![Stonehenge Decoded , Secrets of Stonehenge , Explore several mysteries behind the construction of Stonehenge.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Secrets of Stonehenge , Explore several mysteries behind the construction of Stonehenge.
![Stonehenge Decoded , New Stonehenge Discovery , Archaeologists uncover new sites that help reveal the truth about Stonehenge.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , New Stonehenge Discovery , Archaeologists uncover new sites that help reveal the truth about Stonehenge.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel and Stonehenge Origins , NIgel Tufnel talks about the origins of Stonehenge.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel and Stonehenge Origins , NIgel Tufnel talks about the origins of Stonehenge.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Stonehenge Monument , See a recreation of how Stonehenge may have been raised 4500 years ago.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Stonehenge Monument , See a recreation of how Stonehenge may have been raised 4500 years ago.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Ancestral Stones , Hauling the giant stones to Stonehenge was a monumental devotion. Watch a recreation of how the builders might have made this perilous pilgrimage.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Ancestral Stones , Hauling the giant stones to Stonehenge was a monumental devotion. Watch a recreation of how the builders might have made this perilous pilgrimage.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel's Viewing Habits , Nigel Tufnel speaks about his viewing habits.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel's Viewing Habits , Nigel Tufnel speaks about his viewing habits.
![Stonehenge Decoded , City of the Living , The builders of Stonehenge have long remained a mystery. Now archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson sheds amazing new light on an ancient civilization.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , City of the Living , The builders of Stonehenge have long remained a mystery. Now archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson sheds amazing new light on an ancient civilization.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel's Experiments , Nigel Tufnel experiments with harmonics.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel's Experiments , Nigel Tufnel experiments with harmonics.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel in the Lab , Nigel Tufnel in the lab to explore Stonehenge mysteries.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel in the Lab , Nigel Tufnel in the lab to explore Stonehenge mysteries.
![Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel's Theories , Nigel Tufnel is interviewed by Jim Piddock about his Stonehenge theories.]()
Stonehenge Decoded , Nigel Tufnel's Theories , Nigel Tufnel is interviewed by Jim Piddock about his Stonehenge theories.
Stonehenge Decoded,The stone is pulled vertical at stonehenge.
Stonehenge Decoded,The city of the living.
Stonehenge Decoded,The southern circle at mid-summer solstice sunset.
Stonehenge Decoded,Execution Arena, Archers wait for victim..
Stonehenge Decoded,Predawn at Stonehenge at midsummer solstice.
Stonehenge Decoded,The stone pulled uphill.
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Stonehenge Theories
By William Lee
As the English scholar Henry of Huntington wrote back in 1130, Stonehenge is a place “where stones of an amazing size are set up in the manner of doorways, so that one door seems to be set upon another. Nor can anyone guess by what means so many stones were raised so high, or why they were built there.” The people who quarried the immense sarsens and the smaller bluestones—the latter of which seem to have come from far away and then arranged them into a circular monument came and went many centuries ago, without leaving an explanation, either written or remembered, of how they built it or what purpose it was intended to serve. It’s not surprising, then, that the mysterious monument has spawned a wealth of theories, ranging from the mythic belief that it was fashioned by an ancient sorcerer to the notion that it was some sort of gigantic prehistoric computer. Some even have speculated that its origin is extraterrestrial. Until one such narrative is conclusively proven to be fact, it’s likely that those who stare in wonder at the structure will continue to come up with new and perhaps even stranger explanations.
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Stonehenge Theories:
The Merlin Myth
Legend states that Merlin summoned the stones that make up Stonehenge from the Giant's Circle in Ireland.
Mid-12th Century pseudo-historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose book Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”) presented the legend of King Arthur as fact, was perhaps the first to come up with an elaborate, fanciful explanation for Stonehenge’s existence. According to Geoffrey, the monument’s bluestones originated in Africa, where ancient giants scooped them up because of their healing properties and transported them to the mythical Mount Killaraus in Ireland, where they formed the Giants’ Circle. But when Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons, wanted to create a memorial to slain warriors, the magician Merlin suggested to him that the stones would make excellent building material. The king sent an army to defeat the Irish in battle, but they were unable to move the stones, until Merlin used his sorcery to dismantle the structure and transport it across the sea—proving, in the process, that the supernatural was more potent than brute force.
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Stonehenge Theories:
A Roman Temple
Stonehenge at sunrise. John Webb suggested that Stonehenge was the ruins of a Tuscan-style temple constructed by the Romans.
