How Was Stonehenge Built?
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Stonehenge was built over a five hundred year period. Though there were three major cultural shifts, its basic design remained the same. This stone construction is "highly accurate for the period" and "remarkable evidence of the knowledge and skills of Stonehenge's makers" ("GBC-Stonehenge", 1). Building Stonehenge took much human power and required high organizational skills.
Stonehenge I was a relatively simple structure compared to how we see it today. The Stone Age builders began in approximately 3100 BC and ended in about 2300 BC (Roop, 64). Stonehenge I was a circular henge with an entrance to the North East enclosing, perhaps, a small wooden building. A tall wooden archway set 65 feet away from the entrance. The fifty-six evenly spaced holes, or Aubrey holes, named after their discoverer, surrounded the wooden building, concentric with the ditch and bank. Their builders filled them in almost immediately after they dug them (much later in Stonehenge's history they were filled with cremated human remains). At the entrance, there was a pair of stones, only one remaining now. It is called the Slaughter Stone. Outside the bank, lined up with the North East entrance, was a large sarsen stone. Called the Heel Stone, it is 16 feet (4.9m) tall and made of a type sandstone called sarsen ("Stonehenge" Encyclopedia Americana, 20).
The Windmill Hill people used shovels and picks made of the shoulder blades of oxen, wood, and antlers of red deer to build the henge. Then they loaded the dirt into baskets and carried it away. Archaeologists found those ancient tools at various places on the site. Modern scientists recreated the process and found the prehistoric instruments to work almost as well as modern tools. The ditch is 320 feet (91 meters) in diameter, six feet (1.8 meters) high and wide (Schreiber, 28). Erosion filled some of the ditch and wore down the two rings on either side. They made an entrance in the henge on the North East side, marked by a pair of stones. The builders constructed a sixty-five foot wooden gate (Roop, 66).
Three feet deep and three feet wide, the Windmill Hill people could have used the Aubrey Holes to hold wooden posts temporarily or to serve in religious ceremonies. They were filled in almost immediately after they were dug. Antiquary John Aubrey discovered them in the 17th century. Previously invisible on the surface, cement posts today mark them. At 16-foot intervals, they are straight sided at flat-bottomed. (National Geographic Society, 98) Their exact use for the Windmill Hill people remains blanketed in mystery, as a great deal of things about Stonehenge are.
The Heel Stone weighs several tons. It sits fifty feet away from the ditch and was at one time part of a pair, one foot away from its mate. It is sixteen feet (4.9 meters) tall and made of sarsen stone ("Stonehenge" Encyclopedia Americana, NPA). This tilted boulder is a natural stone. Also called the Helestone or Friar's Heel, it came from a quarry in Marlborough Downs. Other than the observation that the sun rises over it on summer solstice, scientists are not sure of its use. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown. Some archaeologists say that it would be near impossible to place the stone in line with the midsummer sun purely by accident. Sources argue on the time the builders erected the pair of Heel Stones, some attributing it to Stonehenge I, and others to Stonehenge II.
During Stonehenge II people believed that a great deal of the sun-moon alignment occurred. Begun in 2150 BC by the Beaker Peoples (Roop, 66), this period was also when the builders brought many of the larger stones to Salisbury Plain and placed them in circles at the center of the earthwork.
The Beaker Peoples save the widening of the entrance and its location shifted a bit to match more exactly the solstice sunrise. They built a dirt road, called the Avenue, from the entrance, possibly to carry stones to the site or for ceremonial purposes. The Avenue had two parallel banks seventy feet apart on each side. The banks continue for approximately 500 feet ("Stonehenge", 2). Later in this period it extended to the River Avon, 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) away (Atkinson, 56). The Avenue runs North East, directly towards the rising midsummer sun.
They placed two partial circles of bluestones in the center of the circle, concentric to each other. The Beaker Folk quarried the eighty bluestones, weighing four tons each, from a place called Mount Prescelly. This wind-blown, dome shaped landmark for sailors on the Irish Sea was probably a sacred place for the Beaker Peoples. Mt. Prescelly might have been like "Mt. Olympus in the traditions of the Greeks." (Roops 69). Such bluestones, whose name comes from their blue, sparkling color, can be found only at this ancient Welsh quarry. Mt. Prescelly is located on the South West tip of Wales, about three hundred miles (438 kilometers) from Stonehenge (Schreiber, 29). The bluestones are tall flat columns of natural stone.
