Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, southern England. At its heart is a circle of huge upright stones topped with horizontal stones called lintels, surrounding a horseshoe of even larger stone archways. Around the stones runs a circular ditch and bank. Beyond it, the landscape is full of other ancient monuments: burial mounds, earthworks and a long path called the Avenue.

Stonehenge was not built in one go. It began as an earthwork enclosure around 3000 BCE, was transformed by the raising of the great stones around 2500 BCE, and was rearranged and added to for centuries afterwards. The people who built it were farming communities of the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and, later, the Early Bronze Age. They left no writing, so everything we know comes from archaeology.

The word “henge” comes from Stonehenge itself; it probably meant “hanging stones”, a description of the lintels that seem to hang in the air. Archaeologists now use “henge” for a type of circular earthwork with a bank outside a ditch. Stonehenge is unusual because its main bank lies inside its ditch, so strictly speaking it is not a typical henge at all.

Start from the outside. The circular ditch and bank, about 110 m in diameter, are the oldest parts of the monument. Just inside the bank is a ring of 56 pits known as the Aubrey Holes, named after John Aubrey, who noticed some of them in the seventeenth century. There were entrances in the northeast and south.

In the centre stood the sarsen circle: 30 upright stones about 4 m tall above ground, topped by 30 lintels fitted into a continuous ring about 33 m across. Inside it stood five trilithons, each made of two huge uprights and a lintel, arranged in a horseshoe that opens toward the northeast. The trilithons rise in height toward the back of the horseshoe; the tallest stood more than 7 m above the ground.

The smaller bluestones were set between the sarsens in circles and ovals, rearranged several times. Near the centre lies the Altar Stone, a large flat sandstone slab now fallen and partly buried. Outside the circle, near the northeast entrance, stands the Heel Stone, and the Avenue, a path between two banks and ditches, leads from the entrance about 2.8 km to the River Avon.

All these parts share one axis. Standing in the centre at midsummer, you can watch the sun rise in the northeast near the Heel Stone and along the line of the Avenue. Turning around at midwinter, you would face the setting sun in the southwest, framed by the great trilithon. Many archaeologists think the midwinter sunset was the most important moment for the builders.

The sarsens are blocks of a very hard sandstone called silcrete that formed naturally on the chalk downs. On average they weigh about 25 tonnes each, and the largest are heavier still. In 2020 geochemical analysis of a core drilled from one of the stones showed that most of the sarsens came from West Woods, near Marlborough, about 25 km north of Stonehenge.

The bluestones are smaller, weighing about 2–5 tonnes each, and are made of several kinds of rock, mainly dolerite and rhyolite, that appear bluish when freshly broken. Geologists and archaeologists have traced many of them to specific outcrops in the Preseli Hills of southwest Wales, more than 200 km away, where quarry sites such as Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin have been excavated. Around 80 bluestones may have been brought to the site; 43 survive today.

The Altar Stone, a six-tonne slab of sandstone, was long thought to come from Wales too. In 2024 a study of tiny mineral grains in it showed that it matches rocks of the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, more than 700 km away. How it was transported, by land or by sea, is unknown.

Moving stones over such distances without wheels or draught animals for heavy loads was a huge task. Most researchers think they were dragged on wooden sledges, perhaps over timber rails, using ropes made of plant fibre and large teams of people. Experiments have shown that such methods can work.

Long before the monument, around 8000 BCE, hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period raised a row of large pine posts near the site, found in the 1960s under the former car park. Whether these had any link with the later monument is uncertain, but they show the place attracted attention very early.

Stage 1 (about 3000 BCE): the circular ditch and bank were dug using antler picks, and the 56 Aubrey Holes were made. Many archaeologists now think the Aubrey Holes originally held bluestones, which would mean some Welsh stones arrived at the very start. Cremated human remains were buried in the holes and ditch, making Stonehenge one of the largest cemeteries of its time in Britain.

Stage 2 (about 2500 BCE): the great sarsen circle and trilithons were raised, and the bluestones were set up in the centre. The stones were shaped with hammer stones, and joints borrowed from woodworking were carved into them: mortise-and-tenon joints to lock lintels onto uprights, and tongue-and-groove joints to link the lintels to one another. The sarsens’ inner faces were dressed more carefully than their outer faces, as if the monument was designed to be seen from inside or along the axis.

Later stages (about 2400–1500 BCE): the bluestones were rearranged into new circles and ovals, the Avenue was built, and around 1800–1500 BCE two rings of pits called the Y and Z Holes were dug around the stones, perhaps for a rearrangement that was never completed. After this, major building stopped, although the monument remained a landmark and a focus for burials in the surrounding barrows.

The first builders were Neolithic farmers. Ancient DNA shows that farming populations whose ancestors had come from Anatolia (modern Turkey), by way of continental Europe, had arrived in Britain around 4000 BCE and largely replaced earlier hunter-gatherers. These farming communities built the ditch and raised the great stones.

About 3 km northeast of Stonehenge lies Durrington Walls, a giant henge enclosure. Excavations by the Stonehenge Riverside Project found traces of many houses from about 2500 BCE, perhaps the dwellings of builders or of people who gathered for festivals. Enormous quantities of pig bones, many from animals slaughtered in midwinter, and pottery with food residues suggest large seasonal feasts. Chemical analysis of animal bones shows that some livestock was brought from far away, including Scotland and Wales.

