How was Stonehenge built?

Who built Stonehenge?

• I know that nobody knows exactly who built it, but are they any suspects or does anyone have any idea what people were around during the time of Stonehenge? Also what were these peoples way of life? how did they organize themselves? Where did they stand religious wise? If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate if you shared them with me : )

• Answer:

  I can tell you quite a lot about them actually....more is known than a lot of people realise! (A lot of books dwell more on weights of stones and construction techniques and alignments than on the people who built them.) There were actually several groups who used Stonehenge, adding to its various phases over the course of a thousand years or more. The first were neolithic farmers, who came from Europe's Atlantic coast, with earliest places of their megalithic culture showing up in Iberia and Brittany. They were a slender people, not terribly tall, with a long skull, high cheekbones, and probably mainly dark haired. They were early farmers, they did grow grain but in the Stonehenge area they were mainly herdsmen. Religion wise,they seemed to have an ancestral cult or cult of the dead that was also linked to the moon and sun. they generally buried their dead in long barrows after they had been defleshed, but at Stonehenge itself they practiced cremation, burying at least 240 people in the Aubrey holes and around the ditch. Why these people were 'special' in this respect, we don't know. It seems only i or 2 burials were made at Stonehenge per year over the course of 100 years, so it could be signs of a ruling dynasty...or it could even be something more sinister. most of the burials were young males (about 24-ish which would actually be in the prime for a Stonehenge person), apparently healthy except for a bit of arthritis in the spine. A few others were women/children, and one women had a rare deposit of a polished macehead which would seem a rather masculine item (and was one of the few gravegoods with the exception of bone pins swhich seem to have been used to fasten cloth cremation bags.) Later, around 2400 BC,maybe a tad earlier, new peoples started appearing in Britain bringing copper...the first metals.They did not build the huge communal monuments of the earlier people but they used them and adapted them; Stonehenge underwent one of its transition phases at the time with many settings being altered. There had always been an alignment to the rising summer solstice sun, but now the winter was given more prominence-the setting winter solstice sun was framed in the arch of the great trilithon.The new people was known as Beaker people-they were taller than the farmers, with very round heads and a more prominent jawline and brow. Many came from areas suuch as Germany and Switzerland but they probably didn't originate there...again, their earliest settlements appear to be in Iberia.They brought in the burial fashion of single graves, first flat graves and then under round mounds. High status men wore golden hair tresses, wore stone archer's wristguards (sometimes with golden studs), carried composite bows and short copper (later bronze) daggers. They may have been the first people to speak a proto-celtic language in Britain.They also brought in a former of pottery known as the beaker, which they buried with the dead, and they appeared to have been drinking some kind of alcohol, probably like mead. The earliest metalwork found in Britain came from a grave near to Stonehenge where a man who had grown up in an alpine region of Europe was buried with 2 daggers from Spain & France, 15 arrows, 2 wristguards, golden hair ornaments,small tools and what appeared to be a metalworker's stone...he was probably a smith. In the very late phases of Stonehenge the monument was used by the Wessex culture, who were probably a blend of the descendents of the beakerfolk (who were probably never great in numbers although culturally dominant) and the local native population The Wessex chiefs became very rich, trading with Brittany (which had relations with Britain right back into the neolithic) and also with other places on the continent like Germany. They were buried in large mounds, mostly men but some women two, with such goods as golden breastplates and belt-buckles, bronze daggers with hilts of gold or bone, jet beads and buttons, amber beads from the north, shale belt rings, amber buttons cased in gold, and so on. One famous chief was buried within sight of Stonehenge--a tall sturdy six foot tallman who lived to over 50 (a good age for his time), and had a golden lozenge and belt buckle, a dagger with a hilt full of golden pins, and the remains of something (maybe a shield or helmet) over his head.) The sun had a definite place in the religion of the last two groups, and probably the moon also, though the sun seemed to become the more dominant aspect. Anyway, just in case you wre wondeering what happened to these people, they aren't some mysterious vanished race. Most British people, especially those in the celtic areas, will have some descent from one or more of these early groups especially in the more remote 'celtic' areas of the country.