Anthro. 3110
Mysteries of the Stonehenge
Growing up, I have always seen postcards, pictures, and movie clips of these large stones that made a circle, yet I never really understood exactly what they were. What I knew of it back then was that it was just some huge rocks people hauled up back in ancient years that we find beautiful today, which brought me to the interest for the topic of my paper. Once known to me as big rocks in a circle is now known as the Stonehenge. Although as a child, through research, I have come to find out that I was not far off from the definition of what this monument was due to archaeologist, Mike Pitts, who mentions that, the meaning of “henge” is “… a variety of circular ritual structures…” (2008).The mystery is, what was this circular structure made for and exactly who put this project into place and why?
There is not any one person who has been titled for the discovery of the Stonehenge. What we do have today are people like English antiquary, John Aubrey, who is known to be the first to discover the “Aubrey Holes” which are the construction pits that may have been used to hold timber or wooden posts in building the Stonehenge (Dimitrakopoulous 2004). Until this day, four thousand years later, no one can really declare who built this mysterious monument, yet after examining the site, archaeologist found radiocarbon dates that pointed out that these massive stones begin to build from 3,000 – 1,400 B.C. With these radiocarbon dates, it advocates the idea that the Stonehenge was built back in the Neolithic period which was a time when people knew how to use and make stone tools and weapons.
Today, the Stonehenge stands tall at Salisbury Plain in Southern England. It is the most impressive prehistoric monument in that area and has massive blocks of sandstone that stands up to seventeen feet and has bluestone circling inside that are about seven feet tall. The irony of this monument is not only the labor that it took to build...