World Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries

World Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries

While Stonehenge is a very fascinating structure due to the big rocks that stand atop one another, the biggest mystery isn’t how it was created but why.

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World Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries

The Mysteries Of Stonehenge - What was Stonehenge used for and how and why was it built?

We described what you will actually see at Stonehenge on our What s Stonehenge? page. On this page we look at arguably the more interesting aspect of Stonehenge, what was it used for and why was it built.

The Neolithic age in which Stonehenge was built is so long ago that firm, factual information is sparse. As a result there is no shortage of conflicting dates and views about Stonehenge.

Nearly every year respected archaeologists will put forward papers suggesting dates need to be adjusted and our assumptions about Stonehenge changed. Just pick up a few books on Stonehenge in the gift shop and even fundamental dates will differ markedly from one book to another.

World Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries

The Archaeoastronomers viewpoint stems from the fact that nearly all the stones at Stonehenge are precisely sited and correlate to significant events of the planets orbit like solstices. A suggestion that Stonehenge is perhaps a place where ancient astronomy took place, perhaps part driven by the need to predict agricultural seasons.

The New Age viewpoint is a loose term we have used to summarise a spiritual input. Religion for want of a better term in Neolithic times had similarities to pagan religions nowadays. The concept of Mother Earth and Father the Sun overlap to some extent with the Archaeoastronomers viewpoint, the concept of 'energies' and the siting of Stonehenge at the intersection of many Ley Lines also follow a back to nature theme.

Today the Druid religion uses Stonehenge as a key religious monument, though druidism itself wasn't around at the time of the Neolithic's.

Why was Stonehenge constructed?

Thêm chú thíchWorld Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries

While there have been many theories as to why Stonehenge was constructed, recent discoveries indicate that Stonehenge’s landscape was a sacred area, one that underwent constant change. 

“It's part of a much more complex landscape with processional and ritual activities that go around it," Gaffney told Live Science, noting that people may have traveled considerable distances to come to Stonehenge. 

One new theory about Stonehenge, released in 2012 by members of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, is that Stonehenge marks the “unification of Britain,” a point when people across the island worked together and used a similar style of houses, pottery and other items.

It would explain why they were able to bring bluestones all the way from west Wales and how the labor and resources for the construction were marshaled.

In a news release, professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield said that "this was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries. Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour 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."

Facts & Theories About Mysterious Monument

Stonehenge is a massive stone monument located on a chalky plain north of the modern-day city of Salisbury, England. Research shows that the site has continuously evolved over a period of about 10,000 years. The structure that we call “Stonehenge” was built between roughly 5,000 and 4,000 years ago and that forms just one part of a larger, and highly complex, sacred landscape. 

World Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries

The biggest of Stonehenge’s stones, known as sarsens, are up to 30 feet (9 meters) tall and weigh 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) on average. It is widely believed that they were brought from Marlborough Downs, a distance of 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the north. 

Smaller stones, referred to as “bluestones” (they have a bluish tinge when wet or freshly broken), weigh up to 4 tons and come from several different sites in western Wales, having been transported as far as 140 miles (225 km). It’s unknown how people in antiquity moved them that far. Scientists have raised the possibility that during the last ice age glaciers carried these bluestones closer to the Stonehenge area and the monument’s makers didn’t have to move them all the way from Wales. Water transport through raft is another idea that has been proposed but researchers now question whether this method was viable. 

Domain of the Dead or British Unification?

The area around Stonehenge has a large number of burials and this has lead Professor Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University to suggest that it is a domain of the dead, while a Neolithic settlement nearby was the corresponding place of the living. More recently, Professor Parker has championed the idea that Stonehenge was built to unify the different peoples of the British island. "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," says Pearson. "This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries."

Pearson also points out that a site as big as Stonehenge would have required cooperation among many groups. "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 everything literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification," he explains.

So was Stonehenge a corral, a religious center, a place of healing, or symbol of British unity? Or was it all of the above? Scientists may never be able to say for sure. As Professor Richard Atkinson of University College, Cardiff, a researcher at Stonehenge, once said, "You have to settle for the fact that there are large areas of the past we cannot find out about..."

World Mysteries - The Stonehenge - World's Unsolved Mysteries