viernes, 3 de enero de 2014

Slideshow: Mysteries of Megaliths

8/13. An even larger henge and stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar, went up at about the same time. These monuments on remote Orkney are the first of their kind anywhere. [CREDIT: Doug Houghton/Alamy]
For millennia, people have been fascinated by ancient British monuments like Stonehenge, with their circles of gigantic standing stones. Now, a flurry of discoveries offers a new perspective on the monuments’ meaning and origins. These great rings of earth and stone served as social glue to bring far-flung ancient communities together in ritual, archaeologists say, and building the monuments may have been as important as the grand final product. Surprisingly, new evidence suggests that this ancient tradition arose in the remote Orkney Islands in far northern Scotland, and only later spread south to Stonehenge and Avebury in southern England. Read more at Monumental Roots (subscriber only). sciencemag.org/

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