News and Articles on
Stonehenge
- 2008 May 22. 2
vandals attack Stonehenge with hammer. By THE
ASSOCIATED PRESS. LONDON (AP) -- Two
men attacked the ancient monument of Stonehenge
with a hammer and chipped off a piece of stone
the size of a large coin, a conservation group
said Thursday.
Two men hacked the piece from the Heel Stone, the
central megalith at the ancient site, English Heritage
spokeswoman Debbie Holden said. ...''The damage
is very, very slight because security guards spotted
them straight away, but the whole thing is still
upsetting,'' said Holden. ''This kind of thing
has not happened for decades.'' Stonehenge ...
has become popular with Druids, neo-Pagans and
New Agers who attach mystical significance to the
stones.
- 2008 Apr 1. The
Lourdes of ancient Britain? Dig aims to reveal
Stonehenge's purpose. by Maev Kennedy, The
Guardian. Excerpt: The first excavation
for more than a generation at Stonehenge began
yesterday, looking for evidence that the most famous
prehistoric monument in the world was the Lourdes
of the bronze age, where the sick and troubled
sought healing from the supernatural power of bluestones
brought from west Wales.
Although the trench will be only 3.5 metres long
and a metre deep, archaeologists expect to find
the foundation holes of the very first stone circle,
built more than 4,500 years ago and then altered
over centuries. With luck they will find enough
organic material, including pollen grains, snail
shells and fragments of the antler tools of the
builders, using techniques developed since the
last excavations, to allow them to date the monument
accurately.
... There is no longer any dispute about where
the stones came from, only about how they travelled:
Wainwright and Darvill believe they were dragged
across land and carried by boat, and reject the
rival theory that glaciers left them scattered
across Salisbury plain.
... They believe that many bodies excavated from
hundreds of later burial mounds in the surrounding
landscape, including the "Amesbury Archer" found
six years ago, show serious health problems such
as contorted limbs or spines, supporting their
theory.
In Wales, Wainwright said, people were still seeking
cures at the springs near the bluestone quarry
late into the last century. Stonehenge attracted
sufferers who chipped fragments of the bluestones
as healing charms right into the 19th century.
- 2006 Oct 15. Building
Stonehenge - This Man can Move
Anything. YouTube video of Wally Wallington showing
how to move large blocks of concrete.
Hard Copy Articles
- Nov 2000, Sky & Telescope magazine, p.
74, review of the book The Sun in the Church:
Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, by J.L.
Heilbron, Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Oct 2002. An Astronomer Reads Archaeology's
Message, by Patricia A. Kurtz.
Article about archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni.
Hard Copy Books
- Walker, Christopher, Astronomy Before the
Telescope, St. Martin's Press, 1997.
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