I. On Salisbury Plain in Southern England stands Stonehenge, the most famous of all megalithic sites. Stonehenge is unique among the monuments of the ancient world. Isolated on a windswept plain, built by a people with no written language, Stonehenge challenges our imagination.
The impressive stone circle stands near the top of a gently sloping hill on Salisbury Plain about thirty miles from the English Channel. The stones are visible over the hills for a mile or two in every direction. Stonehenge is one of over fifty thousand prehistoric "megalithics" in Europe.
As Stonehenge is approached, the forty giant stones seem to touch the sky. Most of the stones stand twenty-four or more feet high. Some stones weigh as much as forty tons. Others are smaller, weighing only five tons. At first glance, the stones may seem to be a natural formation. But a closer look shows that only human imagination and determination could have created Stonehenge.
II. The Stonehenge today looks quite different from the Stonehenge of old. Wind and weather have destroyed a little of Stonehenge over the ages. People have destroyed much more.
Today, less than half of the original stones still stand as their builders planned. Many of the once upright stones lie on their sides. Religious fanatics, who felt threatened by the mysteries posed by Stonehenge, knocked over many of the standing stones. They toppled some of the huge stones, which then split into pieces; they buried others.
Other stones were "quarried" over the centuries as free building material and hauled away. Even into this century, visitors have come with hammers to carry away a chip of stone with them.
III. Only in recent years have the stones been protected from the huge amounts of people that see them every year. No longer can anyone roam among the stones. Too much damage, intentional or not, has been done by the hundreds of thousands of visitors. Today, tourists are even prevented from walking between the stones for fear that the millions of footsteps every year might make the stones unstable.
IV. The twelfth-century English writer and historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, first recorded Merlin's building of Stonehenge in his famous book History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey claimed that his book was a translation of "a certain very ancient book written in the British language." However, no other scholar or historian knows of the existence of such a book.
According to Geoffrey, the great stones were brought from Ireland to England to mark the burial place of a group of slain British princes.
Stonehenge: a Human Vulva or Temple, or something else…? The content of this project is based on the largest and most complete megalithic structure in Europe, The Stonehenge. It resides in center of the southern England; on the wide spread Salisbury Plains. It is said to be old approximately four thousand years, and it is even considered older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
But this was not the end of the affair. The king's chief minister, Robert Cecil, had given strict instructions that Robert Catesby should be taken alive. The reason being, that he possessed a sacred relic - a green, jade gemstone called the Meonia Stone. Tradition held that it had once been set in King Arthur's sword Excalibur. Historically, it had belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, the last legitimate Catholic heir to the English throne. Following her death in 1587, a legend had developed that the Catholic who would finally secure the English throne would need to possess the sacred stone. Fearing that the Meonia Stone would act as a rallying symbol for the English Catholics, Cecil was determined that it should be destroyed. He was furious, however, to discover that Robert Catesby had been shot dead and the knowledge of the stone's whereabouts had died with him. Despite months of frantic searching and intense interrogation of the surviving conspirators, the stone was never found. Three centuries later, in 1979, Graham Phillip's and fellow researcher Andrew Collins decided to go in search of the lost Meonia Stone. The Green Stone, co-authored by Martin Keatman, is the remarkable true story of this fascinating quest.
Jackson states, “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys (564).” This seems like innocent play until the stones’ true purpose becomes unveiled at the end of the story. Jackson creates suspense through the children and the rock piling.
in the uneducated minds of popular culture from tie seventeenth century to the present. It
Stonehenge is located on Salisbury Plain in Southern England. Although it is not the largest henge (circle of stones) of the Neolithic Period, it is a remarkable site because it is one of the most complicated megalithic sites. Stonehenge was repeatedly reworked from 3100 to 1500 B.C.E. (Encyclopedia Brittanica 287). Each new major building phase added new elements to the site. The present-day arrangement at Stonehenge is the result of the last building phase which ended nearly 3,500 years ago.
Powell, Eric A. "Solstice at the Stones." Archaeology 56.5 (2003): 36-41. JSTOR. Web. 22 Oct. 2013. .