From around 2450 BCE, people associated with the Beaker culture, named after their distinctive pottery, arrived in Britain from the continent. Ancient DNA studies suggest that within a few centuries this migration replaced most of the genetic ancestry of the earlier Neolithic population. Beaker-period people used and modified Stonehenge. The Amesbury Archer, a man buried about 5 km from Stonehenge around 2300 BCE with arrowheads, copper knives and gold ornaments, grew up in central Europe, probably the Alpine region, according to isotope analysis of his teeth.

Stonehenge, then, was not the work of a single people or generation. It was built, used and reshaped by communities across more than a thousand years, including groups whose ancestry and way of life changed over that time.

Because no written records survive, the purpose of Stonehenge must be inferred. Several functions seem certain: it was a monument to the dead, with many cremation burials; it was aligned on the solstices, marking key turning points of the year; and it drew people and materials from far away, making it a meeting place for communities across Britain.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project, led by Mike Parker Pearson, proposed that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls formed a pair: timber circles at Durrington Walls for the living, and the stone circle at Stonehenge as a domain of the ancestors, linked by the River Avon and the Avenue. On this view the midwinter gatherings were times of feasting and of honouring the dead.

Other interpretations emphasise different aspects. Timothy Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright suggested that the bluestones were believed to have healing powers, pointing to injured and ill people buried nearby. Some researchers stress unification: bringing Welsh stones and Scottish stone to Wiltshire may have symbolised joining distant communities. Others have argued that the sarsen circle encoded a solar calendar; this idea has been strongly criticised by archaeoastronomers.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Stonehenge probably meant different things to different generations over the centuries it was in use.

Medieval writers tried to explain Stonehenge with stories. Around 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth told how the wizard Merlin moved the stones from Ireland to create a memorial for Britons killed by the Saxons. In the seventeenth century the architect Inigo Jones argued it was a Roman temple, while John Aubrey suggested it had been built by the Druids, the priests of the pre-Roman Britons. William Stukeley developed the Druid theory in the eighteenth century and was among the first to record the monument’s alignment with the midsummer sunrise.

Radiocarbon dating later showed that Stonehenge is far older than the Druids of the Iron Age, but the Druid idea shaped its modern image. Since the early twentieth century, modern Druid groups have held ceremonies there, and the solstices continue to be important for pagan and other communities today.

The monument has changed over time. Some stones fell in 1797 and on the last day of 1900. In 1915 the estate was sold at auction to Cecil Chubb, who gave Stonehenge to the nation in 1918. Excavations by William Hawley in the 1920s and Richard Atkinson and colleagues in the 1950s, as well as restorations in the twentieth century that straightened and re-erected several stones and set some in concrete, mean that today’s monument is partly a product of modern intervention.

In 1986 Stonehenge and Avebury, with their associated sites, were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List as outstanding examples of Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial landscapes. Stonehenge is owned by the state and cared for by English Heritage, while much of the surrounding land is managed by the National Trust.

Access to the stones has been contested. A free festival held near the stones in the 1970s and early 1980s was banned, and in 1985 police clashed with travellers heading to the site in what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield. Since 2000, English Heritage has allowed managed open access to the stones at the solstices, when thousands of people gather.

Roads have been a long-running problem. In 2013 the road passing right beside the stones was closed and a new visitor centre opened further away. Plans to put the nearby A303 main road into a tunnel divided opinion for decades, with supporters arguing it would restore the landscape and critics, including archaeologists and UNESCO advisers, warning of damage to buried archaeology. The UK government cancelled the scheme in 2024.

Chronology. The sequence of building stages has been revised several times. The classic scheme of Stonehenge I, II and III was replaced in the 1990s by a sequence based on a large programme of radiocarbon dating, and was revised again in 2012 into five stages. Dates for particular events, such as when the bluestones first arrived, remain debated, partly because many early excavations were poorly recorded.

Transport of the bluestones. In the twentieth century some geologists argued that glaciers had carried the bluestones to Salisbury Plain. Most researchers now reject this, because quarry sites in the Preseli Hills show evidence of human extraction and because no similar glacial deposits are found near Stonehenge. It has also been proposed that the bluestones first stood in a circle at Waun Mawn in Wales before being moved; this hypothesis is disputed.

Astronomy. The solstice alignment is widely accepted, but more elaborate claims have been controversial. In the 1960s the astronomer Gerald Hawkins argued that Stonehenge was a “computer” for predicting eclipses; Richard Atkinson and others criticised this sharply. More recent claims that the sarsen circle represents a precise calendar have also been challenged. The debate illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing intended alignments from coincidences.

Society and power. Who organised such a project? Some archaeologists see evidence of emerging elites or chiefdoms; others emphasise cooperation among many communities without centralised rulers. The discovery that people, animals and stones came from across Britain has shifted attention to Stonehenge as a product of island-wide networks.

Excavation records are the foundation. Around half the interior was excavated in the early twentieth century, often with methods that destroyed context. A major English Heritage publication in 1995 brought together the records of twentieth-century excavations with a new series of radiocarbon dates. Modern projects, including the Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003–2009) and later work on the bluestone quarries, have added carefully recorded evidence.

Scientific analyses are transforming understanding. Radiocarbon dating of antler picks and bones fixes the building stages. Geochemistry and petrography link stones to their sources. Isotope analysis of teeth and bones traces where people and animals grew up. Ancient DNA reveals population movements. Laser scanning of the stones has revealed tool marks and prehistoric carvings of axe-heads and daggers.

Landscape archaeology views Stonehenge not in isolation but as part of a wider ceremonial landscape. Geophysical surveys across many square kilometres, such as those of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, have mapped buried pits, ditches and monuments. The central lesson is that Stonehenge can only be understood together with its surroundings, its builders and its long afterlife.