Bodies reveal Stonehenge's royal secret
Domain of the Dead
archaeologists sift through earth in
search of more clues to the enigmatic site's past.
RADIOCARBON dating of cremated bodies excavated from Stonehenge in Britain have solved part of the mystery of the 5000-year-old site: it was a burial ground for what might have been the country's first royal dynasty.
The new dates indicate burials began at least 500 years before the first massive stones were erected - probably as a monument to the dead - and continued after Stonehenge was completed, British archaeologists said on Thursday.
The pattern and relatively small number of the graves suggest all were members of a single family.
The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least the lower portion of the British island in this early period, exerting enough power to mobilise the manpower necessary to move the stones from as far as 240 kilometres away, the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, leader of the excavations at the site, said.
"It was clearly a special place at that time," he said. "One has to assume that anyone buried there had some good credentials."
Dr Parker Pearson presented the new data at a teleconference organised by the National Geographic Society.
Construction began at Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain south-west of London, about 4500 years ago, about the same time the Pharaohs were building the Great Pyramids of Giza. The structure is aligned with sunrise at the summer solstice and researchers have long viewed it as an astronomical observatory and a cemetery, although they thought the burials took place over only a relatively short time, perhaps a century.
Research over the past three years has provided a wealth of information suggesting Stonehenge is part of a larger ceremonial and religious complex. Excavations at Durrington Walls, three kilometres north-east of Stonehenge, revealed a village and a wooden henge almost identical in design to Stonehenge, built at the same time but aligned with sunrise at the winter solstice.
Dr Parker Pearson now believes that Stonehenge was the "Domain of the Dead", where the ancient people, whose identity is still unknown, held sombre ceremonies in summer to honour the dead. Durrington Walls was the "Domain of the Living", where they would hold raucous parties to celebrate life and fertility.
The cremated remains dated by Dr Parker Pearson's team were excavated in the 1920s and 1950s. They had not been radiocarbon-dated before because only recently has a technique been devised for use on burned bones.
One significant find was a mace made out of stone. Maces have long been a symbol of authority in Britain and even now the House of Commons and the House of Lords have their own maces.
The team believes that 150 to 240 burial sites are scattered around Stonehenge, the largest number dating from the last stages of the site's use. Both the small number of burials and its increase over the centuries - as the number of offspring would have multiplied - suggest that all came from a single family of rulers, the archaeologist Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Sheffield, who is part of the excavation team, said.
Los Angeles Times,The New York Times
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