After 10 years of archaeological investigations, researchers
have concluded that Stonehenge was built as a monument to unify the
peoples of Britain, after a long period of conflict and regional
difference between eastern and western Britain.
Stonehenge Riverside Project team
Its
stones are thought to have symbolized the ancestors of different groups
of earliest farming communities in Britain, with some stones coming
from southern England and others from west Wales.
The teams, from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester,
Southampton, Bournemouth and University College London, all working on
the Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP), explored not just Stonehenge and
its landscape but also the wider social and economic context of the
monument’s main stages of construction around 3,000 BC and 2,500 BC.
“When Stonehenge was built”, said Professor Mike Parker Pearson of
the University of Sheffield, “there was a growing island-wide culture –
the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used
from Orkney to the south coast. This was very different to the
regionalism of previous centuries. Stonehenge itself was a massive
undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as
far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work
itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been
an act of unification.”
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