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News and Articles on
Stonehenge

  • 2008 May 22. 2 vandals attack Stonehenge with hammer. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. LONDON (AP) -- Two men attacked the ancient monument of Stonehenge with a hammer and chipped off a piece of stone the size of a large coin, a conservation group said Thursday.
    Two men hacked the piece from the Heel Stone, the central megalith at the ancient site, English Heritage spokeswoman Debbie Holden said. ...''The damage is very, very slight because security guards spotted them straight away, but the whole thing is still upsetting,'' said Holden. ''This kind of thing has not happened for decades.'' Stonehenge ... has become popular with Druids, neo-Pagans and New Agers who attach mystical significance to the stones.
  • 2008 Apr 1. The Lourdes of ancient Britain? Dig aims to reveal Stonehenge's purpose. by Maev Kennedy, The Guardian. Excerpt: The first excavation for more than a generation at Stonehenge began yesterday, looking for evidence that the most famous prehistoric monument in the world was the Lourdes of the bronze age, where the sick and troubled sought healing from the supernatural power of bluestones brought from west Wales.
    Although the trench will be only 3.5 metres long and a metre deep, archaeologists expect to find the foundation holes of the very first stone circle, built more than 4,500 years ago and then altered over centuries. With luck they will find enough organic material, including pollen grains, snail shells and fragments of the antler tools of the builders, using techniques developed since the last excavations, to allow them to date the monument accurately.
    ... There is no longer any dispute about where the stones came from, only about how they travelled: Wainwright and Darvill believe they were dragged across land and carried by boat, and reject the rival theory that glaciers left them scattered across Salisbury plain.
    ... They believe that many bodies excavated from hundreds of later burial mounds in the surrounding landscape, including the "Amesbury Archer" found six years ago, show serious health problems such as contorted limbs or spines, supporting their theory.
    In Wales, Wainwright said, people were still seeking cures at the springs near the bluestone quarry late into the last century. Stonehenge attracted sufferers who chipped fragments of the bluestones as healing charms right into the 19th century.
  • 2006 Oct 15. Building Stonehenge - This Man can Move Anything. YouTube video of Wally Wallington showing how to move large blocks of concrete.
  • Stonehenge and archeoastronomy http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ritson/quest/henge/
  • AboutStonehenge.Info provides Stonehenge information, pictures, legends, and lore including theories on construction, purposes, and age for both students and tourists.
    http://www.aboutstonehenge.info/
  • Aerial View of Stonehenge http://www.sacredsites.com/1st30/stonehen.html
  • Dating Stonehenge http://www.eng-h.gov.uk/stoneh/start.htm
  • Earth Mysteries -- Stonehenge -- http://witcombe.sbc.edu/earthmysteries/EMStonehenge.html
  • Stone Pages - Travelogue of sites throughout Europe http://www.stonepages.com/
  • Stonehenge--pages by Christiaan Stoudt http://www.christiaan.com/stonehenge/info/students
  • The Stonehenge organization -- http://www.stonehenge.org.uk/
  • Stonehenge Tour Company http://www.stonehengetours.com
  • Christiaan Stoudt's Stonehenge website http://www.christiaan.com/stonehenge/
  • Sunwheel Project, University of Massachusetts, Amherst -- http://www.umass.edu/sunwheel
  • Theories of Gerald Hawkins and Fred Hoyle -- Tiverton Astronomy Society http://www.tivas.org.uk/stonehenge/stone_ast.html

Hard Copy Articles

  • Nov 2000, Sky & Telescope magazine, p. 74, review of the book The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, by J.L. Heilbron, Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Oct 2002. An Astronomer Reads Archaeology's Message, by Patricia A. Kurtz. Article about archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni.

Hard Copy Books

  • Walker, Christopher, Astronomy Before the Telescope, St. Martin's Press, 1997.

See also: updates for PASS Vol 11, Astronomy of the Americas


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Lawrence Hall of Science    © Wednesday, 27-Aug-2008 21:28:29 PDT The Regents of the University of California    lhsweb@berkeley.edu    Updated Monday, 09-Jun-2008 16:16:51 PDT