Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, two miles west of Amesbury. It consists of a ring of standing stones, each around 13 feet high, seven feet wide, and weighing around 25 tons. Archaeologists believe it was constructed from 3000 BC to 2000 BC. The site and its surroundings were added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 1986.
About Stonehenge in brief
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, two miles west of Amesbury. It consists of a ring of standing stones, each around 13 feet high, seven feet wide, and weighing around 25 tons. The stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England. Archaeologists believe it was constructed from 3000 BC to 2000 BC. It has been a legally protected Scheduled Ancient Monument since 1882, when legislation to protect historic monuments was first successfully introduced in Britain. The site and its surroundings were added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 1986. The modern phasing most generally agreed to by archaeologists is detailed below. Features mentioned in the text are numbered and shown on the plan, left and right, depending on where they are located on the map. The date of the first bluestones at Stonehenge may have been as early as 3000 BC, although it is more likely that they were raised between 2400 and 2200 BC. The earliest human remains found at the site date to about 3100 BC, and could have been buried there from the beginning of the monument’s existence. There is evidence of large-scale construction on and around the monument that perhaps extends the landscape’s time frame to 6500 years. A Mesolithic posthole, which date to around 8000 BC, has been found beneath the nearby old tourist carpark in use until 2013.
Three of the posts were in an east-west alignment which may have had ritual significance. Another Mesolithic site in Britain is the Warren Field Field in Aberdeenshire, which is considered the world’s oldest Lunar calendar, observing the midwinter solstice by yearly by observing the equinox. A settlement in Scandinavia may also have been contemporaneous with the posts that have been found in the nearby Blickway, which was built 4,000 years later, during the earlier Neolithic period. The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monuments, have been dated to about3100 BC. Despite being contemporary with true Neolithic henges and stone circles, Stonehen ge is in many ways atypical—for example, at more than 24 feet tall, its extant trilithons’ lintels, held in place with mortise and tenon joints, make it unique. It was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B. C. The cremation burial dating to StonehenGE’s sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the Monument’s use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead. It is believed that the site was still still a wooded, wooded area when it was built, but later people built a enclosure at the earlier, later, but more reliable year-round spring spring one mile from Salisbury Plain.
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This page is based on the article Stonehenge published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
