The mystery of Stonehenge!

Few places in the world elicit the mystery and wonder that Stonehenge does. For hundreds of years archaeologists and historians have puzzled over the ancient ruins, trying to piece together the truth behind its origin. At last, though modern science has caught up with the ancient mystery, and we finally have a pretty good idea as to who created this wonder of the ancient world. 

For anyone living under a very large rock for the last five hundred years and doesn’t know, Stonehenge is an ancient site in the UK made up of pillars of rock laid out in a circle. The remains show that the entire site was once ringed with the massive stone columns, which were themselves topped with slabs of stone that completely encircled the monument. Inside, scientists suspect that there was once a smaller circle of stones, of which only a few pillars remain, also topped by a massive stone slab. While the site is relatively simple in its construction and certainly pales in comparison with wonders such as the pyramids of Egypt, what is impressive is that Stonehenge is estimated to have been built over five thousand years ago, when humans were thought to have been largely using nothing more than simple bone and antler tools. 

The neolithic monument is also thought to have taken 1500 years to complete, with construction being taken up by various groups of people who continually added to the original site. The first stage was a massive circular ditch and bank dug on the Salisbury Plain by neolithic Britons using deer antlers for tools. They also included deep pits inside of that circular construction, now known as Aubrey holes after John Aubrey, the 17th century antiquarian who discovered them. It's believed that the holes once held up a ring of timber posts standing upright, creating a circle of timber within the larger circular ditch. This site remained standing until a few hundred years later, when more builders arrived and decided to remodel. 

Rather than use timbers for their construction, they hauled eighty bluestones, of which forty-three remain standing, and laid them out in either a horseshoe or circular formation around the site. Lastly, during the third and final phase of construction which took place around 2000 BC, sandstone slabs were arranged into a ring formation around the entire site, with some being assembled into the iconic three-pieced structures called trilithons. A few trilithons remain standing inside the formation today, and it's these structures that have become a visual representation of Stonehenge for millions of people around the world today. Work would continue for the next four hundred years, with the large stones being repositioned as new people modified the original site. What's particularly impressive about Stonehenge is that the majority of the construction took place well before the invention of the wheel. That means that the sandstone blocks weighing over forty tons had to be transported from over twenty-five miles away (40 km), while the smaller bluestones which weighed up to four tons each, where originally sourced over two hundred miles (322 km) away. How in the world did neolithic builders get these giant stones into position without even the use of the wheel? The longest standing theory is that the stones were transported using sledges and rollers made out of fallen tree trunks, with each stone riding atop a bunch of greased logs, which would be moved in front of the stone as it traveled over and past a section of logs. This would have allowed the builders to simply push or drag the huge stones over long distances, though it would certainly have been incredibly labor intensive. They then could have transferred the stones onto huge rafts and floated them along the Welsh coast and up the river Avon towards the construction site. More modern refinements to the theory have the builders’ using teams of oxen to drag the stones along grooved planks or transporting them in giant wicker baskets or on kinds of ball bearings. 

However, in the 1970s geologists began to get in on the debate of how the mighty stones were transported. They suggested that it wasn't humans who lugged these stones dozens or hundreds of miles, but rather that it was ancient glaciers. Well known to uplift rocks and transport them hundreds of miles, these glacial erratic as they are known pop up all over the world and are remnants from the last Ice Age. They propose that perhaps glaciers had deposited a large number of the raw stones required to build Stonehenge, though the theory isn't particularly popular amongst mainstream geologists. Never mind how it was built though, who were the people that actually built Stonehenge? Back when mythology was considered history, it was believed that Stonehenge was the handiwork of King Arthur's friend and confidant, the wizard Merlin. Sometime in the mid-fifth century hundreds of British nobles were killed by Saxon barbarians and buried on the Salisbury plain, which was at the time made out of steaks, and in order to honor the fallen men King Aureoles Ambrosias, the uncle of King Arthur, ordered that a memorial be built on the site to honor their deaths. The King thus sent an army to Ireland to fetch a stone circle known as the Giants' Ring, which ancient giants had built from magical African bluestones. 

The Irish defending the ring were defeated, but the men could not move the massive stones. Thus, Merlin used his magic to move the giant stones across the sea and onto the site they stand on today. According to the legend, King Ambrosias and King Arthur's father, Uther, remain buried there to this day. When people started believing in myths less and science more, the monument was attributed to the Saxons, the Danes, the Romans, the Greeks, and even the Egyptians. Eventually in the 17th century, archaeologist John Aubrey claimed that the monument was the work of Celtic high priests known as Druids, and the theory largely stuck for hundreds of years. Even today many individuals who identify as modern druids gather at the site to hold rituals- yet sadly for them, modern science has at last determined that it was definitely not the druids who built Stonehenge. Stonehenge it turns out has an origin as complicated as its construction, and after the careful observation and dating of bones, tools, and other artifacts discovered on the site, archaeologists now believe that there was actually no one people who are responsible for building Stonehenge, but that rather the monument was a community project of sorts, with various groups of people working on it at different times. First were neolithic agrarian humans, likely the original inhabitants of the British Isles, though some genetic research hints that these original inhabitants were actually displaced by invaders from the mainland.