[tt] NS: Was Stonehenge built to revere the dead?

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Was Stonehenge built to revere the dead?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826594.100&print=true
8.6.4
Linda Geddes

THEORIES about the purpose of Stonehenge are never in short supply.
Now the first carbon-dating evidence from human remains unearthed
there suggests that the imposing megalithic monument was a place to
bury and commemorate the dead.

Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, UK, and his team
analysed the cremated remains of three humans uncovered at the site
in southern England. They were part of 52 sets of remains revealed
by excavations during the 1920s, though the rest were reburied.

The team dated the oldest to around 3000 BC, when construction of
the monument began. The most recent of the three remains dated to
approximately 2500 BC, around the time when the massive standing
stones were erected.

Parker Pearson says it is now clear that burials were a major
component of activity at Stonehenge "in all its main stages".
Archaeologists had previously assumed that it was only between 2800
and 2700 BC that the site was used mainly as a burial ground.

The team has also been conducting excavations at Durrington Walls -
a massive circular earthwork 3 kilometres north of Stonehenge.
Within Durrington Walls are the remains of a giant wooden henge,
called the Southern Circle, near a smaller one called Woodhenge.

All three henges have a similar design, and previous carbon dating
revealed that Durrington Walls was in use around the same time as
the large sandstone blocks were erected at Stonehenge. Parker
Pearson says this supports his theory that the two sites were
linked, together forming a massive religious complex. "We're looking
at a pairing - one in timber to represent the transience of life,
the other in stone marking the eternity of the ancestral dead."

The carbon dating of the human remains supports the idea that
Stonehenge was used for burials, says Christopher Chippindale at the
University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,
but it does not prove that its primary function was as a cemetery.
Churches are full of graves, but that is not their primary purpose,
he points out. "It is another part of the puzzle, but it's not the
final answer," he says.

Tim Darvill at Bournemouth University, UK, has a different
explanation for why Stonehenge was built. He and Geoff Wainwright,
former head of archaeology at the conservation organisation English
Heritage, believe that the construction of a stone monument marked a
transition in the site's use, when it became a centre for healing.

Darvill says the new findings don't alter this picture. "It's a good
step forward to have these fully dated examples, but they simply
reinforce our model that after about 2500 BC when the stones start
being put up, the burials decline in number and the stones become
the focus of the monument."

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Weblinks

Stonehenge Riverside Project (led by Mike Parker-Pearson)
http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/research/stonehenge
English Heritage Dig at Stonehenge
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.18771
Tim Darvill, Bournemouth University
http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/conservation/people/staffprofiles/Tim%20Darvill/timdarvill.html
Christopher Chippindale, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,
University of Cambridge
http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/projects/Chip/Chip001.htm