Stonehenge - Hardcover

Burl, Aubrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841199648 ISBN 13: 9781841199641

Publisher: Constable, 2006

This title offers authoritatively researched, new insights into Stonehenge's past. Britain's leading expert on stone circles turns his attention to the greatest example of them all - Stonehenge. Drawing on forty years of research and fieldwork, archaeologist Aubrey Burl offers a seminal new view of the changing cults and evolving architecture of Stonehenge. Every aspect of Stonehenge is re-considered in this groundbreaking volume. Burl explains for the first time how the outlying Heel Stone long predates Stonehenge itself, serving as a trackway marker in the prehistoric Harroway. He uncovers new evidence that the Welsh bluestones were brought to Stonehenge by glaciation rather than by man. And he reveals just how far the design of Stonehenge was influenced by Breton styles and by Breton cults of the dead. Meticulously researched, the book sets the record straight on the matter of Stonehenge's astronomical alignments. Although the existence of a sightline to the midsummer sunrise is well known, the alignment and the viewingposition are critically different from popular belief. And until now the existence of an earlier alignment to the moon and a later one to the midwinter sunset has been little appreciated. One almost unexplained puzzle remains. The site of Stonehenge lies at the heart of a vast six-mile wide graveyard. All around it are groups of earthen long barrows, the burial places of Neolithic people, many of whom died more than a thousand years before Stonehenge. The mystery is that before Stonehenge there was a vacuum two miles across inside that cemetery. Nothing was inside. Why? Burl points to an answer.

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About the Author:

Aubrey Burl was principal lecturer in archaeology, Hull College of Higher Education, East Riding of Yorkshire, and has carried out extensive fieldwork in Britain, Ireland and Brittany. His many books on stone circles include Prehistoric Avebury and A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.

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