Stonehenge: A calendar or only a crematorium — Science News, November 11, 1972
The monument consisted of a circle of immense, finely tooled stone archways surrounded by a variety of 56 equally spaced [holes].… The exactly proportioned placement of the stones and holes has led archaeologists to presume that the monument had some nice astrological significance.… As an alternate clarification, the researchers say maybe there have been 56 households, clans or social models who constructed Stonehenge and who have been entitled to dig one of many [holes] and use it to inter cremated stays.
Update
Stonehenge’s objective stays murky, however the monument’s origin is changing into clearer because of science. For at the very least the primary 500 years of its existence, Stonehenge was a cemetery (SN: 5/29/08). A chemical evaluation of stays on the web site means that a number of the individuals interred there got here from Wales, greater than 200 kilometers west of the place Stonehenge stands in southern England (SN: 8/2/18). The monument’s first constructing blocks additionally could have come from Wales, repurposed from a stone circle there, however that speculation is debated (SN: 2/11/21).