Wessex Guided Tours

Lead archaeologist at Stonehenge discusses his team’s discoveries in new book

The eerie megaliths of Stonehenge have inspired speculation for centuries.

Druids—and sometimes aliens—have been suspected of planting the 4,500-year-old stones. Is Stonehenge an astronomical calendar or a place of healing or a marker for magical energy lines in the ground? For a long time, no one really knew, though some theories were more grounded in reality than others.

But now, we may be a little bit closer to understanding the monumental Neolithic site. Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson and his colleagues at the Stonehenge Riverside Project, whose research was funded in part by the National Geographic Society, spent seven years excavating Stonehenge and its surroundings. This month, Parker Pearson published the project’s findings in a new book, Stonehenge—A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument.

National Geographic writer Rachel Hartigan Shea spoke with Parker Pearson…

Since construction work on the houses ended in May, we’ve been using the Neolithic houses at Old Sarum for all kinds of activities, including the education workshops we’ve been explaining in the few previous posts. We’ve been busy!

Open days

We hosted two hugely successful open weekends over the two May bank holidays, helped by some lovely sunny weather. We had lots of visitors coming to see the houses, ask questions and find out about the project. As well as showing off our lovely houses, we’ve been using these open days to collect information about how visitors move around the houses, what sort of questions people are asking, and also asking people to fill in a survey about how they’d like to see the houses presented at the Stonehenge visitor centre. If you’ve received a survey in your e-mail inbox, please respond!

The good news is that we will be…

Who built Stonehenge?
A visit to Stonehenge is bound to make you ask: who built it?  It is a question nearly as old as the stones themselves.  And what do we know about the people who achieved this prehistoric marvel? Words Susan Greaney

Wizard Ideas 

In the early medieval period, writers thought they knew who had built Stonehenge—Merlin. But by the early 17th century, scholars were looking for a more plausible answer. In 1620, architect Inigo Jones thought it was based on classical geometry and constructed by the Romans. Antiquary John Aubrey thought that the native Britons, in particular the Druids, were the builders of Stonehenge. Antiquary William Stukeley’s 1740 book firmly established the idea that it was a Druid temple.

Towards the end of the 19th century, archaeologists began to realise that Stonehenge could be much older, linking finds to the Bronze Age. William Gowland’s excavations in 1901 showed…