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Stonehenge used as `royal burial site` |
Stonehenge used as `royal burial site` | 30.05.2008 | |
ENGLAND`S Stonehenge was used as a burial site from its inception 5000 years ago and remained so for more than 500 years, says a study that may shed some light on the ancient monument.
"It`s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages,`` said Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield.
"Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium BC,`` said Parker Pearson, who with support of the National Geographic Society leads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project
Up to now, archaeologist believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 BC before its large stones, known as sarsens, were put in place.
But a small pile of burned bones and teeth from one of the pits around Stonehenge`s edge known as the Aubrey Holes dates to 3030-2880 BC, the study found.
A second burial of an adult, from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, dates to 2930-2870 BC.
The most recent cremation, of a 25-year-old woman in the ditch`s northern side, dates to 2570-2340 BC, around the time the first arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge, Parker Pearson said.
"The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge`s sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument`s use, and demonstrates that it was still very much a `domain of the dead,``` he said.
The people buried at the site were likely among prominent members of the society at the time, the archeologist said.
"I don`t think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge - it was clearly a special place at that time,`` Parker Pearson said.
"The people buried here must have been drawn from a very small and select living population,`` he said.
"Archaeologists have long speculated about whether Stonehenge was put up by prehistoric chiefs - perhaps even ancient royalty - and the new results suggest that not only is this likely to have been the case, but it also was the resting place of their mortal remains.``
His colleague at Sheffield, Andrew Chamberlain, a specialist in ancient demography, suggests that it may have been a site for a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty.
His theory is based on the small number of burials in Stonehenge`s early stages, a number that increases in subsequent centuries as offspring multiplied.
The research marks the first time any of the cremation burial sites from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated.
Stonehenge is one of the world`s best preserved prehistoric monuments. Share this article |
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