LONDON (AP) — It’s that point of 12 months when crowds of pagans, druids, hippies and vacationers head to Stonehenge in Britain to rejoice the winter solstice, with the shortest day and the longest night time within the Northern Hemisphere.
Thousands are anticipated on Saturday on the megalithic circle on a plain in southern England as the primary rays of solar break by the enormous stones that make up one in every of world’s most well-known prehistoric monuments.
Rain has been forecast however there isn’t a doubt it received’t have the ability to drown out the drumming, chanting and cheering.
Beyond the fascination of the ritual, the everlasting query should still linger at the back of the minds of many guests: What was the actual which means and objective of Stonehenge?
The website has been the topic of vigorous debate, with some theories seemingly extra outlandish, if not alien, than others.
This 12 months, these gathering may have one thing new to debate.
In a paper revealed within the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University say that the location on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, could have had some unifying objective in historical instances.
They base that on a latest discovery that one in every of Stonehenge’s stones — the distinctive stone mendacity flat on the heart of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, lots of of miles north of the location.
What was shocking was that it got here from so far-off. It was lengthy identified that the opposite stones come from throughout Britain — together with the so-called bluestones, the smaller stones on the website that got here from Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, almost 240 kilometers (150 miles) away.
That diversified geology is what makes Stonehenge distinctive amongst over 900 stone circles in Britain.
“The reality that every one of its stones originated from distant areas … means that the stone circle could have had a political in addition to a spiritual objective,” mentioned lead writer Professor Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology.
It could have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their everlasting hyperlinks with their ancestors and the cosmos,” Parker Pearson mentioned.
Whatever its authentic objective, Stonehenge as we speak retains an necessary place in Britain’s tradition and historical past and stays one of many nation’s largest vacationer attracts — regardless of the seemingly everlasting visitors jams on the close by A303 freeway, a preferred route for motorists touring to and from the southwest of England.
Stonehenge was constructed on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain in phases, beginning 5,000 years in the past, with the distinctive stone circle erected within the late Neolithic interval, about 2,500 B.C.
English Heritage, a charity that manages lots of of historic websites, together with Stonehenge, has famous a number of explanations — from the circle being a coronation place for Danish kings, a druid temple, a cult heart for therapeutic, or an astronomical laptop for predicting eclipses and photo voltaic occasions.
So so far as symbolism and unification go — perhaps Stonehenge actually was a Mount Rushmore of its day?
