A new study explains how the ancient solar calendar may have worked at Stonehenge — and why it was constructed in the first place.
stones once stood in a circle representing each day of the month . While some are now missing, excavation shows they were once present in uniform size and shape.The additional five days needed to be consistent with the solar year are found in five structures in the Trilithon Horseshoe, within the center of Stonehenge. Four stones on the outside of the circle track the leap year every four years.
“If you go to Stonehenge, you can pick out which sarsen stone represents the current day within the month. It all works quite nicely,” says Darvill. While he thinks he’s figured out how the calendar works, however, the purpose of it is much more complicated. That’s because while Stonehenge is a calendar, it’s nota calendar; it was also a meeting place where people came from near and far to be close to the gods. “It’s about being at the right place at the right time,” says Darvill.
Calendars are additionally a way of controlling society, he says, and Stonehenge is no different. Churches and temples always have clocks so that their followers know when to worship and when their god is present. But cracking the code of Stonehenge is also about realizing that it didn’t have one singular purpose — it had many purposes.
A church involves worship, service, celebration, burial, art and architecture, and much of the same is true of Stonehenge. It was always a multipurpose prehistoric monument that likely meant different things to different people and to different generations, Darvill says. “Embedded in Stonehenge is all the bits and pieces that it needs to fulfill all the functions it had.”
He adds that in its earliest days, Stonehenge was likely not a calendar but more of a burial site. Over time, the sarsens were likely designed so that the harvest festival could be celebrated at the same time each year. Ancient peoples constructed the calendar at a time when they worshipped the sun. Additionally, burials show that people once traveled long distances to worship there. It was a monument to all of Europe, not just to the locale where it was erected.
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