The Great Stonehenge Mystery

Stonehenge has stood in Britain since around 1600 BC, and has puzzled mankind ever since. Both its purpose and the methods of its construction are unclear, with the giant monument seeming impossible and useless all at once. The construction must have taken hundreds of years, and its establishment seems to lack a point. In the past, legends connected it to Merlin or to the Devil. However, modern theories have come up with reasons and methods that may finally bring the mystery to light.

For centuries, the purpose behind Stonehenge has been a mystery. The first discoveries to shed some light on what it might have been were twofold. One was that Stonehenge works as a calendar, with the solstices and equinoxes becoming possible to predict. The other was that buried underneath the grounds are many human remains, some cremated and others bearing signs of trauma damage. These two discoveries have allowed the formation of many modern theories. One of these holds that Stonehenge was primarily a secular calendar - for a rural, agricultural people, the ability to predict the seasons would be truly invaluable and worth dedicating centuries to. However, the more common modern theory is that Stonehenge was a burial ground, the center of an intricate burial ritual. Many barrows and burial grounds seem to radiate around Stonehenge, making the megalith itself possibly the center of a necropolis of sorts. In addition, Stonehenge is similar in planning to wooden temples found in other locations, and many ancient cultures associated wood with the living and stone with the dead. Stonehenge may well have been the center of a grand burial ritual, a place of contact between the living and the dead, with other rituals possibly based on the calendar.

As for the construction, many elements are still a mystery. As mentioned before, the construction seems to have spanned centuries, and many scholars how ancient people from many locations managed to work together for so long. Even the stone is a mystery - the closest deposits of the bluestone used are several kilometers away. Theories about how the stones were brought to the site range from a glacier moving them close enough to the ancients using primitive ball bearings to move the stones along. (The latter is supported by the discovery of many small, near-identical stone spheres in nearby areas.) Many attempts to move comparable stones in modern times have ended in utter failure. The erection of the structure, at least, may have been somewhat easier. One man has proven that working solo it is possible to erect one of the arch structures of Stonehenge, using a basic set of systems that ancient people could have easily constructed. This means that even if the movement of the stones was difficult, the construction may well have been easier than it seems.

Unless a way is discovered to talk to the establishers of the monolith, the true nature of Stonehenge may never be uncovered. Still, it is a stunning monument to the skill and ingenuity of people in ancient times, and a form of proof that humanity has always been clever.