🪨 Stonehenge

What you’ll learn

1. A Monument Built Over 1,500 YearsUnderstand Stonehenge as a sequence of phases across roughly 1,500 years, dated by radiocarbon evidence.Stonehenge began around 3000 BCE as an earthwork enclosure with the Aubrey Holes, a cremation cemetery. The great stones came centuries later. Archaeologists date each phase using radiocarbon measurements on antler picks, bone and cremations. What survives today is a partial ruin of the monument's grandest, sarsen-and-lintel phase.
2. The Bluestones and Their Long JourneyLearn where the bluestones came from and what recent excavations reveal about their extraction and journey.Most bluestones come from the Preseli Hills of west Wales, with quarries confirmed at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin. The 2021 Waun Mawn findings suggest a Welsh circle may have been dismantled and rebuilt at Stonehenge, though this is debated. Quarry evidence shows deliberate human extraction, favouring overland transport over the discredited glacial theory.
3. The Sarsens and How They Were RaisedUnderstand the sourcing, shaping and raising of the sarsen stones, and why alien theories are false.A 2020 study traced most sarsens to West Woods near Marlborough. The stones were dressed with hammerstones and joined with mortise-and-tenon and tongue-and-groove joints. Experimental archaeology shows human crews could raise them with ramps, levers and A-frames. Pseudo-archaeological alien claims are false and erase the real Neolithic builders.
4. What Stonehenge Was ForDistinguish the well-established solstice alignment and funerary role from weaker speculative claims.Stonehenge's main axis aligns firmly to the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. From its beginnings it was also a cremation cemetery, one of Britain's most important. Nearby Durrington Walls hosted great midwinter feasts, suggesting a landscape linking the living and the dead through solar ceremony.
5. The Builders and Their Wider WorldPlace Stonehenge in its wider ceremonial landscape and meet the real people who built and used it.Stonehenge sits amid the Cursus, the Avenue, burial mounds and nearby Avebury. Isotope analysis of pigs shows communities travelled from across Britain, including Scotland, to feast there. Human remains and ancient DNA reveal both distant travellers and a later population turnover. The builders were Neolithic farmers, not druids, aliens or a lost civilisation.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• English Heritage
• British Museum
• University College London Institute of Archaeology
• Salisbury Museum

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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