After 10 years of research, British archaeologists believe Stonehenge was built as a monument to unify the people of Britain after centuries of conflict.
Its stones, some coming from southern England and others from west Wales, are thought to symbolize ancestors of different groups of Britain's earliest farming communities, according to researchers of the Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP).
At the time of the epic task — which required the labor of thousands of people to move, shape and erect the stones — there was a growing island-wide culture that shared styles of houses, pottery and other material forms after centuries of regionalism.
The landscape of Stonehenge suggests the place already had special significance for prehistoric Britons as the team found that it sits upon a series of natural landforms that form an axis between the directions of midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.
"This might explain why there are eight monuments in the Stonehenge area with [solstice] alignments, a number unmatched anywhere else," SRP team member Mike Parker Pearson said. "Perhaps they saw this place as the center of the world."
The SRP team reject previous theories that the iconic monument was a prehistoric observatory, a sun temple, a place of healing, a temple of the ancient druids or inspired by extra-terrestrials.
The researchers discovered a large village nearby, found architectural influences originating from Wales and Scotland and found the site of a former stone circle about a mile away – Bluestonehenge – that caused them to revise the dating of Stonehenge itself.
"Stonehenge appears to have been the last gasp of this Stone Age culture, which was isolated from Europe and from the new technologies of metal tools and the wheel," Parker Pearson said.
The discoveries are presented in the new book Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Enigma.
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