The Meaning of Stonehenge

went into its completion. Yes, and this episode is all about the four Why Why would such an expenditure of labor on such a grand scale be carried out for so long? In the last episode we we mentioned the comparison that the very strong comparison to be made between the construction of Stonehenge and modern day space programs. This

was essentially the Neolithic space program. Now, for that makes sense, you have to think in terms of mega projects, Okay, now we h We've spoken to neotographs types in a couple of times on this podcast, and one of the times we talked to him, he compared the space program, the modern human space program to megaprojects of the past, the construction of the Pyramids, construction of the Great Wall,

of the construction of Stonehenge. These are projects that require vast amounts of energy and effort, and ultimately you have to have a lot of UH of communal energy behind it. You know. There there's a lot of talk to be made, and certainly Neograss Tyson speaks a lot about the uh the waning power of the idea of the space program, like there's not enough just public interest in it and public power to put into the the the realization of

some of our space streams. What's interesting about this, and we'll tie this all up in a neat little bow at the end, is that that space program, the decline of it, could actually have parallels with the decline of Stonehenge. And we'll get into that. But a lot of this story here about Stonehenge has to do with community, as you say, and there have been many, many theories that have abounded for hundreds of years as to why it was built. Um, we're talking about twelve century myths crediting

the wizard Merlin with constructing the site. Uh. More recently, UFO believers have thought that this is perhaps some sort of ancient alien and spacecraft landing pad. But I've also read that that it might have been the totally about the acoustics. That may be because it turns out I think it's the blue stones to actually have some really

nice acoustic values to them. So, but that that actually plays out in this idea of the site really hosting a ton of people were talking about a tenth of the population and b C. This pilgrimage, the side of of of festivals and the site of the living and the dead that we're all going to get into, and all of these more recent theories about its purpose had kind of dovetailed together for the sort of unified theory as Stonehenge being a place where one could observe the

passing of seasons but also the passing of souls. Yeah, because, as as Neutocrost Tyson pointed out, there basically three ways, three things that motivate us to build things like this and do things like the space program, ETCeteras. One of them is war. Now, that's the idea that the whole space race in our modern times was in a large part of product of the Cold War. There was a

war motivation to really push the envelope. Okay, so you could have war as ego you could make the argument that war is just an embodiment of ego, and certainly Stonehenge could embody a certain aristocratic family or families in their ego and be a monument to them. Yeah, And of course though it's it would be hard to argue that, I mean, nobody as far as I know, has ever argued that Stonehenge was any kind of a fortification. It's just obviously not. Like, clearly it has some other purpose

in mind. So that the so the two other motivation and on de grass his list um would be, uh, you're creating something out of obligation to a god or or you know, some sort of religious strong religious reason, or it's out of devotion to some sort of a some sort of a keen. So those ideas hold a whole lot more weight when we're talking about the more

prominent theories regarding the constructions. The stories must have been so robust that they would compel people to work for that long over that those many thousands of years to see something come to fruition. So that part, I think, will always be a mystery to us. But we can at least look at the site, look at the information we have today, and try to figure out some of

the reasons why people would have congregated here. Yes, So one of the big ideas that's often pushed around and is the idea that, oh, well, Stonehenge is an astronomical observatory. Ancient man built this so they could look at the sky and figure out how the seasons work and and

and chart the heaven. Now, it's an idea that became a little more popular than it should have been in the sixties just because you know, the sort of nineties feel goody was abounding this and there's a the idea that that ancient man would build an observatory is it's it's kind of a romantic notion. But uh, as as we know today, it really doesn't hold the much water. There's like one core astronomical bit of awesomeness to Stonehinge and that's really about it. Yeah, I mean, it really

is a rudimentary, celestial little observatory. Maybe that's even giving it too much credit, but we're talking about is something that Professor Clive Ruggles, he's a professor of archao astronomy. He says there's really only one alignment, the main access that runs through it on the summer solstice and on the opposite end during the winter solstice sunset. Yeah, and

it's important, it's an important part of the design. But saying that it's that saying a stone hinge is an observatory because of it is it's like saying that, oh, well, this house that was designed for a passive solar energy is an observatory. No, it's just it's just it's it's it's not the same thing at all. And actually the placement of Stonehenge is not random at all, you know, it's it has to do actually with the landscape itself.

