was never finished...." Oh yes it was!
It is often said that Stonehenge was never completed because stone 11 would have been 'too small' to have supported a lintel. This is clearly not what the prehistoric builders thought. Both stones on either side of stone 11 had pairs of tenons so that a lintel could be passed across to the broken smaller stone. Importantly the upper bearing surface of 11 would have been no less than that provided by some of the more substantial tapering stones of the Sarsen Circle. Note how the laser image below also clearly shows a ridge running transversely across the top of stone 10 - at the interface of the former lintel seats.
Above: Laser images of stones 10, 11, & 12 ( s-w isometric view )
The remarkable method of jointing
lock the lintels
haven't these kind of facts been pointed out before?
There are many such important details that been overlooked, both above and below the ground, but why do they escape notice? The answer is simple - most books about Stonehenge are not written by archaeologists. For example did you also know that the surviving upright of the massive Great Trilithon (sarsen 56) is no longer in the same place as it was when Stonehenge was constructed? That might be important too.....
We are so 'familiar' with Stonehenge that people often forget that the visible structure forms only part of a complex archaeological site. It is also set within a landscape that retains a diverse and only partly known palimpsest of prehistoric monuments and buried features. Many people, even academics, often make the mistake of thinking 'Stonehenge? surely it's been thrashed to death?'. Nothing could be further from the truth, we have only just begun to explore the evidence, it is time for centuries of 'fact by repetition' and groundless speculation to be swept away, 'Solving Stonehenge' is beginning of this process. As one reviewer observed:
'This is not a book however for people who don't want to think about the subject, if you just want another Stonehenge theory - it's not for you'.
graphics and text © A.E.Johnson
Stone 21 (left) broke during the construction of the Circle. The tenon sockets had however already been cut on the underside of the lintel, and the one on the end offered to the stone had to be re-cut (clear evidence that the lintel ring had been prefabricated).
It would clearly have been impossible to cut the curves and match the lintels on top of the supporting uprights. The ring had to have been precut, joints made, and the whole then trial-fitted on the ground. Further evidence, if any were needed that it was a prehistoric architectural masterpiece - carefully designed, not to accommodate distant alignments, but to a premeditated and symmetrical geometric plan. In other words its form had to reflect an exact structural concept based on a conceptual model.
Details such as the gaps between the stones were all incidental, what mattered to the builders was to get the massive uprights centred against their surveyed marks - so that the pre-cut tenons would exactly match. Likewise the central 'horseshoe' of trilithons conform geometrically to each other, there are no distant alignments which determined their position, the only thing the stones aligned on were themselves!
.... now we are getting closer to the mindset behind Stonehenge.
Stonehenge Midwinter © James Mitchell