Stonehenge 'a long-term cemetery'

[Melvadius]

Stonehenge served as a burial ground for much longer than had previously been believed, new research suggests.

 

The site was used as a cemetery for 500 years, from the point of its inception.

 

Archaeologists have said the cremation burials found at the site might represent a single elite family and its descendents - perhaps a ruling dynasty.

 

One clue to this idea is that there are few burials in the earliest phase, but that the number grows larger in later centuries, as offspring multiplied.

 

Under the traditional view, cremation burials were dug at the site between 2,700 BC and 2,600 BC, about a century before the large stones - known as sarsens - were put in place.

 

Professor Mike Parker Pearson, from the department of archaeology at the University of Sheffield, and his colleagues have now carried out radiocarbon dating of burials excavated in the 1950s that were kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

 

Their results suggest burials took place at the site from the initiation of Stonehenge, just after 3,000 BC, until the time the large stones appear at about 2,500 BC. ...

 

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7426195.stm