And Professor Parker Pearson thinks that the site was chosen because of a pair of naturally occurring parallel ridges in the landscape, and this would have been the result of ice age melt water, which coincidentally points directly at the midwinter sunset in one direction and in the mid summer

sunrise in the other. So if on the winter solstice your I followed these natural channels in the earth thousands of years ago, you would have seen the sun appearing to sit on the land as it was sitting there on the horizon and lining up perfectly with these channels in the ground. And that would have probably appeared as some sort of auspicious sign to you that this was a place that was important and perhaps we should erect

something here. Yeah, you kind of have to, you know, we can we can never really fully put on the Neolithic mindset, but it's kind of in the dna of our existing beliefs, in our existing worldviews. So to to an extent, we can just sort of we can understand like the power of you know, winter and summer, and you know, spring is the return of life, winter fall

and winter is the the advent of death. Uh. And that uh and that and night and day as well like these uh, these these these opposites are I have always been a powerful part of virtually any myth building, any kind of worldview that we've constructed for ourselves throughout human history. And as we've discussed before, cyclical time seasonal time would have been far more important than linear time.

And we take that for granted today that everybody has been on some sort of clock or calendar, but really the cyclical time, the season's would have been important and marking, observing and and really honoring. Yeah, one of the crazy things about a stonehenge that has really come to mind and researching this is that you know, we'll we'll take the observatory explanation, will will paste that over it from our modern perspective, or will paste aliens over it for

a modern perspective. And but but in a way, we're kind of trying to take our modern cosmological wanderings, you know, who are we in one of our place in the universe, and we're trying to to put those on an object that was constructed for a Neolithic uh cosmology, for Neolithic questions and answers regarding their place in the universe. Yeah, exactly.

So if your only experience is the land in the seasons and it's not our modern understanding of buildings in technology, then you're going to come at it in a very different way. That being said, I would I would wager Tibet that everybody has that same question, no matter what period they were born in, is why am I here? Um? How did I get here? What was sort of story? Can I cobble together to make my existence make sense

to me? Right? And so that's the really interesting part when you start to look at Stonehenge in terms of burial, because it turns out that there are crew mains inside of Stonehenge. That gives us a little bit of a different idea of how it might have been used, not just as a burial ground, but but perhaps these cream mains point to the kind of people who were buried

there in what sort of prominence they had. Yeah, there's a British team led by Professor Parker Perison we've mentioned already, and he in his group analyzed the remains of sixty three bodies buried around Stonehenge and their findings seem to suggest that the first minding it was originally a graveyard for a community of elite families, uh, and their remains would have been brought to Stonehenge and buried for over a period of for a period of more than two

hundred years. And that you know, Okay, that's interesting in and of itself, right, So you have this idea that there's an important play because it lines up on a certain access and that people who were honored within the community, perhaps you know, we're royalty of some kind, would have been honored by being buried there. But that is only part of the story. And we're gonna take a quick break and when we get down we are going to sort of expand on this idea and uh, check it up.

All right, we're back. So we're talking about stone hinge. We're talking about the meaning of stone hinge. Why did did men and women put so much effort in Theolithic times to be creating this structure that still, for the most part, stands with us today. It's it's it's you know, it's fallen here and there, but it is still a destination and it has remained so for five thousand years

of human history. Well, and the cool thing about this next section that we're going to talk about durington Walls is that the existence of something else can often bring light into the thing that you're examining. Right, So for a long time, it was just thought, Okay, the pile of rocks, that's all there is to it. Yeah, let's dig up around it. Let's who we can come up with. And so for the longest we didn't have any additional answers.

You know, it kind of brings you back to the cock snowflake, right that you can you can examine one side all you want, but there's only so many answers to be gleaned from that particular site. But if you can bring in another side, a connected site, then suddenly you have a number of different answers that can present themselves. And that's what has happened in the form of a

Neolithic settlement just two miles away from Stonehenge. This is called Durrington Walls, and it is notable because it actually has evidence of timber post holes arranged in a nearly identical circular pattern, constructed around the same time as Stonehenge. Yes, and that's that's key, the wood, because chances are no one has ever had a poster of Durrington Walls on their wall and their of their dorm room. You know. Stonehenge is, you know, has to the test of time.

