STONEHENGE was used as a burial ground for 500 years from when it was first built, according to new research.

New radiocarbon dates of human cremation burials at the ancient monument suggest it was used as a cemetery from its inception just after 3000 BC until well after the large stones went up around 2500 BC.

Many archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 BC, before the large sarsen were raised and the new dates provide strong clues about the original purpose of the monument.

This is one of the discoveries made by the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project supported by National Geographic under the leadership of Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield. Dr Joshua Pollard of Bristol University's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology is one of the Directors of the Project.


A 'domain of the dead'


Professor Parker Pearson said: "It's now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its stages. Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the late third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use and demonstrates that it was still very much a 'domain of the dead'."

The earliest cremation find, a small pile of burned bones and teeth, to be dated came from one of the pits around Stonehenge's edge known as the Aubrey Holes and dates to 3030-2880 BC, roughly the time when Stonehenge's ditch-and-bank monument was cut into Salisbury Plain.

The most recent cremation comes from the ditch's northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman; it dates to 2570-2340 BC, around the time that the first arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.


Up to 240 buried


This is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The burials dated by the team were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

Another 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge during the 1920s, but all were put back in the ground because they were thought to be of no scientific value. Archaeologists estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all as cremation deposits.

Professor Andrew Chamberlain, a specialist in ancient demography at the University of Sheffield, theorizes that the cremation burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty. One clue to this is the small number of burials in Stonehenge's earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.


"impressive credentials"


Another is the graves' placement in such an impressive monumental site. "I don't think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge - it was clearly a special place at that time," Professor Parker Pearson said. "One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials. The people buried here must have been drawn from a very small and select living population.

"Archaeologists have long speculated about whether Stonehenge was put up by prehistoric chiefs - perhaps even ancient royalty - and the new results suggest that not only is this likely to have been the case but that it also was the resting place of their mortal remains."