Like the Great Pyramid and Machu Picchu, Stonehenge has an aura of mystery, an allure that is beyond words. With an enigmatic, almost archetypal power, it attracts visitors from across the globe. During his years at Oxford he had often thought of going to Stonehenge – it was only a few hours by train or bus from London – but had never taken the time. His imaginations of crowds of noisy tourists had kept him away. Now, finally visiting the site, he was happily surprised to find only a few people wandering peacefully about.
From his readings, he knew that more than five hundred stone rings still existed in the British Isles and perhaps twice that number may have originally been built. Scholars usually classify these types of megalithic structures as rings rather than circles, because the rough proportions for the different shapes are 2/3 true circles, 1/6 flattened circles, 1/9 ellipses, and 1/18 egg-shaped. Stonehenge, however, is roughly circular. It is difficult to precisely date the stone rings because of the scarcity of datable remains associated with them, but it is known that they were constructed during the later Neolithic period. In southern England, this period dates from the development of the first farming communities around 4000 BC to the development of bronze technology around 2000 BC, when the construction of the megalithic monuments was mostly over.
Toran knew that in the 17th century, well before the development of archaeological dating methods, the antiquarian John Aubrey had surmised that Stonehenge and other megalithic structures were constructed by the Druids. While this idea and a collection of related fanciful notions had become an unquestioned belief of popular culture from the 17th century to the present age, the Druids had nothing at all to do with the construction of the stone rings. The Celtic society, in which the Druid priesthood functioned, came into existence in Britain only around 300 BC; more than 1500 years after the last stone rings were constructed.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, prehistorians attributed Stonehenge and other stone rings to Egyptian and Mycenean travelers who were thought to have infused Europe with Bronze Age culture. With the development of Carbon-14 dating techniques, however, the infusion-diffusion conception of British Neolithic history was abandoned and the megalithic monuments of Britain and Europe were shown to actually predate those of the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Mycenean cultures.
While the Carbon-14 method provided approximate dates for the stone rings, it was of no use in explaining their function. During the past few decades the orthodox archaeological opinion had generally assumed their function to be concerned with the ritual activities and territorial markings of various Neolithic chiefdoms. Then research by scholars outside the boundaries of orthodox archaeology began to suggest an alternative use. Toran was particularly fascinated by these alternative-use ideas.
In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the Oxford engineer Professor Alexander Thom and the astronomer Gerald Hawkins had pioneered the new field of archaeoastronomy, this being the study of the astronomies of ancient civilizations. Conducting precise surveys with theodolites at numerous stone rings and other types of megalithic structures, Thom and Hawkins discovered many significant astronomical alignments among the stones. This evidence confirmed that the stone rings were used as astronomical observatories. Moreover, the archaeoastronomers revealed the extraordinary mathematical sophistication and engineering abilities that the native British developed before either the Egyptian or Mesopotamian cultures. Two thousand years prior to Euclid's elucidation of the Pythagorean triangle theorems and at least 3000 years before the 6th century AD Indian sage Arya Bhata had "discovered" the concept and value of Pi, the British megalithic builders were incorporating these mathematical understandings into their stone rings.
Archaeologists studying Stonehenge during the past few decades had made many discoveries and advanced different, sometimes opposing, theories. It is currently believed that Stonehenge was a composite structure built during three distinct periods from perhaps 3100 to 1100 BC, after which it seems the site was abandoned. Situated in the center of an ever older ring, itself marked by fifty-six holes dug in the soil, Stonehenge is 320 feet in diameter and currently has more than twenty-five standing stones in two different rings. Some of the stones are truly enormous, towering fifteen to twenty feet above the ground, many being capped with curved lintel stones that are expertly joined together with precisely sculpted with mortise and tenon joints. The stones, weighing between four and twenty-five tons, were laboriously transported from different parts of England, some of them coming from the Prescelly Mountains, 240 miles away in Wales. How the stones were actually transported remains a mystery to this day.
Stonehenge, England
