History of Stonehenge’s sun-worshippers brought to life in British Museum exhibition
- An exhibition at London’s British Museum examines the mystery of Stonehenge and the surprisingly sophisticated sun-worshipping people who built it
- The exhibition includes more than 430 objects, from a stone cup that’s like a ‘prehistoric souvenir’ to a 3,600-year-old bronze disc inlaid with gold
For a monument that has been drawing crowds for thousands of years, Stonehenge still holds many secrets.
The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago on a windswept plain in southwest England. Its purpose is still debated: was it a solar calculator, a cemetery, a shrine?
“We all feel we know Stonehenge,” lead curator Neil Wilkin said. “We drive past it, and we visit as schoolchildren or bring our kids to see it. But often we don’t know much, or feel like we don’t know much, about the world, the people who built the monument and who came to worship at the monument.”
“The World of Stonehenge” exhibition assembles more than 430 objects from across Europe to explore the monument’s creators and their world. It was a time of radical change that saw technological advances, large-scale migration and social transformation.