Stonehenge in Six Questions

Kipling kept "six honest serving-men": What and Why and When, and How and Where and Who. Put to Stonehenge, five of them have answers backed by evidence. This page is the companion to the short film Stonehenge in six questions, with the sources behind each card.

Where

On Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, about two miles (3.3 km) west of Amesbury and eight miles north of Salisbury, in a landscape dense with Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, above all round barrows. Durrington Walls, about two miles to the north-east, is a far larger henge; houses excavated there may have sheltered the people who built Stonehenge (Parker Pearson et al. 2007).

Still from the Stonehenge Landscape Flyover.

(Click Photos to embiggen)

What

A circular bank and ditch, the earliest part of the monument. Inside it, a ring of sarsen uprights capped by a continuous circle of lintels; within that, a horseshoe of five trilithons; and among them the smaller bluestones, set as a circle and an inner horseshoe. Stonehenge gave its name to the class of monuments called henges, yet fails the definition: its main bank lies inside its ditch, not outside (see Is Stonehenge a henge?).

Plan from the Stonehenge 3D model, bluestones in blue. T. Daw, after Rees 1989.

When

The bank and ditch were built about 3000 BC. The sarsens and bluestones were set up in the centre about 2500 BC; the bluestones were rearranged two or three centuries later; and the Y and Z holes around the circle are dated between 1800 and 1500 BC (English Heritage; Darvill et al. 2012 set out five stages).

How

Fifty of the fifty-two surviving sarsens share a geochemical signature with West Woods, about 25 km to the north; typical uprights weigh around 20 tonnes (Nash et al. 2020). The bluestones come from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, some 220 km away in a straight line. The Altar Stone is a sandstone from much further north: Clarke et al. (2024) point to the Orcadian Basin of north-east Scotland. On the evidence so far that is a search area rather than a source outcrop (see The Altar Stone Zircons, One Sample at a Time). How the stones were moved is still debated; the distances here are straight lines, not routes.

Sarsens from West Woods (25 km), bluestones from the Preseli Hills (220 km). Lines are not routes.

Who

The builders were farmers whose ancestors had crossed from the continent around 4000 BC; ancient genomes show that Britain's Neolithic transition "was mediated by incoming continental farmers, with little gene flow from local hunter-gatherers" (Brace et al. 2019). About 64 cremations have been found at Stonehenge, and perhaps as many as 150 people were originally buried there (English Heritage). Isotopes in pig bones from Durrington Walls suggest animals were brought from across Britain for feasts, though the authors note that "it is not possible to define origins with confidence" (Madgwick et al. 2019). From about 2450 BC newcomers associated with Beaker pottery arrived, and within a few centuries about 90 per cent of Britain's gene pool had been replaced (Olalde et al. 2018).

Reconstructed Neolithic house, Stonehenge visitor centre. Alan Hunt, geograph.org.uk/p/4520192, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Why

Unknown. The one fixed clue is the axis: from the centre, the midsummer sun rises just to the left of the Heel Stone, and the midwinter sun would originally have set between the uprights of the tallest trilithon; the final straight stretch of the Avenue follows the same north-east to south-west line (English Heritage). Proposed purposes include a temple to the sun, a monument to the ancestors (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998) and a place of healing (Darvill 2006). The evidence does not yet choose between them.

Notes on the film

• Dates are rounded from radiocarbon ranges.
• Bluestone positions on the plan are taken from the stone-number points on the Rees 1989 sheet (via the georeferenced plan); they mark positions, not shapes.
• The maps use the NOAA GLOBE land mask. Lines join a source to Stonehenge; they are not routes.
• Music: original.

Sources

• Brace, S. et al. 2019. Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain. Nature Ecology & Evolution 3: 765–771.
• Clarke, A. J. I. et al. 2024. A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. Nature 632: 570–575.
• Cleal, R. M. J., Walker, K. E. & Montague, R. 1995. Stonehenge in its Landscape: Twentieth-Century Excavations. London: English Heritage.
• Darvill, T. 2006. Stonehenge: The Biography of a Landscape. Stroud: Tempus.
• Darvill, T., Marshall, P., Parker Pearson, M. & Wainwright, G. 2012. Stonehenge remodelled. Antiquity 86: 1021–1040.
• English Heritage. History of Stonehenge; Understanding Stonehenge. english-heritage.org.uk
• Kipling, R. 1902. The Elephant's Child. In Just So Stories. London: Macmillan.
• Madgwick, R. et al. 2019. Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs and across Wessex drew people and animals from throughout Britain. Science Advances 5: eaau6078.
• Nash, D. J. et al. 2020. Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge. Science Advances 6: eabc0133.
• Olalde, I. et al. 2018. The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe. Nature 555: 190–196.
• Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2007. The age of Stonehenge. Antiquity 81: 617–639.
• Parker Pearson, M. & Ramilisonina 1998. Stonehenge for the ancestors: the stones pass on the message. Antiquity 72: 308–326.