Stonehenge, c. 2100 BCE, largest stone 24’ high, diameter of circle 97’, bluestone, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, Photo by Mactographer via Wikimedia Commons.
The Art Minute University: Cat Hosch, a student at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, wrote this post.
Located in Wiltshire, UK, this structure of mammoth proportions has called to question the true purpose of the stones. Stonehenge hides over 300 graves within acres of the monument. When Stonehenge became a tourist attraction in the 1930s, the archeologists mistakenly covering the gravesite, their most important clue, with a parking lot.
We assume that a glacier in the Ice Age brought the stones to Wiltshire, where tribes of 50 people each worked together to build Stonehenge in three stages over hundreds of years.
The placement of the stones themselves suggests that Stonehenge was a religious monument, used to calculate the movements of the sun, however this is unconfirmed as sun worship did not begin until a century after Stonehenge was completed.
Human errors have hindered our understanding of Stonehenge, but hopefully not for much longer.
