Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery
With unprecedented access to the World Historical Site’s 26.6 square kilometers, the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which Parker Pearson headed (2003–2009), opened 45 archaeological excavations and used technologies like carbon dating, thermal imaging, DNA analysis, and GPS to produce breakthroughs in our understanding of the monolithic circle that attracts nearly a million tourists a year. The project’s signal accomplishment may be defining context. It positions Stonehenge as part of a complex of Neolithic sites that served quite different purposes and establishes with greater precision a widely (if not universally) accepted time line of five construction stages (3000–1520 BC). A place for honoring the dead, Stonehenge may also, the book suggests, have been a monument of unification, a place where natives and immigrants from Wales and Europe came together as one community. Stonehenge grew less important to the people of the Salisbury Plain, Parker Pearson suggests, because “labouring for the ancestors gave way to labouring for the living”; and monuments, like Stonehenge, honoring the deaths of the community’s elite were replaced by round barrows where a family could honor its own deceased. --Mary Carroll--This text refers to an alternateHardcoveredition.