Lying on the windswept plains of southern England is what may be one of mankind's greatest monuments to the seasons—and to the importance they have long had in our lives. Known as Stonehenge, this construction of massive stones, or megaliths, evokes wonder and haunts our imagination: How was Stonehenge created, and why?
Like Rome, Stonehenge wasn't built in a day. In fact, it evolved over about 1,600 years. It began nearly 5,000 years ago in the late Stone Age when workers hacked out a circular ditch and built an earthen embankment enclosing an area about 330 feet (100 meters) across. Within the circle the builders dug 56 small holes that likely held wooden posts. Over time these wooden posts decayed, leaving deep indentations in a circular pattern. Sometime between 2900 and 2400 BC, several of the holes became repositories for ashes. These ashes, archaeologists believe, are from the cremation, or ritual burning, of dead bodies.
A thousand years later, new builders erected a monumental circle of linked sarsen stones, a form of very hard sandstone. They also raised an inner horseshoe-shaped design of ten megaliths, which stand up to 23 feet (7 meters) tall and weigh as much as 45 tons each. Perhaps using a system of levers, timber, and ropes, the builders topped these slabs with horizontal stones called lintels, thus forming five trilithons, or squared arches. Around them they placed a ring of somewhat smaller sarsens rising about 25.5 feet (8 meters) from the ground and bearing their own lintels.
At some point, builders reconfigured Stonehenge so that its axis was aligned to the east. They also cut an avenue that was oriented with surprising accuracy to the rising of the sun on the summer solstice. Outside the monument they erected what has come to be called the Heel Stone. On the morning of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, it was thought that a person standing at the center of the circle could look through the entrance and see the first rays of the sun hover briefly near the tip of the Heel Stone. Recently, however, new evidence indicates that the Heel Stone, along with a missing companion stone, instead framed the rising sun. On the winter solstice, moreover, the rays of the setting sun shine straight into the monument's center.
Photograph by George Mobley/NGS |
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That ordinary people of long ago built Stonehenge—ferrying bluestone (another type of rock) over water by raft and hauling sarsens along wooden tracks—is wonder enough. That they also may have crafted it as an astronomical calendar to track the movements of the heavens and the passing of the seasons makes it even more of a marvel.
Perhaps it played a role in telling Stone Age farmers when to plant crops or what kind of weather to expect. But even today, people still flock to this site to celebrate the arrival of the summer solstice—and perhaps to renew our age-old bond with the natural rhythms of the world.
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