Stonehenge was a failed experiment in “unifying” early Briton communities, new research has suggested.
Archaeologists have suggested that the Neolithic stone circle was built to “unify” early farming communities.
The construction of Stonehenge in the Wiltshire countryside coincided with the arrival of thousands of migrants from Europe in around 2500 BCE, new research has suggested.
The influx of arrivals, mainly from Germany and the Netherlands, had completely displaced existing Britons by the time the stone circle was complete – potentially making it a “failed” exercise in community integration.
Historians have been left baffled by the origins of Stonehenge for years, with the circle composed of large stones moved from other parts of the UK by human labor for unclear purposes.
But the new study has speculated that the monoliths were transported across the country to represent a newfound sense of “alliance or collaboration” between previously fragmented communities.
Arrivals from Europe over 4,000 years ago ushered the so-called Beaker Bell culture into Britain, named after its production of new artefacts including pottery in the beaker shape.
A cohesion drive aimed at integrating the migrants with existing communities saw the stone circle grow to incorporate the six-tonne Altar Stone, hailing from northern Scotland, researchers at University College London and Aberystwyth University have suggested.
But they don’t believe the aim to merge disparate communities was an ultimately successful one.
Professor Mike Pearson of UCL, leading author of the project, said: “This was a period of substantial population replacement following the arrival from continental Europe of Beaker-using communities with steppe ancestry.
“The Altar Stone’s incorporation … may have been a response to a legitimation crisis brought on by this influx of new people.”
Just a few hundred years later and Britain’s “insular Neolithic population appears to have been largely replaced”, however, leading the authors to conclude that: “As an attempt at unification, Stonehenge was ultimately a failure.”
“The fact that all of its stones originated from distant regions, making it unique among over 900 stone circles in Britain, suggests that [it] may have had a political as well as religious purpose – as a monument of unification for the peoples of Britain,” Professor Pearson added.
“We’ve known for a while that people came from many different parts of Britain with their pigs and cattle to feast at Durrington Walls, and nearly half the people buried at Stonehenge had lived somewhere other than Salisbury Plain.
“The similarities in architecture and material culture between the Stonehenge area and northern Scotland now make more sense. It [has] helped to solve the puzzle of why these distant places had more in common than we might have once thought.”