Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton

totem poles,
and indeed it is difficult to see what
other purpose they could have served.
The area around Stonehenge is full of
prehistoric monuments, a number of
which were constructed in the early
Neolithic period (c. 4000 B.c.-3000 B.C.)
and thus predate the Stonehenge
monument. Examples include the long
barrow (communal burial chamber) at
Winterbourne Stoke, 1.4 miles away;
the causewayed enclosure (a type of
large prehistoric earthwork) known as
Robin Hood's Ball, 1.2 miles northwest
of Stonehenge; and the Lesser Cursus
(a long, narrow, rectangular earthwork
enclosure) 1,968 feet to the north.
Thus, when the builders of the first
stage of construction at Stonehenge
began work, they were already operating in a sacred landscape, one that
had seen ritual use for more than 5,000
years.

    The first of Stonehenge's three construction phases was begun around
3100 B.C. and consisted of a circle of timber posts surrounded by a ditch and
bank. This henge, (henge used in the
archaeological sense to mean a circular or oval-shaped flat area enclosed
by a boundary earthwork) measured
approximately 360 feet in diameter,
and possessed a large entrance to the
northeast and another smaller one
to the south. This monument was dug
by hand using deer antlers and the
    shoulder blades of oxen or cattle. Modern excavations of the ditch have
recovered antlers used in the construction that were deliberately left
behind by the builders of this monument. One odd fact about this phase is
that there were other animal bones,
mainly from cattle, placed in the bottom of the ditch, which proved to be
200 years older than the antler tools
used to dig the structure. It seems that
the people who buried the items kept
them for some time before burial; perhaps the bones were sacred objects
removed from a previous ritual location and brought to Stonehenge. There
is little remaining evidence for Phase
II at Stonehenge, though judging by
finds of cremated bones from at least
200 bodies, the site must have functioned as a cremation cemetary.
    Phase III at the site, beginning
around 2600 B.C., involved the rebuilding of the simple earth and timber
henge in stone. Two concentric circles
of 80 bluestone pillars were erected at
the center of the monument. These
stones, weighing about 4 tons each,
were carved and transported from the
Preseli Hills, in Pembrokeshire,
southwest Wales, and brought by a
route at least 186 miles long. Apart
from the bluestones, a 16 foot long
blue-gray sandstone, now known as the
Altar Stone, was brought to
Stonehenge from near Milford Haven
on the coast to the south of the Preseli
Hills. How the bluestones arrived on
Salisbury Plain is a subject of much
controversy, though most archaeologists nowadays believe that they were
brought there by man. The most obvious way for the builders of Stonehenge
to transport the stones would have
been to drag them down to the sea at Milford Haven by roller and sledge,
and then float them to Stonehenge on
rafts by sea and river-an incredible
achievement of organization and dedication. An experiment to duplicate
this feat was undertaken in 2001, when
volunteers managed to pull a 3-ton
stone down to the sea from the Preseli
Hills in a wooden sledge on rollers, but
when the stone was placed on the raft
it slipped into the sea and sank. Intriguingly, an old legend held that
Stonehenge originated with Merlin the
wizard, who had a huge structure
known as the Giant's Dance magically
transported from Ireland. Could the
journey of the bluestones form Wales
be a disorted memory of Stonehenge
originating in the west?

    Photograph by the author.
    Detail of Stonehenge, showing the huge sarsen stones.
    It was also in Phase III at Stonehenge that the northeastern entrance
to the enclosure was widened so that
it precisely aligned with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset of
the period. Another feature added to
the Stonehenge landscape