Since the bluestone quarry was so far away, this poses another question: How did the Beaker Folk transport them to Salisbury Plain? Scientists think they know the answer. The Beaker People first loaded the bluestones onto sledges with wooden runners on the bottom. Then they drug the sledges over a long line of rounded logs. Carried by roller and sledge across land to the headwaters of Milford Haven, they then floated on rafts to what is today Frome in Somerset. From there the Beaker peoples hauled the stones over land to Warminster in Wiltshire. Floating down the River Wylye, they went up the Salisbury Avon to West Arnesbury. The workers then had their last stretch to go, the drag long to Stonehenge.
Some of the mysterious components of Stonehenge II are the Q and R holes. The Q holes make an eighty-six foot (26.2m) diameter circle, and the R holes make a seventy-four foot (22.5m) circle inside them. No one really knows what their purpose was, though archaeologists think they held approximately thirty-eight bluestones, many of which builders used for later construction ("Stonehenge" Encyclopedia Americana, WPA).
Equally mysterious is the abrupt stop to construction around 2000 BC The bluestones were not even in all of their holes yet. They also removed some stones and filled in their holes. Archaeologists puzzle over what could have caused such an organized and wealthy tribe to terminate their project so quickly. Some guess that a disease swept the workers, leaving few to carry on the work. Others suppose that other tribes (such as the Wessex) drove them away, the Beaker Peoples or moved in seek of food (Roop, 69). We will probably never know the answer.
Sources dubbed Stonehenge III as the most fantastic of all construction periods. It is responsible for the most famous stones, the sarsen trilithon horseshoe and circle. Trilithons are two stone posts with a cap, or lintel, connecting the two. Begun in approximately 2000 BC (Robbins, 179), Stonehenge III was the most advanced of all stages, requiring the most human power.
The sarsen stones, made of a type of sandstone harder than granite, weigh from 25 to 50 tons each (Robbins, 179). They are 7 feet (2. lm) wide and 13 feet (4m) ("Stonehenge" Encyclopedia Americana, NPA) to 21 feet (6.4m) high on average (Schreiber, 30). The trilithons have "integral mortise and tendon joints" ("GBC-Stonehenge", 2). The Wessex people showed very precise measurements on keeping the stones even. They cut the lintels at a slight curve to make the circle. That would have taken careful and wise judgment and engineering.
These heavy stones came from a place called Marlborough Downs near Avebury in Northwiltshire, twenty miles north of Stonehenge (Stonehenge, 2). They transported the using rollers and sledges like their predecessors. With such heavy stones, it took five hundred individuals to pull one stone, with another one hundred to lay heavy rollers in front of the stone. It's steepest part, Redhorn Hill, took even more persons. One theory suggests that the Wessex peoples only transported stones when there was ice on the ground so the stones would just slide along. Once at Stonehenge, they prepared the stones for their pre-dug holes. The builders dressed them for their lintels and trimmed and pointed their ends. Levers made the stone rise until gravity slid it the rest of the way into the hole. At a 30-degree angle to the ground, the Wessex workers pulled on ropes from the opposite side, raising it to upright position. Workers quickly filled the hole at the stone's base with small, round packing stones. They then lowered the lintels into place ("Stonehenge", NPA). Outside this circle is an outer ring of sarsen trilithons, called the sarsen circle, consisting of 30 smaller stones with lintels (Roop, 71). They used the same process on the outer ring.
Inside the sarsen circle, the Wessex erected a small oval of twenty bluestones around the Altar Stone, a flat, blue-green, bluestone. Two more sets of mysterious holes, the Y and Z holes, appeared during Stonehenge III. The Y holes have 30 holes, 3 feet deep, about thirty-five feet from the sarsen circle. The Z holes are 29 holes, 3 feet, five inches deep (Hawkins, 57). Irregularly spaced, they usually form a rectangular shape. Never holding stones, they filled in naturally. There is a single blue-stone fragment in each of the holes, making them all the more mysterious.
