Stonehenge: Sarsens and a Sacred Place

© Courtesy of Melanie Grisak: RBCM Photographer

Stonehenge: Sarsens and a Sacred Place

By WHAT’S INSIGHT, ROYAL BC MUSEUM

The theories that surround the creation of Stonehenge are as elusive and magical as the stone circle itself. Aliens, giants, or the wizened old sorcerer Merlin? How, and more importantly, why were hundreds of tonnes of stone moved to Salisbury Plain some 5,000 years ago? For every question science has answered, there are as many that remain just out of reach.

In Stonehenge, the current feature exhibition at the Royal BC Museum, archeologists, scientists and historians delve into the mysteries of the famed and fabled stone monument and, importantly, the people who built it.

For the first time, Stonehenge, created by MuseumsPartner in Austria, takes visitors behind the myths and magic to the real people who lived, worked, and died on the land where the henge has stood for five millennia.

It’s a fascination the world can’t shake, according to award-winning archaeologist and exhibition curator Mike Parker Pearson, one of the minds behind Stonehenge. Polling done while deciding the topic of MuseumsPartner’s next exhibition showed huge interest in the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“Stonehenge was built in the Neolithic—the New Stone Age— and most of what has survived is little more than stones and bone, [but] public opinion in different parts of the world showed that people were really fascinated by Stonehenge,” says Parker Pearson. “I realized that there’s an amazing story to be told about the people who built this iconic stone circle. Who were they? How did they live? How and why did they build it?”

When Parker Pearson first began excavating Stonehenge in 2004, archaeologists knew about many of the sites around the primary henge, but no one had figured out how they linked to one another.

The iconic linteled and jointed stonehenge made of Welsh bluestone and massive sarsen stones is at the centre of a multi-monument complex that spans 26 square kilometres in Wiltshire, England. The site is comprised of five henges (Stonehenge, Woodhenge, Durrington Walls Henge, the now levelled Coneybury Henge, and the West Amesbury Henge, also known as Bluestonehenge), two cursus monuments (large parallel banked enclosures earlier than Stonehenge and thought to be ceremonial routes for the dead), hundreds of burial mounds known as barrows, prehistoric roadways (known as avenues) at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, Vespasian’s Camp (an Iron Age hillfort), the Cuckoo Stone shrine, and the largest Neolithic settlement in Britain beneath Durrington Walls henge.

“Over the next 10 years of fieldwork, we discovered the remains of houses where people lived at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, and recovered the cremated bones of those buried at Stonehenge,” says Parker Pearson.

“The discoveries confirmed our theories and also provided thousands of finds of pottery, bones, flints, plant remains, and other finds for laboratory analysis.”

Advances in scientific techniques and methods, including isotope and ancient DNA analysis, allowed Parker Pearson and his team to tell a completely new story about the site and its role in unifying the ancestors, the people, the land and the cosmos.

“Stonehenge was built in a landscape that was already special and sacred, and where people had come together for large gatherings in the centuries before,” says Parker Pearson. While Parker Pearson and his team may understand why the location was chosen, there are fewer answers as to why those specific stones were chosen, particularly when other viable stones already existed in the area.

“Since 2012 I’ve been working with geologists to find out exactly where Stonehenge’s stones came from. We’ve found that the big stones—called sarsens—come from 24 kilometres away but it is the smaller ‘bluestones,’ which are really fascinating,” says Parker Pearson. “Although there are 43 of them, there were originally about 80. Geologists have sourced them to outcrops in the Preseli hills of west Wales, 280 kilometres away. To haul them that huge distance was one of the great achievements of prehistoric people.”

Parker Pearson says that in many cases, they’ve been able to pinpoint the location of the stones down to the exact outcrop. The team’s excavations confirmed that the rocks had been quarried for standing stones just before Stonehenge was built, even discovering

the stone wedges used to pry the pillars off the outcrops. While maybe not as exciting as spying evidence of an extraterrestrial visitor or a mystical wizard, the wedges are remarkable evidence of the very real work of human hands thousands of years ago.

“Stonehenge is the only stone circle to be built with stones not from its locality and this is the secret of its purpose, to unite those ancient people of Britain,” says Parker Pearson. “Geologists are now investigating the source of the Altar Stone, at the centre of Stonehenge, and they are about to announce their findings. We’ve known since last year that it comes from far to the north, even further away than the bluestones, but just how far is likely to be a revelation!” And just like that, there’s another mystery poised to be revealed. Who knows what other secrets Stonehenge keeps hidden within its towering slabs?

See Stonehenge at the Royal BC Museum through January 5, 2025, and discover the mysteries of one of the world’s most famous stone monuments for yourself.