Stonehenge it is perhaps the most famous of all henges, vast circular monuments built with wood or stone that spread across the British countryside. The prehistoric monument was probably erected in what is now England sometime between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC and some of stones were transported from neighboring Wales – it is no small feat for a Stone Age civilization.
It must have been a colossal effort and raises the question: Why Earth did they bother? Why did people of the Stone Age build so many henges?
“The short answer is that I don’t know and no one else does,” said Rosemary Hill, historian and author of “Stonehenge” (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2008).
Related: What are piles of stones?
Before we go any further, it is important to note that, technically speaking, Stonehenge is not even a henge. The word “henge” is actually a relatively recent term, first defined by British archaeologist Thomas Kendrick in 1932 to mean a circular bench with a ditch inside it and one or more entrances projecting through the bank. “But Stonehenge is the opposite, it is a bank in a ditch,” Hill told Live Science.
Another funny fact: even ignoring the reverse order of the ditch and the ravine, most henges still wouldn’t have looked like Stonehenge because they were usually made of wood, which makes sense. Wood is everywhere and is much easier to carve and transport, even if it is not as durable. It wasn’t until the 20th century that archaeologists he realized that Britain once prided itself on an abundance of wooden henges that had long since rotted and disappeared from view.
“After the First World War, when people started flying over the country, they started to see where these buildings were because they left traces on the ground with their mounds. People didn’t really notice until they got a panoramic view, “Hill said.” They are also unique to Britain. “
In Ireland and the French region of Brittany, there are also some similar stone circles, which, although technically not henges, overlap in academic discussions. There is also a hengé-type wooden monument dating from the late Stone Age and early Bronze, not far from Berlin, and 4,500 years old “wooden circle” monument in Portugal. If we count all these different types of circles together, there are thought in thousands spread across the British Isles and parts of continental Europe. So, back to the question at hand: why?
Researchers have a myriad of ideas proposed over the years, suggesting that monuments like Stonehenge were used as sacred hunting grounds, community gathering places, astronomical calendars, structures for sound amplification, cemeteries or even ancestral healing havens. Excavations offer supporting evidence for some of these claims.
“They found [human] remains at Stonehenge, this is strong evidence that it was a burial place and is oriented towards the sunset during the Winter Solstice“Explained Hill.” So I think you can say that it has to do with the dead and the solstices. It is reasonable to think of it as a ritual place and there is no evidence of people eating or living there. “
But this is not the case for other difficulties, such as the Durrington Walls, which, incidentally, is just 3.2 kilometers from Stonehenge and contains evidence of people partying there, apparently in pork. “Henges could have been used for different reasons, but I don’t know and anyone who can tell you for sure is being too ambitious,” said Hill. “What the henges seem to have in common is that they don’t appear to have been closed and may have been meeting places.”
That uncertainty may seem like an anti-climatic answer to the question of why Stone Age Europeans thought it appropriate to build so many circular monuments, but there is a kind of magic about not knowing, Hill said. “Stonehenge remains a mystery, and you can be a Druid or an anthropologist or an archaeologist or a New Age adept and you can bring your own things to him. “
Originally published on Live Science.