There's still stone portions of it visible, drinking walls made of wood. So all we have is archaeological evidence that this site existed. Yeah, and in some ways it's kind of the mirror image of Stonehenge or the twin It's also aligned with the solstices. But on the morning of the winter solstice, the timber circle will point at the rising sun and at the end of the day Stonehenge

will be framed with the setting sun. So and if you think about summer solstice, Stonehenge would be aligned with the sunrise, but Durington Walls would be aligned with the sunset. So it's sort of it's neat because it kind of encompasses this idea of light and dark, these two different

places serving two different purposes. And we think this because there's this archaeologist by the name of Ramlas and Nina and he visited Stonehenge and he thought this, there's an interesting similarity going on here with Stonehenge and Madagascar because in Madagascar you have the use of stone imburial sights only, and this is thought of as the realm of the dead, right and you would use um ephemeral uh sorts of materials for the realm of the living. The villages would

be constructed out of timber, for instance. And so he began to look at this idea of Durrington Walls and Stonehenge is perhaps being interlinked in the same way in the same sort of symbolic relationship between life and death.

And there's this idea that that Parker Pierson actually runs with a little bit more is that Drington Walls could have been this place for weary travelers to stop off before observing the solstice, and Stonehenge, which also would have been a time to observe the passing of souls and lo and behold. Um, it even has a body of water that is connected into this scenario because we always need this, right when we're talking about passing between the realm of living in the realm of the dead, there's

gotta be a body of water to help the passageway. Yeah, you gotta pass the river. You've gotta go down the river. I mean you find it and everything from his Inferno to to American spiritual hymns. Uh, the river is a powerful symbol just throughout human history. Yes, and so in

this case we have the river Avon. And so what's really interesting about this is the Parker Pearson said, Okay, well we think this is the theory, but we don't know unless we actually can find some evidence of a pathway from both Durrington Walls and a pathway from Stonehenge to the river. Because if if the river is connected in this story, then obviously people would have made those pathways and made it a part of ritual. Lo and

behold they found it. Yes, Yes, there's plenty of evidence to show that there was a path both from Stonehenge to Avon and from Durrington to Avon. Yeah, we're talking about a thirty foot avenue that was uncovered between this realm of the living and the water, and also evidence of eight small Neolithic houses that coincided during the same

time the Sarson's were erected at Stonehenge. I think you really nailed it on the head earlier when you were talking about um the Durrington as a is a reflect of Stonehenge as it's opposite, because you also see that in the evidence of things found there. For so, we found remnants of the dead at Stonehenge and found cremains. We've also found some remains at Durrington, but most of those remains are animal remains, pig remains that evidence of

massive feast, massive barbecues. They'll find the bones, for instance, will still have uh will will still be together in a way that represents that they were buried discarded when the soft material was still attached the bone. So it's it's it's pretty obvious that what happened here is some

people had a massive feast. Yeah, we're talking about testing the cattle teeth from eighty thousand animal bones that were excavated in in the complex Stonehenge complex, and the team found that around that would have been the site of those vast communal feasts, and more importantly, they found that the animals would have been slaughtered in the winter, nine

months after their spring birth, pointing to the midwinter solticem gathering. Yeah, so the ideas people are making a long pilgrimage to this during Concide, to this uh, this place of the living, this place instructed of wood, this impermanent place in which we can live and play and feast and enjoy ourselves. And then once you have you've you've you've taken care of those needs, then you can go down the river

avon a bit. You can you can disembark at this other path, and you can go up to a place that is made of stone, a silent place, a place where no one's living, a place that that that stands between life and death, where the perhaps the spirits of the dead are are contacted or at least remember this. And this is what is the interesting part of this

is again this is based on community. This is talking about people who are unified in this one story to observe this thing about the seasons and about what it means to be a human being and passing through on Earth at that time, and I wanted to read this quote from Professor Parker Pearson. He said that it was a monument soon as it was a monument that brought ancient Britain together. What we found is that people came with their animals to feast Stonehenge from all corners of Britain,

as far afield as Scotland. It was built soon after the appearance of the first Pan British culture, the only time in prehistory that the people of Britain were unified. So in a way you could, you know, not to make this all sort of rosy colored um time period, but you could say that this was perhaps a peaceful time in which people really were on the same page here. And certainly if you read anything about the history of Britain, you know that that there has been plenty of strife

since those days, just pretty much almost constant strife. I guess we're more or less in recent times where it's a little calmer they're in the British Isles, but but still there's plenty to argue about there as well. Strife has abounded. Uh. Professor Parker Pearson believes the decline is explained by the culture of the Beaker people known to have arrived in these areas, these the aisles around the time.

