Located about 90 miles west of London, Stonehenge is one of the world’s most famous and mysterious prehistoric monuments. Built around the same time as Egypt’s Great Pyramid, this complex of giant stones, some weighing up to 30 tons, has captivated archaeologists and historians for more than a thousand years .
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At the University of Salford, acoustics researcher Trevor Cox has been doing sound experiments on a scale model of Stonehenge that he keeps inside a soundproof studio. He found that the monument had concert-hall acoustics, which might tell us something about why it was built. A BBC video crew visited Cox’s office for a demonstration of its special sound.
The crowds that gather at Stonehenge for the solstice celebrations are a colorful bunch: Some wear the white robes of modern Druids, carry staffs and wear crowns made of antlers or wildflowers. Some blow through ox horn trumpets to mark midsummer; others just show up with a hula hoop. Getty photographers are on hand to capture all the sights.
Stonehenge may be the most famous monument of its kind, but it’s not the only one. In fact, building “henges” was kind of the “it” thing to do in prehistoric Europe. About 1,300 of them are still standing today. This introduction, written by a curator of the British Museum’s 2022 exhibition on Stonehenge, puts the monument in context.
Prehistoric people approached Stonehenge via a route archaeologists call “The Avenue.” If they stood in the center of the circle and looked back down the Avenue on the summer solstice, they’d see the sunrise framed by the large sarsen stones. If you can’t visit Stonehenge in person, this interactive 3D virtual tour—complete with sidebars and video explainers—is the next best thing.
Stonehenge is considered a sacred site by many modern-day druids and pagans. Then artist Jeremy Deller came along and recreated the monument as … a bouncy house? The inflatable artwork, measuring more than 100 feet across, invites the public to jump all over this symbol of British national identity. It has been displayed in Paris, in London during the 2012 Olympics and even at Stonehenge itself.
If you ask archaeologist Mike Pitts, the leading theories about how Stonehenge was built are all wrong. Instead of using wooden rollers to transport the sarsen stones, he suspects stone-age builders used sleds, and that they raised them not with long ropes but rather with the same technique islanders used to raise the big stone heads on Easter Island.
Stonehenge was built before the wheel was even invented, making its construction even more mysterious. In response, some wild theories have sprung up. One text from the 12th century depicts a giant from the Nephilim race helping the wizard Merlin erect the stones. A popular book from the 1960s suggested that Stonehenge (along with the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids) was actually built using alien technology.
If you can’t quite picture how human beings managed to lug 30-ton stones over miles of prehistoric English countryside and stand them up, this short animation from English Heritage can help. The Stone Age engineering involved using giant wooden rollers and carving precisely interlocking tongue-and-groove joints to hold the heavy stones in place.
Scientific advances like radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have upended what we know about the people who built Stonehenge. The Guardian explains how forensic geology and isotopic analysis of the teeth of a man who died 4,350 years ago reveal that those societies were likely much less violent and more cooperative than previously thought.
Constructed in the obscure prehistoric period of ancient England, Stonehenge is just the most well-known monument in the region of Wiltshire in the Salisbury Plain. Peruse a set of landscape maps highlighting other sites in the vicinity of Stonehenge before the great monument was built and see how the region was clearly inhabited by sophisticated, mysterious peoples with ambitious public projects.
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