STUDY: Stonehenge was a burial site for centuries

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - England's enigmatic Stonehenge served as a burial ground
from its earliest beginnings and for several hundred years thereafter,
new research indicates.

Dating of cremated remains shows burials took place as early as 3000
B.C., when the first ditches around the monument were being built,
researchers said Thursday.

And those burials continued for at least 500 years, when the giant
stones that mark the mysterious circle were being erected, they said.

"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 in England and head of the Stonehenge
Riverside Archaeological Project.

In the past many archaeologists had thought that burials at Stonehenge
continued for only about a century, the researchers said.

"Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in
the mid third millennium B.C. 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," Parker Pearson said in a statement.

The researchers also excavated homes nearby at Durrington Walls, which
they said appeared to be seasonal homes related to Stonehenge.

"It's a quite extraordinary settlement, we've never seen anything like
it before," Parker Pearson said. The village appeared to be a land of
the living and Stonehenge a land of the ancestors, he said.

There were at least 300 and perhaps as many as 1,000 homes in the
village, he said. The small homes were occupied in midwinter and
midsummer.

The village also included a circle of wooden pillars, which the
researchers have named the Southern Circle. It is oriented toward the
midwinter sunrise, the opposite of Stonehenge, which is oriented to
the midsummer sunrise.

The research was supported by the National Geographic Society, which
discusses Stonehenge in its June magazine and will feature the new
burial data on National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

The researchers said the earliest cremation burial was a small group
of bones and teeth found in pits called the Aubrey Holes and dated to
3030-2880 B.C., about the time with the first ditch-and-bank monument
was being built.

Remains from the surrounding ditch included an adult dated to
2930-2870 B.C., and the most recent cremation, Parker Pearson said,
comes from the ditch's northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman.
It dated to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first arrangements of
large sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.

According to Parker Pearson's team, this is the first time any of the
cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The
burials dated by the group were excavated in the 1950s and have been
kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

In the 1920s an additional 49 cremation burials were dug up at
Stonehenge, but all were reburied because they were thought to be of
no scientific value, the researchers said.

They estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all
as cremation deposits.

Team member Andrew Chamberlain suggested that that the cremation
burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its
descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty.

A clue to this, he said, is the small number of burials in
Stonehenge's earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent
centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.

Parker Pearson added: "I don't think it was the common people getting
buried at Stonehenge — it was clearly a special place at that time.
One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials."

The actual building and purpose of Stonehenge remain a mystery that
has long drawn speculation from many sources.

And not all archaeologists agree with Parker Pearson's theory.

Indeed, the June issue of National Geographic Magazine quotes Mike
Pitts, editor of the journal British Archaeology, as saying some
details of the theory are problematic with gaps remaining to be
filled. Uses of the landscape in the area for farming and grazing, for
example, do not seem compatible with a ritualized place.

"The value of this interpretation is not just the idea of linking
stones and ancestors, but that it works with the entire landscape,"
Pitts was quoted as saying.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080529/ap_on_sc/sci_stonehenge

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