Nat Geo's 'Stonehenge Decoded' a no miss on Sunday June 1st

By Stone Martindale Jun 1, 2008, 15:49 GMT

A file picture dated 21 June 2003 shows Stonehenge in Amesbury, Britain. EPA/ROY KILCULLEN

For 5,000 years, the purpose of Stonehenge has remained a mystery, but archaeologists have uncovered a theory for this architectural riddle.

National Geographic Channel presents 'Stonehenge Decoded" tonight, Sunday June 1st at 9 PM.

Lying on the windswept plains of southern England is what may be one of mankind's greatest monuments to the seasons—and to the importance they have long had in our lives.

This construction of massive stones, or megaliths haunts our imagination: How was Stonehenge created, and why?

English scholar Henry of Huntington wrote back in 1130, Stonehenge is a place “where stones of an amazing size are set up in the manner of doorways, so that one door seems to be set upon another. "

The people who quarried the immense sarsens and the smaller bluestones—the latter of which seem to have come from far away and then arranged them into a circular monument came and went many centuries ago, without leaving an explanation, either written or remembered, of how they built it or what purpose it was intended to serve.

It’s not surprising, then, that a wealth of theories have been prsented, and the Nat Geo special examines several up close with known Stonehenge scholars and experts.

Some contend the stone monument was fashioned by an ancient sorcerer to the notion that it was some sort of gigantic prehistoric computer.

Some even have speculated that its origin is extraterrestrial. Until one such narrative is conclusively proven to be fact, it’s likely that those who stare in wonder at the structure will continue to come up with new and perhaps even stranger explanations.

Mid-12th Century pseudo-historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose book Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”) presented the legend of King Arthur as fact, was perhaps the first to come up with an elaborate, fanciful explanation for Stonehenge’s existence.

According to Geoffrey, the monument’s bluestones originated in Africa, where ancient giants scooped them up because of their healing properties and transported them to the mythical Mount Killaraus in Ireland, where they formed the Giants’ Circle.

But when Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons, wanted to create a memorial to slain warriors, the magician Merlin suggested to him that the stones would make excellent building material. The king sent an army to defeat the Irish in battle, but they were unable to move the stones, until Merlin used his sorcery to dismantle the structure and transport it across the sea—proving, in the process, that the supernatural was more potent than brute force.

In 1620, the eccentric English architect Inigo Jones was commissioned by King James I to document the structure of Stonehenge and investigate its origin. In 1655, three years after Jones’ death, his son-in-law and assistant John Webb published a book, The Most Remarkable Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly Called Stone-Heng, Restored, supposedly based upon notes left behind by the architect.

The book depicts Stonehenge as the ruins of a Tuscan-style temple, built by the Romans during their occupation of Britain in the First through Fifth Centuries AD, to venerate Coelus, the Roman god of the sky.

The Roman theory was in vogue for only a few years before it was attacked by another writer, Dr. Walter Charleton, who argued that Stonehenge actually had been built by the Danish invaders who followed the Romans.

Modern archaeological research reveals that Stonehenge predated both groups by thousands of years.

Like Rome, Stonehenge wasn't built in a day. In fact, it evolved over about 1,600 years.

It began nearly 5,000 years ago in the late Stone Age when workers hacked out a circular ditch and built an earthen embankment enclosing an area about 330 feet (100 meters) across. Within the circle the builders dug 56 small holes that likely held wooden posts. Over time these wooden posts decayed, leaving deep indentations in a circular pattern. Sometime between 2900 and 2400 BC, several of the holes became repositories for ashes.

These ashes, archaeologists believe, are from the cremation, or ritual burning, of dead bodies.

A thousand years later, new builders erected a monumental circle of linked sarsen stones, a form of very hard sandstone. They also raised an inner horseshoe-shaped design of ten megaliths, which stand up to 23 feet (7 meters) tall and weigh as much as 45 tons each.

Perhaps using a system of levers, timber, and ropes, the builders topped these slabs with horizontal stones called lintels, thus forming five trilithons, or squared arches. Around them they placed a ring of somewhat smaller sarsens rising about 25.5 feet (8 meters) from the ground and bearing their own lintels.

Perhaps it played a role in telling Stone Age farmers when to plant crops or what a sort of ersatz farmers almanac.

Even today, people are drawn to this site to celebrate the arrival of the summer solstice—to marvel at the sheer feat of its creation and perhaps to renew human and natural rhythms on planet Earth.