Nigel's Photo Blog

Today's Times newspaper carries a report from the academic journal Plos One that the famous Stonehenge prehistoric monument was built on a site that had been inhabited by hunter-gatherers for thousands of years previously.The research was undertaken by a team from Southampton University who concluded that the people who built Stonehenge did so in an open habitat already maintained and used by earlier populations, possibly for rituals.   More information Here is a link to the academic report adverted to above. Here is a link to my Stonehenge 1.0 blog post.

This evening, I am posting information reports in today's media carrying new information on the origins of Stonehenge near Salisbury in southern England. Most of the information herein was sourced from today's Times newspaper.                Above image shows the famous stone circle. Archaeologists have now determined that the Stonehenge monument has its origins in an earlier stone circle located in west Wales, about 175 miles away. It appears that a dense population of Neolithic (New Stone Age) peoples which existed in the Preseli region of west Wales around 5000 years ago suddenly relocated to the Stonehenge region and took parts of an existing stone circle with them. Refer map extract below. This must have been an heroic effort for the people who had no wheel or lifting equipment and were faced with a landscape which was untamed and probably heavily forested. (The lines on the map are intended to highlight the start and...

This evening, I am posting information on the Stonehenge site in England. The basic Stonehenge structure visible today dates from around 2500 BC but was not the result of a single, one-off project. The structure on the site evolved over a long period of time. In fact, analysis of post holes located underneath the current car park (parking lot) indicate human occupation dating back to about 8000 BC.  Here is an approximate chronological progression: ♦Phase 1, 3200 BC: A spacious earthen ring with a central timber setting and an outlying stone. Such earthen rings are known as ‘henges’. ♦Phase 2, 2200 BC: Two unfinished circles of Welsh bluestones replaced the posts and an earthen avenue was laid out. ♦Phase 3, 2000 BC: The two circles were removed and replaced by the lintelled sarsen ring and internal horseshoe of five trilithons. ♦Phase 4, 1600 BC: The bluestones were returned. Outlines of a bronze dagger, axes and stylised images were carved ...