Stonehenge - A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument - Hardcover

Parker Pearson, Mike

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1615190791 ISBN 13: 9781615190799

Publisher: The Experiment, 2013

Synopsis

Stonehenge stands as an enduring link to our prehistoric ancestors, yet the secrets it has guarded for thousands of years have long eluded us. Until now, the millions of enthusiasts who flock to the iconic site have made do with mere speculation—about Stonehenge’s celestial significance, human sacrifice, and even aliens and druids. One would think that the numerous research expeditions at Stonehenge had left no stone unturned. Yet, before the Stonehenge Riverside Project—a hugely ambitious, seven-year dig by today’s top archaeologists—all previous digs combined had only investigated a fraction of the monument, and many records from those earlier expeditions are either inaccurate or incomplete.

Stonehenge—A New Understanding rewrites the story. From 2003 to 2009, author Mike Parker Pearson led the Stonehenge Riverside Project, the most comprehensive excavation ever conducted around Stonehenge. The project unearthed a wealth of fresh evidence that had gone untouched since prehistory. Parker Pearson uses that evidence to present a paradigm-shifting theory of the true significance that Stonehenge held for its builders—and mines his field notes to give you a you-are-there view of the dirt, drama, and thrilling discoveries of this history-changing archaeological dig.

About this title

About the Author

Mike Parker Pearson is professor of archaeology at Sheffield University and an internationally renowned expert in the archaeology of death. The author of fourteen books and over 100 academic papers, he led the Stonehenge Riverside Project from 2003 to 2009. He has appeared in the National Geographic Channel documentary Stonehenge Decoded and in the NOVA episode “Secrets of Stonehenge.”

Reviews

With unprecedented access to the World Historical Site’s 26.6 square kilometers, the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which Parker Pearson headed (2003–2009), opened 45 archaeological excavations and used technologies like carbon dating, thermal imaging, DNA analysis, and GPS to produce breakthroughs in our understanding of the monolithic circle that attracts nearly a million tourists a year. The project’s signal accomplishment may be defining context. It positions Stonehenge as part of a complex of Neolithic sites that served quite different purposes and establishes with greater precision a widely (if not universally) accepted time line of five construction stages (3000–1520 BC). A place for honoring the dead, Stonehenge may also, the book suggests, have been a monument of unification, a place where natives and immigrants from Wales and Europe came together as one community. Stonehenge grew less important to the people of the Salisbury Plain, Parker Pearson suggests, because “labouring for the ancestors gave way to labouring for the living”; and monuments, like Stonehenge, honoring the deaths of the community’s elite were replaced by round barrows where a family could honor its own deceased. --Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: The Experiment
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1615190791
• ISBN 13: 9781615190799
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432