Google Earth Trip To Stonehenge

Ernest W. Adams
, School taught me to hate history, but now I love it.
Answered May 10, 2016
Originally Answered: Why is stonehenge such a big deal?

Because it's unique among Bronze Age megalithic sites. There are many sites with rows of standing stones and stone circles, but Stonehenge is the only survivor with the trilithon structures. It also contains stones that have apparently been dragged for over a hundred miles.

It's a huge site, too. There's far more there than just the obvious part. It's surrounded by dozens of barrows and other features that we know very little about. There appears to have been some kind of processional way, but what kinds of rituals were performed there, we don't know.

The whole thing is a tremendous mystery. But it was clearly a deeply important place at one time for all that labor to go into it.

Tom Hartley
, Studied Stonehenge way too much to be healthy
Updated Feb 12 · Upvoted by
Hugh Weller-Lewis
, MA Literature & Social Sciences, The Open University (1991)

The interesting answer is that some of them have been, but we have learnt lessons after these were done and we try not to do that sort of thing any more.

After the second world war the Ministry of Works was alarmed at the precarious state of one of Britain’s best loved monuments and they tasked some engineers with making the stones safe. The best Archaeologists of the time gave their input on how best to do this and where exactly the stones must have fallen from. The stones were then replaced or shored up in what was believed to be their correct position.

By and large they were spot on with their calculations and put them in the right place.

However, we don’t like to do this any more.

One of the things we learnt from Stonehenge is that when a scientist like Gerald Hawkins comes along later to measure precisely the angles between the stones, if we then learn that those stones have been moved by recent engineers the inferences that Hawkins came to are thrown into doubt. It turns out that, after seeing those doubts through, he was still correct, but the lesson was learnt.

Archaeologists today try hard not to disturb as much as possible, and try to make sure that any necessary works, such as making the site safe or rebuilding to preserve a site’s integrity against the weather, will be obvious to later archaeologists and not confuse the picture.

I think it is a shame that this means we are unable to show the site more like it would have been when it was in use, around 4–5000 years ago, but if doing so would destroy or damage what we do have then perhaps it is right we resist that temptation.

So, yes, some stones were ‘put back’, they appeared to have been done so correctly and respectfully, but none have been moved since the end of the fifties I believe