Stonehenge Cremation Burial

This article argues that Stonehenge was a cremation burial site from its beginning and continued to be so throughout the third millennium Cal BC with an estimate of a hundred and fifty individuals buried at Stonehenge. It also goes further, saying how the 56 Aubrey Holes belong to the primary stage of Stonehenge construction and also the chance that they contained Welsh bluestones. The cremation burials were appointed to have taken place around the twenty-seventh to twenty-sixth centuries cal BC, (i.e. to the end of Stonehenge's timber phase and the beginning of its bluestone and sarsen phase) as appointed by researchers. A number of the unburnt human bones excavated by William Hawley, who worked at Stonehenge between 1919 and 1926, have been kept
safely in Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum's collections although some have been lost. The only prehistoric inhumation from Stonehenge, an arrow-pierced adult male known as the Stonehenge Archer, was buried in the ditch and dates to the Beaker period.
In 2007, the Stonehenge Riverside Project and Beaker People Project jointly launched a radiocarbon dating program of the surviving remains, Hawley's unburnt human remains and the Archer, aiming to figure out when Stonehenge was used as a burial space. Samples from three cremation burials produced radiocarbon dates within the third millennium Cal BC where the earliest date comes from the cremated remains of an adult from Atkinson's 1950 excavation of Aubrey Hole 32, dated to 3030-2880 Cal BC. The two other dated cremation deposits were excavated in 1954 by Atkinson from the fills of the ditch to the west of Stonehenge's north-east entrance. The significance of the research is the contexts and dates of the cremations have led to an amendment of Stonehenge's overall sequence of use. After a new data from the Aubrey Hole 32 place the period of digging the circle of the Aubrey Holes within the period of Stonehenge's first phase of use when its encircling ditch was dug, a method of the three-part distinction sequence was used by examining the Aubrey Holes'
in-filling. Comparing the threefold re-phasing of layers within both the Aubrey Holes (1=primary fill; 2=secondary fill; 3=insertion into filled pit) and the Stonehenge ditch (1=base of ditch; 2=lower ditch fill; 3=fill of re-cut) suggests the cremation burials from these particular Aubrey Hole fills might date to the first stage of construction within the overall Stonehenge sequence. Thus, the article is significant in determining that allof the burials in the monument's latest phases derive from a sub-section of a large lineage that might derive from a single dynasty over seven centuries and how Stonehenge was founded as a high-status burial ground and continued as such for at least half a millennium.