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Lady Gryphon's Mythical Realm Presents
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Myth, Fantasy, History and Sci-Fi News | In Search of the Secret of Stonehenge
The myth of Stonehenge may be more powerful even than science.
April 08, 2008 |  For the first time in a generation, archaeologists have begun to sift through the most sacred soil in Britain, in search of the secret of Stonehenge. Work to answer Stonehenge’s big questions -- when the ring of stones was created, and why -- began in earnest March 31st 2008 with the first excavation within the site’s inner circle for nearly half a century.
To the prehistoric tribes of southern Britain the site on Salisbury Plain may have been a place of healing, a temple and an astronomical observatory. To modern archaeologists, Stonehenge is far more important than that. Professors Geoffrey Wainwright and Tim Darvill, who are leading the two-week dig, spent six years toiling in the stone quarries of the Preseli Hills in West Wales to earn the right to excavate in hallowed ground.
The full artillery of modern science will be trained on a trench of earth, measuring 11 feet long and eight feet wide, inside the great stone circle. Archaeologists believe that a small patch of grass between a giant standing sarsen stone and a smaller knee-high bluestone, marked out yesterday with orange twine, may provide clues.
They were investigating the origins of the bluestones that were dragged more than 150 miles to form Stonehenge’s first circle, a double ring. An estimated 82 bluestones each weighing up to four tonnes were brought about 4,550 years ago. Pollen grains, tool fragments, snail shells, and chips of the original bluestone pillars will all be carbon- dated, to try to answer a question that had intrigued thinkers since medieval times: how and why, did our ancestors bring the stones from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales to Salisbury plain?
By the time the site was abandoned more than a millennium later the bluestones had been uprooted and rearranged at least once and been overshadowed by the 5m-tall sarsens that still dominate the site. Some were removed for purposes unknown or may have been deliberately destroyed. Even in the 20th century it was possible to rent a hammer to chip a souvenir off the stones.
The excavation will delve back into Stonehenge’s earliest origins. Professor Wainwright, president of the Society of Antiquaries, said: “Until the arrival of the bluestones, Stonehenge was just one of thousands of similar sites the length and breadth of the country, from the Orkneys to Cornwall. Bringing the bluestones here set it apart. We have identified the hillside they came from in southwest Wales. We have even found bluestones that broke in two as they were being brought down the mountain still lying exactly where they were abandoned.
“But what we’ve been unable to do in the Preselis is establish exactly when they were erected.”
The hole they intend to dig will measure just 3.5 by 2.5m and will be less than 1m deep. The archaeologists will be looking for socket holes that would reveal where the bluestones stood originally. At the bottom of the holes they hope to find organic material that will give a precise date for when they were erected.
They will also be looking for stone chips known to archaeologists as the “Stonehenge layer”, which should reveal whether they were the result of stones being worked by masons or of deliberate destruction. The last dig within the circle took place in 1964. Dr Darvill, Professor of Archaeology at Bournemouth University, said: “It is an incredibly exciting moment.”
Why? The theories
- A druid temple: possible, but the druids were around at the time of the Roman conquest, long after Stonehenge had fallen into disuse
- An astronomical observatory: yet to be proven, but like many prehistoric monuments Stonehenge is aligned to the rising sun in midsummer
- A place of healing: supported by the excavation nearby of skeletons showing signs of chronic disease
 The archaeologists believe that science will unlock the secret of Stonehenge, once and for all. I doubt it, for the myth of Stonehenge may be more powerful even than science.
Stonehenge is one of those historical artifacts whose beauty and inspiration lie in their mystery. The great stone circle has forged more stories, unleashed more flights of spiritual speculation, more sheer imagination than perhaps any other place on earth, precisely because of its inexplicability.
There may be a single “true” reason for Stonehenge: it may have been a druidical temple, a center for magic arts, an observatory, an oracle, a pilgrimage site, a shrine to the dead or, as the archaeologists now working there believe, a place of healing, the Lourdes of ancient Britain. But there is another sort of historical truth associated with Stonehenge: the beliefs, legends, superstitions and ideas that have clustered around the place because no one knew for certain what it was. Science can answer certain historical questions with unerring accuracy, but at an imaginative cost.
Science and technology have unlocked mysteries that were once thought to be permanently immune to human understanding. The unknowable has become explicable.
The imaginings that cluster around the unknown and the uncertain are as fascinating as any historical truth, and of nowhere is this more true than Stonehenge. What different people chose to believe and invent about Stonehenge is just as important, historically, as what it was really for.
According to one Greek legend, the Oracle of Delphi took a sort of winter holiday, during which Apollo operated from northern climes, possibly Stonehenge. Geoffrey of Monmouth described how the wizard Merlin ordered the bluestones to be removed from Ireland, where giants had brought them from Africa for their healing properties. Inigo Jones depicted the stones as a druid's temple. Or perhaps Stonehenge was the shrine to the sun described by a Greek historian in the first century BC.
According to one folk tale, the Devil brought the great stones to the plain simply in order to confuse people as to how they got there. He succeeded, and the various stories that have accumulated around the enigma of Stonehenge offer a strange and wonderful human archeology of changing attitudes, dreams and beliefs.
The latest scientist-archaeologists hope to prove, definitively, that Stonehenge was a Bronze Age healing centre, “the A&E ward of the South West”, in the words of one of them. Perhaps the latest diggers will be able to proclaim that the riddle has been solved at last. But more likely the scientific explanation will simply lie on top of all the other, unscientific, explanations that have preceded it, another layer in an ancient and never-ending mystery story written in stone.
Excerpts taken from Times Online article Chipping at the world's mysteries by Ben Macintyre and The small patch of Stonehenge earth that may reveal big secrets by Simon de Bruxelles | Posted in categories: [Archaeology] | Comments | Added by Black Dragon on April 30, 2008 | | On THe Theory Of Stonehenge Why Can't Humans Be Satisfied Not Knowing The Truth Of Mysteries That Should Be Preserved For Future Generations. The Wonder Of The Unknown Is What Inspired Me To Become A Mytholigest In THe First Place |
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