Stonehenge may have been used as 'elite graveyard'

The site of Stonehenge may have been used as a graveyard for an elite community of families hundreds of years before the construction of the monument that stands today, according to archaeologists.

The research, carried out by a team of academics from around the UK and led by Mike Parker Pearson from the UCL Institute of Archaeology, analysed 63 sets of human remains buried around the site. The results suggest that the bodies would have been interred over a period of more than 200 years.
Tests on cattle teeth found at the site, meanwhile, point to its use for massive communal gatherings in the years around 2,500 BC. As documented in Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons, a documentary to be broadcast in the UK at 8pm on Sunday 10 March on Channel 4, the fact that the animals were apparently killed in winter suggests their use for mid-winter feasts.
Professor Pearson said: "Stonehenge was a monument that brought ancient Britain together. What we've found is that people came with their animals to feast at Stonehenge from all corners of Britain — as far afield as Scotland."
Image credit: Channel 4
Source: http://www.historyextra.com/news/stonehenge-may-have-been-used-elite-graveyard

Stonehenge Tour Guide

Stonehenge visitor centre will be a "tremendous boost"

CONSTRUCTION of the long-awaited, £27million Stonehenge visitor centre is well underway.
The centre, which will create 35 new jobs and be used by around 1.25 million tourists each year, is set to open this winter.

Work on the new Stonehenge visitor centre

Two buildings have been constructed at Airman’s Corner to house an exhibition, a cafe, shop and education centre, from where they will take a passenger transit vehicle the 1.5 miles to the stones.
The vehicles will be able to carry up to 900 people an hour from the visitor centre to the stones, along the route of the existing A344, which will be closed to all other traffic except farm access. On the way the vehicle will stop at Fargo Plantation where there will be a viewing point for tourists to get their first glimpse of the ancient monument.

Work on the contents of the exhibition is well underway and will include an audio visual presentation, display cases, interactive features and exhibits loaned from Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, many of which have never been on display before. Stonehenge director at English Heritage Loraine Knowles said: “This visitor centre will let us tell the story of Stonehenge, how it evolved over millennia.It will also transform the whole landscape – it will be truly fantastic.”

The visitor centre will employ 78 people. The entry price for the visitor centre will be announced later this year along with the opening date.
* The opening of the visitor centre could be a huge boost to the south Wiltshire economy according to tourism bosses. Because it will take a minimum of two hours to visit Stonehenge, they say visitors are more likely to stay in the county rather than visiting area on a whistlestop tour of the south west.
“At the moment you have coaches pulling up, people spending 20 minutes taking pictures of the stones and then going on to Bath and the Cotswolds,” said David Andrews, chief executive of Visit Wiltshire. “They are not here long enough to spend any money and are taking their business elsewhere.”
Once the A344 is closed it will not be possible to stop and see the stones from the road, which English Heritage says will build up a sense of anticipation.
Other tourist attractions are also hoping they will benefit from the new visitor centre.
“We want to co-ordinate the way we are presenting information about Stonehenge,” said director of Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Adrian Green. “At the visitor centre they will learn its history while we will have displays focussing on the excavations and more recent discoveries such as the Amesbury Archer.
“We will each tell part of the story and encourage people to visit the museums as well.
“There are tremendous opportunities for marketing and it could be a fantastic boost for the economy in this area.”
By Jill Harding: http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk

Stonehenge Tour Guide

Prehistoric artwork uncovered on Stonehenge Stone Circle

The world-famous Stonehenge has been laser scanned in unprecedented detail, revealing 71 carvings of Bronze Age axes not seen in more than three thousand years.

The task of further examining this ancient structure, to discover more about it, was awarded to ArcHeritage, part of the York Archaeological Trust in the United Kingdom, as part of a project commissioned by English Heritage.
The laser scan used point spacing of 0.5 millimetres, and resulted in an enormous data resource of 850 gigabytes. Preliminary examination of the meshed models identified individual tool marks over 5,000 years old, but it was evident that the data contained more prehistoric artwork carved onto the surface of the stones.
The team decided to visualise the original point-cloud data and created a workflow using Bentley Pointools. The use of Bentley Pointools on this project enabled large datasets to be loaded, facilitating an examination of the full resolution data. The software’s shading function was instrumental in visualising the most subtle features, which resulted in the discovery of the subtle, Bronze Age carvings.
“We needed a software solution that would handle and visualise vast quantities of survey data,” said Marcus Abbott, a member of the ArcHeritage geomatics and visualisation team. “Bentley Pointools is capable of loading both 3D mesh and point-cloud data. The discovery of unrecorded prehistoric rock art on the stones was first realised in Bentley Pointools.”
Richard Zambuni, Bentley global marketing director, geospatial and utilities, said, “Stonehenge is one of the world’s great buildings surviving from prehistory – it is not fanciful to call this amazing public building ‘infrastructure,’ and although we know very little about how this structure was designed, constructed, and used, cutting-edge infrastructure software such as Bentley Pointools can be used to give us more insight into this astonishing edifice.
“The layering and shading functions in Bentley Pointools allowed carvings of Bronze Age axe heads and daggers that were invisible to the naked eye to be visualised, and provided sub-millimetre accuracy to the archaeologists documenting Europe’s greatest Stone Age building. It is truly gratifying to see Bentley Pointools used on such an exciting undertaking.”
The discovery of the carvings at Stonehenge was realised through the team’s use of Bentley Pointools’ Plane Shading function to create a greyscale band 7.5 centimetres wide. This band was moved at 1-millimeter intervals through the data. As it moved, it created a high-quality rendering of the plane shaded image. The team repeated the process 75 times to complete a full colour-change for every point in the data. Depending on the position in relation to a pre-set camera plane, each point was assigned a greyscale value, allowing very subtle features to be visible. When the images were combined into an animation and played back, the carvings, which were invisible to the naked eye, were seen fading in and out.
It was only through Bentley Pointools’ powerful visualisation capabilities that this eroded prehistoric artwork was discovered. Once the extent of the carvings was identified, the team deployed the measuring and point location tools to accurately plot the carvings to the Ordnance Survey grid.
A case study on the ArcHeritage Stonehenge project is available from Bentley here [PDF link].

Article by schester : http://www.spatialsource.com.au/

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