As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.
However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.
First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.
For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.
But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.
Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.
We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.
All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.
Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?
We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".
I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.
I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.
In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.
And you would make a circle of little rocks at the centre. Next year you would put bigger rocks there, then you needed bigger rocks than the place up the road, or you were not as cool.
Yep. Reading some of the earliest written stories really shows how little we have changed socially since then, and I imagine that goes back a lot further.
I fell down one of those rabbit holes by watching a young adult TV show called "The Children of the Stones" which was filmed at Avebury (a village built around a stone circle, about 25 miles north of Stonehenge) and the book "The Old Straight Track" which claimed all these neolithic sites were linked by Ley lines.
There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.
Comments
As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.
However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.
First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.
For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.
But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.
Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.
We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.
All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.
Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?
We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".
I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.
Which is not surprising since our DNA barely evolved during that "short" time span.
We still like to think we are far superior, which all the people before us probably also thought about the people before them
I have always thought they were likely seasonal camps. Many peoples living off of the land are seasonally nomadic. Having the stones arranged to also be season change indicators based on the sun would be helpful.
In Alaska we still head out to fish camp. Places along the river where people gather for a few months because that is where the food is. Building a permanent structure at such places for seasonal use just seems logical.
And you would make a circle of little rocks at the centre. Next year you would put bigger rocks there, then you needed bigger rocks than the place up the road, or you were not as cool.
1000 years of this oneupmanship = stonehenge?
Yep. Reading some of the earliest written stories really shows how little we have changed socially since then, and I imagine that goes back a lot further.
Stonehenge is more like stacking rocks next to a stream than what their contemporaries were doing in other parts of the world.
I fell down one of those rabbit holes by watching a young adult TV show called "The Children of the Stones" which was filmed at Avebury (a village built around a stone circle, about 25 miles north of Stonehenge) and the book "The Old Straight Track" which claimed all these neolithic sites were linked by Ley lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Stones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Straight_Track
There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...