It’s been quite a year for Stonehenge. First it was revealed that the prehistoric structure’s altar stone did not come from south Wales, as long believed, but from far north-east Scotland, hundreds of miles from Salisbury plain.
Why was Stonehenge built?
Now that discovery has helped develop a new and startling theory about the reason Stonehenge came into being at all. In an article in Archaeology International, Mike Parker Pearson writes, ‘It’s not a temple – that has been a major stumbling block for hundreds of years. It’s not a calendar, and it’s not an observatory.’
Stonehenge: 6 bamboozling facts about the planet’s most famous prehistoric monument
Instead, he believes that the stone circle may have been erected ‘to unite early farming communities across the island of Britain at a time of cultural stress’.
Parker Pearson, the Professor of British Later Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, is one of the world’s foremost experts on Stonehenge and has previously been voted the UK’s ‘Archaeologist of the Year‘, so his words on the subject carry some weight.
Stonehenge’s collection of stones from disparate corners of the island makes it unique amongst the 900 or so stone circles in Britain. In taking so much trouble to gather the stones, Parker Pearson asserts that ‘[The builders] are constructing a monument that is expressing the permanence of particular aspects in their world.’
Thus it may have been a ‘monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.’ As such, it may have served as an attempt to defend their culture against the threat of change.
Parker Pearson believes that it’s ‘highly likely’ that Stonehenge's six-tonne altar stone came from a Scottish monument and that its transfer south was intended to demonstrate the forging of a political alliance. It was common practice in Scotland to lay the altar stone down and this may well have been mirrored at Stonehenge.
Where is Stonehenge's alter stone from?
But exactly where in Scotland the stone came from remains a mystery. All eyes looked to Orkney and its famous Ring of Brodgar or the Stones of Stenness. However, scientists researching the Orcadian stones found them to have a very different composition to the altar stone in Wiltshire. The search continues.
But what might have been the change the builders of Stonehenge feared? Parker Pearson explains that it may have been the coming of the Beaker folk. The central European group migrated westwards, arriving in Britain about 4,400 years ago, bringing their technologically-advanced bell-shaped pots after which they are named.
If Stonehenge was intended as a show of unity in the face of the advent of these newcomers, it can be considered a failure. The 2018 report on DNA research carried out by a team led by Professor Ian Barnes from the National History Museum revealed that the blonde, blue-eyed, light-skinned Beaker folk supplanted Britain’s dark-haired, brown-eyed, olive-brown-skinned inhabitants over the course of several centuries.
It’s most unlikely, of course, that this is the final word on Stonehenge. As Parker Pearson himself has put it: ‘New discoveries are being made all the time, forcing existing theories to be modified or rejected as partial or incomplete.’ So watch this space….
