Nice print titled Stone Henge (Angleterre), from wood engraving with fine detail and clear impression, approx. size with margins is 27 x 18 cm. From: Ernest Breton, Monuments de tous les peuples, Paris.

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Stonehenge,

monumental circular setting of large standing stones surrounded by a circular earthwork, built in prehistoric times beginning about 3100 BC and located about 13 km (8 miles) north of Salisbury, Wiltshire, Eng. The modern interpretation of the monument is based chiefly on excavations carried out since 1919 and especially since 1950.

The Stonehenge that visitors see today is considerably ruined, many of its stones having been pilfered by medieval and early modern builders (there is no natural building stone within 21 km [13 miles] of Stonehenge); its general architecture has also been subjected to centuries of weathering and depredation. The monument consists of a number of structural elements, mostly circular in plan. On the outside is a circular ditch, with a bank immediately within it, all interrupted by an entrance gap on the northeast, leading to the Avenue. At the centre of the circle is a stone setting consisting of a horseshoe of tall uprights of sarsen (Tertiary sandstone) encircled by a ring of tall sarsen uprights, all originally capped by horizontal sarsen lintels. Within the sarsen stone circle were also configurations of smaller and lighter bluestones (igneous rock of diabase, rhyolite, and volcanic ash), but most of these bluestones have disappeared. Additional stones include the so-called Altar Stone, the Slaughter Stone, two Station stones, and the Heel Stone, the last standing on the Avenue outside the entrance. Small circular ditches enclose two flat areas on the inner edge of the bank, known as the North and South barrows, with empty stone holes at their centres.

Why Stonehenge was built is unknown, though it probably was constructed as a place of worship of some kind. Notions that it was built as a temple for Druids or Romans are unsound, because neither was in the area until long after Stonehenge was last constructed. Early in the 20th century, the English astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer demonstrated that the northeast axis aligned with the sunrise at the summer solstice, leading other scholars to speculate that the builders were sun worshipers. In 1963 an American astronomer, Gerald Hawkins, purported that Stonehenge was a complicated computer for predicting lunar and solar eclipses. These speculations, however, have been severely criticized by most Stonehenge archaeologists. "Most of what has been written about Stonehenge is nonsense or speculation," said R.J.C. Atkinson, archaeologist from University College, Cardiff. "No one will ever have a clue what its significance was."

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