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Scientists chip away at mystery of Stonehenge
Posted on Wednesday, May 07, 2008 (CDT) by Isis
 The mysterious circle of stones that rises on Salisbury Plain near here has stood as a marvel for thousands of years, its origins and purpose shrouded in the mists of history. But a just-completed excavation of Stonehenge, the first within the ancient circle in more than 40 years, could provide some of the first reliable explanations for one of the greatest wonders of the prehistoric world.
A team of British archeologists hopes to prove its theory that nearly 4,000 years ago Stonehenge was regarded not as a place of sacrament for the dead, but as a temple with unique healing powers. The dig is investigating about 82 bluestones - a double circle of rocks, some weighing as much as 4 tons, that were brought in during the second stage of Stonehenge, which began about 2150 B.C. and account for the first stone construction at the site.
About 150 years later, these were rearranged and surrounded by the much larger sarsen stones that have become iconic of Stonehenge. Yet it is the bluestones, somehow hauled to the Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales, that researchers say hold the key to the mystery of Stonehenge. Although the researchers found to their dismay that the area they examined had been tampered with in Roman times, they still hope the excavations will help show that the bluestones were once viewed as therapeutic.
Over the
years, Stonehenge's legends have been many. Some said the devil bought
the stones from a woman in Ireland; another story suggests they were
placed on the plain by the wizard Merlin; others have sworn that aliens
built the monument and left it as a place for worship, or that Druids
built it as a temple for sacrificial ceremonies.
"You could put 10
archeologists in a room, and you'd get at least 11 theories," said Dr.
Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archaeology, a private company involved in
the excavation, which was approved by English Heritage, which manages
Stonehenge.
"I think the one thing
everybody would agree on is that Stonehenge is a temple, which is easy
to lose sight of in the kind of to-ing and fro-ing of ideas."
The recent realization that
the site contained stones from mountains 250 miles away in Wales shed
new light on Stonehenge's origins.
Tim Darvill, a professor at
the University of Bournemouth, and Geoff Wainwright, president of the
Society of Antiquaries of London, have spent the last six years
researching Stonehenge and the rocky outcrop Carn Menyn, thought to be
the site in the Preseli Hills from which the bluestones were taken.
Darvill and Wainwright, the
co-directors of the dig, found the Welsh site to be a center for
ceremony and burials, where the springs that flowed below the rocks
were regarded by ancients as having medicinal powers. They hope that by
finding evidence to tie the stones from the Preseli Hills to those at
Stonehenge, they will have a better understand the site's purpose.
Darvill and Wainwright hope
to establish a more precise timeline for the construction of Stonehenge
to within 10 years by collecting samples from the excavation and
comparing them to those taken from the site in Wales through
radiocarbon dating.
The scientists also hope to
learn whether the stones were transported manually, as Darvill
believes, or whether perhaps the former Irish Sea Glacier pushed the
stones to Salisbury. One fact is certain: Their presence at Stonehenge
makes it unique among the stone circles of its era.
"Once they arrive here,
this monument becomes very different from any other kind of monument in
the British Isles. . . . And when they come here they elevate this
monument into something rather special," Darvill said one recent
afternoon, accenting various points of interest with the end of a long
hoe, as a student volunteer sifted buckets of dirt through a giant
metal sieve.
"You can make the analogy
with a medieval cathedral - it's a bog-standard Paris church until they
get those relics, and at that point it becomes a beautiful, marvelous
building," he said. "It changes its purpose at about that time from a
fairly standard henge to a temple of really European renown."
This theory was first
proposed in a book about Stonehenge by Darvill two years ago. According
to Fitzpatrick, it is one of the two most widely accepted theories
about the origins of Stonehenge.
The second theory is being
explored by another Stonehenge scholar, Mike Parker Pearson of the
University of Sheffield, who uncovered evidence of a village in
Durrington Walls, only a few miles away from the monument.
Pearson believes that
Stonehenge's true significance is in its relationship to a temple found
at Durrington Walls. Together, he believes, the temples served as
meccas for religious observance - Durrington Walls a site of feasts for
the living, Stonehenge a series of statues of the dead.
"There is certainly a
debate going on amongst archeologists in the UK at the moment,"
Fitzpatrick said. "We're all kind of waiting to see how it pans out;
we're waiting to see if the new excavations provide dating, which will
help us resolve some of these questions."
Now that researchers
believe the bluestones come from Wales, the question is why? If the
bluestones were just ordinary rocks, surely prehistoric peoples would
not have bothered to move them so far. One clue may be in the ancient
burial mounds that surround the site: Are they commemorations of the
dead or evidence of attempts to heal the living?
"There's people in the
landscape buried here who have come here perhaps like pilgrims, in
order to benefit from the things here," Darvill said. "You can imagine
a big temple like this is going to have shamans, it's going to have
witch doctors, it's going to have all the sorts of people who in
prehistoric terms would look after those who were ill."
Although the Romans may
have destroyed some evidence, the two scientists refuse to be deterred.
Their research "ties in with some big questions about the
interpretation of Stonehenge," Darvill said. "Once these bluestones
were moved here, people believed the place was important, it was
sacred."
Copyright: The Boston Globe
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