“These other people are farmers, they have crops, they have animals and the change of year would have been a component of their way of life,” Greaney, Senior Asset Historian at English Heritage, told AFP.
4,500 years ago, people from all over Britain and the European continent descended into the vast plain of southwest England, lifting the huge stones to shape the now-world-famous monument, a miraculous feat celebrated in a new major exhibition at the British Museum in London.
Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, Stonehenge was not built through slaves but through “volunteers,” a type of non-secular pilgrimage, Greaney said.
“I guess it’s a bit like your life in Mecca,” he added.
“Maybe once in your life, you will spend a year attending the wonderful communal project, which will solve the disorders of society and arrange appointments with the gods. “
The stone monument, carved and built at a time when there was no steel equipment, symbolizes the semi-Mythical prehistory of Britain and generated countless legends.
It is composed of two concentric circles of stone columns and lintels, and it is believed that there was an altar in the center.
The two main gates are lined up so that the sun rises on one the longest day of the year, June 21, and sets for the shortest, on December 21.
Adding more intrigue to the site, experts in 2011 found that many stones came from more than 250 kilometers (155 miles).
It’s possible that the builders, who migrated in search of more fertile land, brought them with them, said Neil Wilkin, curator of the exhibition, which will be open Feb. 17 to July 17.
The stones may have been selected simply for their symbolic value, similar to the ancestors of the builders, as remains of cremations were also found, he added.
The exhibit highlights “the vast interconnected world that existed around the ancient monument,” he said.
“This concept of being a farmer comes from England, Britain, the continent,” he explained. “So we stick to the elements that have moved. “
These come with a green jadeite punch head, quarried 1,300 kilometers away in the Italian Alps and brought to the region 6,000 years ago.
“They will illustrate those long-distance connections,” Wilkin said.
The exhibition will show how recent DNA discoveries and curtain research tell the story that the developers of Stonehenge were primitive.
Instead, it presents them as professional craftsmen who already deployed complicated and technical in 2500 BC.
Three kilometres from Stonehenge, in Durrington Walls, the remains of small houses were found in 2004.
The houses, made of intertwined branches covered in plaster, housed piles of staff from afar, dressed in fabrics of herbal fibers and leather slippers filled with grass to protect themselves from the cold.
To put Stonehenge in its global context, the British Museum will bring together 430 items borrowed from 35 collections.
“It’s an opportunity to see all of this together,” Adrian Green, director of the Salisbury Museum, which contributes to the exhibition, told AFP.
The southwest of England is dotted with Neolithic monuments.
They come with the circular log structure, Woodhenge, in Durrington Walls, and the five stone burial chambers of West Kennet Long Barrow.
The nearby Avebury Stone Circle is 3 times the length of Stonehenge, with stones weighing up to a hundred tons and a trench nine meters (30 feet) deep.
The region hopes to take advantage of the exhibition around the London exhibition to attract visitors after a drop in the number of employees due to the coronavirus pandemic.
One million more people visited Stonehenge every year before Covid-19.
Officials expect first-time visitors to stick to a tourist address called the Great West Way, passing through the other sites that only visit the domain on a day trip.
Stonehenge lost its original use only a hundred years after its structure with the arrival of other people who brought from the continent the dominance of steel and with it a revolutionary cultural change.
But the site has never ceased to fascinate and generation has assigned it a new and mystical vocation.
Several centuries later, thousands of other people gather at the place where Celtic druids celebrate the winter and summer solstices.
“There is only one Stonehenge but several,” Wilkin said.