge at Durrington Walls, discovered the site of a former stone circle – Bluestonehenge – and revised the dating of Stonehenge itself.

All these discoveries are now presented in Parker Pearson’s new book Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery, published by Simon & Schuster. The research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, National Geographic, and many other funding bodies.

In affiliation with Summit County Voice. Stonehenge photo by Shutterstock

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