Stonehenge :: essays research papers

StonehengeOn the British Isles more than nine hundred stone ring exist. Most people preferto call them rings rather than circles for the reason that only two percent of them are truecircles. The different ninety octonary percent of these structures are constructed in an ellipticalshape. Stonehenge in itself is roughly circular. Most of these rings cannot be datedexactly, but it is known that they are from the Neolithic period.In southern England the Neolithic period begins around the date of the firstfarming communities in 4000 B.C. to the time of the development of bronze technologyaround 2000 B.C., by that time the construction of major monuments was mostly over. Because of the scarcity of the archaeological record at the stone rings, any attempts toexplain the functions of the structures are guesses. Most attempts tend to reflect the heathenish relatedness of their times. Most people believe that these rings were constructedby a group of people called Druids.This idea of Stone henge being constructed by Druids has become deeply implantedin the uneducated minds of popular culture from tie seventeenth century to the present. Itis common knowledge that the druids had nothing to do with these rings. The Druidsflourished after about 300 B.C., more than 1500 eld after the last stone rings wereconstructed. Even more, there is no evidence that suggests that the Druids even usedthese stone rings for ritual purposes. Any Druidic connectedness with the stone rings ispurely hypothetical.During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, prehistorians attributedStonehenge and other stone rings to Egyptian and Mycenean travelers who were thoughtto have infused Europe and Bronze get along with culture. With the development of ascorbic acid 14dating methods, the infusion-diffusion of British Neolithic history was abandoned and themegalithic monuments of Britain were shown to predate those in most other countries. While the carbon 14 method provided approximate dates for the stone rings it was no useexplaining their function. Research by scholars outside the discipline of archaeology suggested a use antithetic to that of rituals.In the 1950s and 1960s, the Oxford University engineer Alexander Thom and theastronomer Gerald Hawkins pioneered the new field of archaeoastronomy-the study of theastronomies of ancient civilizations. Conducting precise surveys at various stone rings andother megalithic structures, Thom and Hawkins discovered many significant astronomicalalignments among the stones. This evidence suggested that the stone rings were used asastronomical observatories. Moreover, the archaeoastronomers revealed the extraordinarymathematical sophistication and design abilities that the native British developedbefore either Egyptian or Mesopotamian cultures.