In 1620, the eccentric English architect Inigo Jones was commissioned by King James I to document the structure of Stonehenge and investigate its origin. In 1655, three years after Jones’ death, his son-in-law and assistant John Webb published a book, The Most Remarkable Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly Called Stone-Heng, Restored, supposedly based upon notes left behind by the architect. The book depicts Stonehenge as the ruins of a Tuscan-style temple, built by the Romans during their occupation of Britain in the First through Fifth Centuries AD, to venerate Coelus, the Roman god of the sky. The Roman theory was in vogue for only a few years before it was attacked by another writer, Dr. Walter Charleton, who argued that Stonehenge actually had been built by the Danish invaders who followed the Romans. Modern archaeological research, of course, eventually would show that Stonehenge predated both groups by thousands of years.
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Stonehenge Theories:
Built by Druids
Stukeley believed that the builders of Stonehenge aligned the monument with the magnetic North. Although incorrect, he was the first to attempt to connect Stonehenge and natural phenomena.
Dr. William Stukeley was an 18th Century physician who had a parallel career as an investigator of antiquarian ruins, and also dabbled in mysticism (he was one of the first prominent English gentlemen to become a Freemason). In 1740, Stukeley published Stonehenge, A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids, a work that he envisioned as part of a multi-volume history of mankind. Stukeley argued that mankind started out with a single, universal patriarchal religion, which as it spread was altered and subverted by pagan idolatry before ultimately being restored by Jesus. By Stukeley’s account, England was visited in 460 BC by travelers from the Middle East—possibly Phoenicians, a seafaring people who lived to the just north of ancient Canaan, the land conquered by the Israelites. The visitors, who were followers of the ancient meta-religion, founded the pre-Christian Celtic religion of the Druid priests, and built Stonehenge as a place of worship. Stukeley’s wildly errant calculation of the monument’s age was based upon his belief that the builders understood the principles of magnetism and had aligned the monument with magnetic North, which he assumed oscillated in a regular pattern (rather than wandering randomly, as it actually does). As later researchers discovered, Stonehenge actually was far older than the Druids. Stukeley was, however, the first to try to connect Stonehenge’s location and design to natural phenomena.
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Stonehenge Theories:
Bronze Age Religious Site
The Amesbury Archer in the Salisbury Museum is an example of a Bronze Age burial.
Sir John Lubbock, the influential mid-19th century archaeologist who invented the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic, was the first to date Stonehenge as a Bronze Age site, based upon bronze objects found in nearby graves and the fact that the occupants had been cremated. He also correctly deduced that the monument had been built in stages over a long period. In his 1865 book, Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by the Ancient Remains and Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, Lubbock compared and noted similarities between Stonehenge and other monolithic stone structures elsewhere in the world, in particular, to Buddhist temples in India. “In the most celebrated example, at Sanchee, the circle consists of roughly squared upright stone posts, joined at the top by an architrave of the same thickness as the posts, exactly as at Stonehenge,” he wrote. Like those temples, Lubbock concluded, Stonehenge also had been built as a place of worship.
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Stonehenge Theories:
Celestial Observatory
Several theories proposed a connection between Stonehenge's purpose and astronomy.
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, the renowned English scientist and astronomer who was the co-discoverer of the element helium and founded the scientific journal Nature, also dabbled in antiquities. Lockyer developed a theory that ancient temples were aligned according to the position of the sunrise at the time they were built. In 1901, he wrote a paper in which he assumed that portion of Stonehenge known as the Heel Stone had been originally aligned with the Summer Solstice, and on that basis calculated—incorrectly, as we now know-- that the monument had been built in 1800 BC. In 1906, he published a book, Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered, in which he pointed to astronomical similarities between Stonehenge and Egyptian temples, and argued that the English monument had been built by people from that region. 57 years later, American astronomer Gerald Hawkins used a computer to do a much more elaborate and exacting study of Stonehenge's astronomical alignments. His analysis, first published in Nature and later in the 1965 book Stonehenge Decoded, found 165 points on the structure associated with movements of the Sun and Moon (but not any stars or visible planets). He proposed that Stonehenge was in itself a sort of ancient computer, designed to predict lunar eclipses.
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Stonehenge Theories:
Ley Line Vortex
Watkins theorized that select travel routes highlighted a network of straight lines which connected various ancient landmarks.
