What Was Stonehenge For?
I for one have really never heard a whole lot about what Stonehenge was. Sure there have always been theories about its use from being some sort of ritual altar, to being a primitive timepiece. I ran a crossed an article about Stonehenge earlier today and it is is thought to have been host to a graveyard for more than 500 years. The Stonehenge graveyard was only thought to have been used for that purpose for about 100 years. New discoveries suggest that it was used for that purpose fror over 500 years, while the rest of the time it was used to host infomercials for “does Hydroxycut work?” seminars 
.
“Stonehenge was the biggest graveyard of the third millennium B.C.,” says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield in England. “From its beginning, it was used as a cemetery for a large number of people.” Parker Pearson directs the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project, which began in 2003 and runs through 2010.
The earliest cremation, a small pile of burned bones and teeth, dates from 5,030 to 4,880 years ago, about the time when a circular ditch and a series of pits were cut into the Salisbury Plain. The human remains originally lay in one of those pits, at the edge of where the circle of sarsen stones would later be placed.
An adult’s burned bones, originally found in a ditch that encircles Stonehenge, date from 4,930 to 4,870 years ago.
Remnants of a third cremation date from 4,570 to 4,340 years ago, around the time when sarsen stones first appeared at Stonehenge.
Another 49 cremation burials were unearthed at Stonehenge during the 1920s but later interred again because archaeologists at that time saw no scientific value in the bones. An estimated 150 to 240 cremated bodies were buried at Stonehenge over a span of 500 to 600 years.
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Filed under: Science by JMH
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