Stonehenge :: essays research papers

Stonehenge     On the British Isles more than nine hundred mark rings exist. Most masses preferto call them rings rather than circles for the reason that only two percent of them are truecircles. The some other ninety eight percent of these structures are constructed in an ellipticalshape. Stonehenge in itself is roughly circular. Most of these rings cannot be datedexactly, but it is know that they are from the Neolithic period.     In southern England the Neolithic period begins or so the time of the firstfarming communities in 4000 B.C. to the time of the development of bronze technologyaround 2000 B.C., by that time the construction of major monuments was by and large over. Because of the scarcity of the archaeological record at the oppose rings, any attempts to formulate the functions of the structures are guesses. Most attempts tend to reflect thecultural relatedness of their times. Most people believe that these rings were construc tedby a group of people called Druids.     This appraisal of Stonehenge being constructed by Druids has become deeply implantedin the ignorant minds of popular culture from tie seventeenth century to the present. Itis common noesis that the druids had nothing to do with these rings. The Druidsflourished after about 300 B.C., more than 1500 historic period after the last stone rings wereconstructed. Even more, there is no evidence that suggests that the Druids even applythese stone rings for ritual purposes. every Druidic connection with the stone rings ispurely hypothetical.     During the nineteenth and early 20th century, prehistorians attributedStonehenge and other stone rings to Egyptian and Mycenean travelers who were thoughtto have infused atomic number 63 and Bronze age culture. With the development of carbon 14dating methods, the infusion-diffusion of British Neolithic history was abandoned and themegalithic monuments of Britain w ere shown to predate those in virtually other countries. While the carbon 14 method provided approximate dates for the stone rings it was no useexplaining their function. Research by scholars outside the illuminate of archaeology suggested a use different to that of rituals.     In the 1950s and 1960s, the Oxford University organize Alexander Thom and theastronomer Gerald Hawkins pioneered the new field of archaeoastronomy-the study of theastronomies of ancient civilizations. Conducting finespun surveys at various stone rings andother megalithic structures, Thom and Hawkins find many significant astronomicalalignments among the stones. This evidence suggested that the stone rings were used asastronomical observatories. Moreover, the archaeoastronomers revealed the extraordinarymathematical sophistication and engineering abilities that the congenital British developedbefore either Egyptian or Mesopotamian cultures.