Stonehenge in brief
Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, in southern England, in a landscape full of burial mounds and older monuments. The visible circle of huge upright stones, with stone lintels across the tops of some, is the last stage of a site that was used and rebuilt for about 1,500 years. Stonehenge and nearby Avebury were made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.
How it was built
- About 3100 to 3000 BC (5,000 years ago). A circular ditch and bank were dug, with a ring of 56 pits known as the Aubrey Holes, after the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey. Some held cremated remains, and in the first stage Stonehenge was a burial ground.
- About 2600 to 2400 BC. The great stones were set up. The large sarsens, sandstone blocks, weigh around 25 tonnes (the biggest uprights are heavier), and form the outer circle and the inner horseshoe of “trilithons”, pairs of uprights with a lintel across. The lintels are fixed to the uprights with carpentry joints, mortise-and-tenon and tongue-and-groove, copied from woodwork.
- The bluestones. Smaller stones, about 2 to 4 tonnes, are of types of rock found in the Preseli Hills in west Wales, about 140 to 150 miles (230 to 240 km) away. In 2015 a team led by Mike Parker Pearson identified two quarries there, Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, where stone was dug out about 3400 to 3200 BC. How the stones were moved, by land or by water, is argued.
- The Altar Stone. A 6-tonne block of sandstone lying in the middle of the monument. A 2024 study showed that it did not come from Wales, but from northeast Scotland, roughly 700 kilometres away, which is a surprise.
- The sarsens. Chemical studies in 2020 traced most of the sarsens to West Woods, near Marlborough, about 25 km away.
What was it for?
Nobody knows for sure. The monument is lined up on the sunrise at midsummer and the sunset at midwinter, which suggests that the sun and the seasons mattered. It was also a place of burial, and cremated bones of dozens of people were placed there. Other ideas, such as that it was a healing place or a place for gatherings of people from far away, have been proposed. At Durrington Walls, about three kilometres away, archaeologists found a large settlement of the same period, with the bones of pigs killed in winter, which seems to show feasting by many people.
The Druids, a priesthood of the Iron Age, had nothing to do with Stonehenge. It was built more than two thousand years before their time.
The people
Isotope studies of bones from Stonehenge show that some of the people buried there grew up far away, including in Wales, so that the monument seems to have been important to people over a wide area. Genetic studies of the same period show that Britain’s population changed dramatically around 2500 BC, with the arrival of Beaker people from the continent.
Visiting
English Heritage runs the site, with a visitor centre about 2.4 km away that opened in 2013, with exhibits and reconstructions of Neolithic houses. Visitors walk around the stones on a path, and at the summer and winter solstices, there is special access to the stones. Avebury, a much larger stone circle, lies about 40 km to the north.
Sources
- Parker Pearson, M. and others (2015). Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge. Antiquity 89: 1331 to 1352.
- Nash, D. J. and others (2020). Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge. Science Advances 6: eabc0133.
- Clarke, A. J. I. and others (2024). Provenance of the Altar Stone at Stonehenge. Nature 632: 570 to 575.
- English Heritage. Stonehenge.