One of the buried items was usually a drinking vessel with a distinctive shape. There are hundreds of them in Britain and a few more in Brittany. This king of the henges has its own highway exit. When our bus pulls off onto this high, wide-open area, we see barrows scattered in all directions. The basic facts are pretty well understood.
Archeologists break up the development of Stonehenge into four phases.
Phase I, dating to around 2800 B.C., saw construction of the henge's bank and ditch. A pair of upright stones formed a ceremonial entrance way, with a larger stone opposite, today called the Heel Stone. Fifty-six small pits encircled the whole. No one has a clue as to what they were for. But in the end someone did some heavy lifting and constructed a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of approximately 19 bluestones within a circle of maybe another 60.