Stonehenge is located in Southern England on what is known as the Salisbury Plain. The structure looks different than it once did, however. Today, Stonehenge suffers the effects of time and pernicious acts by people. Originally, in the years after completion, the structure was made up of “several concentric circles of megaliths, very large stones.” (5) Stonehenge consists a circular layout of approximately one hundred megaliths. On the tops of them another flat stone was placed to make a continuous ring of horizontal stones. These structures are known as trilithons.
The Parthenon is an amazing Greek temple that was built 2,500 years ago. Even the architects of today have numerous questions about how it was constructed and how it has held up through its eventful past. The Parthenon's detailed appearance is not its only meaningful quality. The Parthenon was constructed as a temple to the goddess, Athena, and as an icon of the Greek people themselves. The Parthenon represents the Greek ideals of humanism, idealism, and rationalism.
Behind every great structure in the world, there are the people who made them, and who took the time and effort to design them. Those who made Stonehenge succeeded in creating an incredibly complex and mysterious structure that lived on long after its creators were dead. The many aspects of Stonehenge and the processes by which it was built reveal much about the intelligence and sophistication of the civilizations that designed and built the monument, despite the fact that it is difficult to find out who exactly these people were. They have left very little evidence behind with which we could get a better idea of their everyday lives, their culture, their surroundings, and their affairs with other peoples. The technology and wisdom that are inevitably required in constructing such a monument show that these prehistoric peoples had had more expertise than expected.
Stonehenge was built in several different phases beginning with the large white circle, 330 feet in diameter, surrounded by an eight foot-high embankment and a ring of fifty-six pits now referred to as the Aubrey Holes.(Stokstad, p.53; Hoyle) In a subsequent building phase, thirty huge pillars of stone were erected and capped by stone lintels in the central Sarsen Circle, which is 106 feet in diameter.(Stokstad, p.54) This circle is so named because the stone of which the pillars and lintels were made was sarsen. Within the Sarsen Circle were an incomplete ring and a horsesho...
The first thing that catches the eye while reading this is when the little boys start stuffing their pockets with stones when they arrive there. “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones” (264). This is a great example of the mere blindness in following ridiculous traditions. The young boys who started getting stones ready as soon as they got there could not have fully understood the tradition. They could have not understood the complete purpose of the stones. They have seen the adults pick stones in years before and have followed in their footsteps without question as if it were some sort of game.
When the Great Pyramids at Giza were built, the Egyptians had not invented the wheel yet, but the limestone blocks that they grudgingly transported, in an effort to build pyramids, weighed about 2 tons each. If all of the stone from the pyramids was cut into one foot, square blocks, it would extend two thirds of the way around the earth. No human life forms could have possibly erected these structures using that much limestone, because they did not have the technology to work in such scale. Only aliens, with more advanced mechanical and mental abilities, could have designed and ...
Stonehenge is located near Salisbury, England and according to an archaeologist who has investigated Stonehenge close up, Mike Parker Pearson (2010) “...the new date for the raising of the sarsens [the large stones]...[is] between 2600 and 2480 B.C….” (p. 47). It consists of the large sarsen stones which are the ones that are in pictures and on postcards. Then there are smaller bluestones that are mixed in with the sarsens, Y and Z holes that form full circles around the sarsen stones, and Aubrey holes which form a circle around the entire structure. There is a large stone outside and a ways away from the circle called the heel stone. There are two station stones that stand to the side of the of the circle and over the Aubrey holes. They form a perfect rectangle with two barrows, or burial mounds, that are there.
There are several theories as to what Stonehenge was. These ideas range from a calendar to an astronomical observatory to sacred grounds. These inferences are based upon the shape and positions of the stones that make up the monument. Stonehenge is made up of megaliths, or giant rocks. There are two kinds of these rocks at the structure, bluestones, which are about 8,000 pounds each, and sarsen stones, which can weigh up to 100,000 pounds each (Rattini, 2008). These rocks make up a henge, a group of circular ritual structures unique to the Late Neolithic era in Britain (Pitts, 2008). The first ring is a sarsen stone circle, the next ring a smaller circle of blue stones, then an even sm...
stones (ranging from 2000 kg to 100 tons for each stone), it called for a great