Meet the Henge Builders
Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 8:48 am
http://www.archaeology.org/0801/abstracts/henge.html
Stonehenge 1,000 yrs. older!? That would make it built ca 4,000 BC.?The view has changed little since Hawthorne's time, but my vision of Stonehenge today is very different. Artists, mystics, and scientists have contemplated the stones for centuries, calling them everything from a place to summon demons to the world's first computer. Hawthorne didn't find any answers here. It is, he wrote, "a mystery as to who built it, and how, and for what purpose." But now, as modern archaeology reaches beyond the stones, we are finding a ceremonial landscape as unique as the megaliths within it:
The remnants of mid-winter feasts at the nearby town of Durrington Walls show that the winter solstice may have been the important time for celebrations at Stonehenge.
Chemical analysis of bones from burials near Stonehenge reveal that people were immigrating to the area from the European continent.
New carbon-14 dates indicate that Stonehenge is 1,000 years older than archaeologists previously believed.
A wooden henge at Durrington Walls that has lead to the contorversial new idea that wood henges were associated with rituals for the living while Stonehenge was associated with rituals for the dead.