Stonehenge is Britain's most famous ancient site - but how far has science helped us understand what it was used for?
Stonehenge is Britain's most famous ancient site - but how far has science helped us understand what it was used for?
Stonehenge is Britain's most famous ancient site - but how far has science helped us understand what it was used for?
Dr Chris Chippindale, curator of the University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, will be exploring some of the mysteries of Stonehenge in a lecture on Thursday 22 March, as part of National Science Week.
Questions such as how old the site is, how it was built and where the stones came from, have all been given fairly satisfactory answers by scientists. But mysteries such as why there is only one Stonehenge, have been answered only partially, and scientists are still struggling to come to a consensus about other questions, particularly about the role played by ancient astronomy at the site.
"Astronomers a generation ago came to be persuaded that Stonehenge was some kind of prehistoric observatory-cum-computer - but the archaeologists are still not convinced about this," explains Dr Chippindale.
"Disconcertingly, the answers to these kinds of questions shift over the years, without coming to any robust conclusion which has solved the mystery.
"In using science to look at Stonehenge and at the society that made Stonehenge, we find that Stonehenge tells us about science and about the society that made science."
Dr Chippindale's lecture, Unravelling the Puzzle of Stonehenge, will take place on Thursday 22 March at 7.00pm, in the Babbage Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site, Downing Street, Cambridge.
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