He believes that they're greater individualism and new material goods, including the first metal goods scene in Britain, put an end to the communal culture for which the monument had originally been created. So what he's talking about is that people were no longer interested in being buried in a more communal sense. But now we're talking about really the sort of uh focus on material goods and metals and wanting to be buried with your stuff. Individual exceptionalism sort

of taking over. So they essentially crash the the ancient hippie party U in Britain. These these jerk show up who are self obsessed, who are carrying metal instruments of death with them, and uh so suddenly they they make a quick work of the existing populations. Now is that a perfect parallel to the Space Program. Perhaps not, But there is this idea that there is more of a

turning towards individualism and away from community. Yeah, yeah, yes, certainly, because with the Space Program, you know, it was anything on that scale, like people have to believe in it or in the case of the Pyramids, enough people have to believe in it to enslave other people to do

the work for them. And that's why this is ultimately much are under as far as our understanding Stonehage goes, it's it's a much happier megaproject than than than pretty much anyone I can think of, you know, because like I said, there's not really a war angle here, there's not a slavery angle here. There are people working to build this thing that is the physical manifestation of their belief, of their idea, of their view. Uh. And there's there's

something just infinitely beautiful about that. Like they form this idea of what life is and how it works, about the importance of community, about the importance of their ancestors, and they made a physical sight that empowers that, I mean, and it continues right, It's extant, and that's pretty amazing. UM. I also wanted to mention if I haven't already, that Stonehenge pretty eights the Pyramids in Egypt. So um, again,

this is a huge undertaking. Um. And I would love to hear from you guys if you have been to Stonehenge, because I hear tale hold of I think twice a year summer soltists, in which are solsists in which people are actually able to walk through Stonehenge. Otherwise it's something like you're roped off thirty yards away. Yeah. Yeah, Like when you touch that is, do you do you feel something?

Not because there's you know, ancient alien energy resonating through it, but more in terms of like the stin doll syndrome that we've discussed before, bringing all of your ideas about Stonehenge with you, Like what kind of experience do you have there. I haven't looked at any any of the data, but I I wonder if there is a Stonehenge syndrome

that takes place. That would be fascinating to find out if someone felt crushed by the weight of history and man, Yeah, because you know you're getting some cookie people show up for that. You know, there's some some alien hunters showing up. You know, there's some some very mystical individuals showing up. And you know, if you bring that mindset of miss stism if with you, if you bring that mindset of alien visitations with you, then then it can be an

overpowering situation to actually touch those stones. Yeah, and I've read that um it is a place of worship for druids. But the fact of the matter is is that Stoneheench was erected two thousand years before uh Druid people begin to actually really worship and form their ideas. All right.

So there you have it, Stonehenge. So we tackled it in two parts again because we felt you really need to needed to understand the challenges of building Stonehenge and the mysteries that we've had to tackle regarding how Neolithic man built it, to fully understand the mysteries regarding why they built it. Yeah. And Uh, if you ever have anything that seems terribly difficult or prolonged in front of you that you need to do, just think about Stonehenge. Yea,

it's not Stonehengch. If this is something I can do in my lifetime exactly, all right. We would love for you to get in touch with us. Yeah, and if you want to do so, you can find us at all the usual places. Our main hunt is stuff to blow your mind dot com. Uh. It is the stone Hinge of our world, constructed over the course of a month. Yeah, and there you will find portals gateways to the magical realms of our our our Twitter account or Facebook account

or tumbler account, SoundCloud, YouTube, Google Plus. I'm more importantly Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com is the place where you find all of our podcasts, all of our blogs, all of our videos, all that good stuff. And if you'd like to drop us a line, you can do so at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it How stuff works dot com