Stonehenge
In the south of Britain a ring of stone blocks is raised, aligned to the sunrise on the longest day of the year.
Around 2500 BCE on Salisbury Plain a ring of stone blocks is raised, weighing up to twenty-five tons and brought from thirty kilometres away, with smaller stones from Wales, more than two hundred kilometres off. The axis of the structure is aligned to the sunrise at the summer solstice and the sunset at the winter one. It was built over several centuries: first a ditch and bank, then timber posts, then the stones. The builders had no writing, and what was done here is known only from the finds: hundreds of burials around it, and animal bones that speak of great winter gatherings. It is the best known of the stone monuments of Europe that stand in the same age as the pyramids of Egypt.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the excavations of Stonehenge and Durrington Walls — the stones, the ditch and the burials around them
Scholarship
- archaeology of Bronze Age Britain — the dating and the alignment to the solstices
Basis: documents and evidence.