In the early 1920s, a photographer and self-taught antiquarian named Alfred Watkins published two books, Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, in which he theorized that various ancient landmarks were connected by a network of straight lines, which he believed were travel routes through England’s once-lush forests. Watkins’ ideas were viewed skeptically by professional archaeologists, but they were embraced enthusiastically by amateurs, who formed the Straight Track Club and traveled around the countryside in an effort to map the routes, which Watkins called “ley lines,” after the Anglo-Saxon word for a cleared strip of ground. The group actually visited Stonehenge in 1930. Over time, students of the occult and New Age philosophy took the concept and expanded upon it, positing that ley lines were conduits for metaphysical energy. They also believe that the connecting points in the network, which often happen to be ancient places of worship, concentrate that power. Stonehenge is one such point, situated along a 22-mile-long ley line that runs from the southwest to the northeast and connects a series of prehistoric burial sites.
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Stonehenge Theories:
Built — or Inspired — by Aliens
Danish author Erich von Däniken suggests that alien astronauts had a role in the creation of Stonehenge and other giant structures.
Although the Sarsens in Stonehenge clearly come from nearby Marlborough Downs, there are conflicting explanations about how Stonehenge’s builders managed to transport the bluestones, which geologists believe originated in the Preseli Hills of Wales, to Salisbury Plain in England, where the monument was erected; some argue that they used brute muscle power to load the stones into boats and drag them overland, while another recent theory holds that an Ice Age glacier actually did the work of moving them. Believers in UFOs, however, offer a third possibility—that extraterrestrials with advanced technology may have done the dirty work for humans. Controversial Swiss author Erich von Däniken, author of the 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods and other books, has promoted the idea that alien astronauts who visited Earth in ancient times had a role in the creation of Stonehenge and other giant structures that otherwise would have been beyond the ability of humans. Another hypothesis advanced by UFOlogists is that Stonehenge’s human builders replicated the shape of an alien spacecraft to pay homage to extraterrestrial visitors, in the fashion of the cargo cult that sprang up the island of Tanna in the South Pacific, where indigenous people worshipped World War II American aviators who had brought them supplies.
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Stonehenge Theories:
The Earth Mother Theory
An aerial view of Stonehenge.
In 1994, Dr. Anthony M. Perks, a retired professor of obstetrics from the University of British Columbia, and coauthor Darlene Marie Bailey published an article entitled "Stonehenge: a view from medicine," in the Journal of the Royal British Society of Medicine. They theorized that Stonehenge was a giant replica of the human vulva, created for worship of a matriarchal deity's role in fertility. “The birth-canal analogy would account for the absence of any monolith at the geometric centre of the henge, despite the way in which one’s attention is drawn there,” they wrote. “The central area is empty because it represents the opening to the world, the birth canal.” Perks and Bailey argued that their Earth Mother theory didn’t necessarily conflict with the earlier notion that Stonehenge was an astronomical temple, because “it was the sun which gave the light and warmth by which Earth Mother brought forth the plants and animals of the world.”
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Stonehenge Theories:
Neolithic Lourdes
Darvill and Wainwright theorize that ancient people made pilgrimages to Stonehenge in hopes of a cure for their ills.
Professor Timothy Darvill, of Bournemouth University, and Professor Geoffrey Wainwright, of the Society of Antiquaries in the UK, are leading an archeological dig at Stonehenge that is being funded by the BBC, which plans to air a documentary about their work. Their theory is that Stonehenge was a sort of "Neolithic Lourdes," a place where ancient people went on pilgrimages in hope of being cured of their ills. This is based upon analysis of ancient human remains found near the site, which they believe show signs of skeletal trauma (including openings in their skulls suggesting crude attempts at surgery). They theorize that these people had travelled long distances to get to southwest England.
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Stonehenge Theories:
City of the Dead
Depiction of a dead man on exposure platform (center) and decomposing bodies (left and right).
University of Sheffield professor Mike Parker Pearson, an expert on the archaeology of death, has been studying Stonehenge since 1998 and is one of the directors of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is exploring the relationship between the monument, the River Avon and other nearby prehistoric sites. Among other finds, Parker Pearson’s team has discovered an ancient settlement near Stonehenge that dates back to between 2600-2400 BC, which coincides with the construction of the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge. Parker Pearson theorizes that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, a prehistoric timber circle about two miles away, were part of a much larger religious complex that the ancient Britons used for funeral rituals. An avenue from Durrington Walls leads to a cliff overlooking the river, where Parker Pearson believes that bones, ashes and perhaps bodies were tossed into the water. In a 2007 Washington Post article about the settlement’s discovery, he described Stonehenge as “our biggest cemetery of that time.”
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