Stonehenge, marker for dead royalty?

At least part of the mystery of Stonehenge may have now been solved: It was from the beginning a monument to the dead.

Based on radiocarbon-dating of cremated bones up to 5,000 years old, researchers said they are convinced that the mysterious circle of large brooding stones in southern England was a burial ground for almost five centuries, and probably hold the remains for what might have been the country's first royal dynasty.

"It's now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages," said Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield in England and leader of the current excavations at the site. "Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C."

The finding marks a major rethinking of Stonehenge, which in the past was believed to be a burial site for only a century.

A combination of the radiocarbon dating; excavations nearby that have revealed a once-thriving "domain of the living"; and the fact that the number of cremated remains appeared to grow over a 500-year period convinced researchers that the site was a burial ground for one ruling family.

The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least the lower portion of the British island during this early period, Parker Pearson said.

He said the rulers must have exerted enough power to mobilize the manpower necessary to move the stones from as far as 150 miles away and maintaining that power for at least five centuries.

In a teleconference with reporters, Parker Pearson described three burials of burned bones and teeth that were dated in recent weeks.

Researchers estimated that up to 240 people were buried there, all as cremation deposits. Other evidence from the British Isles shows that skeletal burials were rare at this time and that cremation was the custom for the elite.

"I don't think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge -- it was clearly a special place at that time," Parker Pearson said. "One has to assume that anyone buried there had some good credentials."

Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain southwest of London, consists of concentric circles of massive stones -- some weighing as much as 50 tons -- surrounded by an earthen bank and a ditch.

The smaller bluestones (they become bluish when it rains) were transported 250 miles from the Preseli Mountains in Wales, while the larger were quarried about 24 miles away at Marlboro Downs. Construction began about 4,500 years ago, about the same time that the pharaohs were building the Great Pyramids of Giza.

'Domain of the Dead'

Some scholars have contended that the stones more than likely marked a sacred place of healing. The idea is at least as old as medieval literature, which also includes stories of Stonehenge as a memorial to the dead. So there could be an element of truth to both hypotheses, experts say.

Over the past three years, research has provided a wealth of information indicating that Stonehenge -- which is aligned with sunrise at the summer solstice -- is only a part of a larger ceremonial and religious complex.

Excavations at Durrington Walls, 2 miles northeast of Stonehenge, revealed a village that is now thought to contain as many as 1,000 houses and a wooden henge that is virtually identical in design to Stonehenge but is aligned with sunrise at the winter solstice. It was built at the same time as Stonehenge.

"It's a quite extraordinary settlement. We've never seen anything like it before," Parker Pearson said.

He now believes that Stonehenge was the "Domain of the Dead," where the ancient people whose identity is still unknown came together in somber ceremonies in summer to honor the dead. Durrington Walls, in contrast, was the "Domain of the Living," where they would adjourn to hold raucous parties to celebrate life and fertility.

At the winter solstice, he said, people would gather again to inter their dead, perhaps flinging their ashes off a 12-foot cliff into the River Avon.

In storage for decades

The latest Stonehenge research marked the first radiocarbon dating of cremation remains at the site.

The burials dated by the group were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum. In the 1920s, an additional 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge, but all were reburied because they were thought to be of no scientific value, the researchers said.

And the remains had not been radiocarbon-dated until now because only recently has a new technique been devised for use on burned bones.

One of the remains, from the so-called Aubrey holes or pits surrounding Stonehenge, has been dated to 3030 B.C. to 2880 B.C., about the time when the ditch and bank monument was first cut into Salisbury Plain.

A second, taken from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, dates from 2930 B.C. to 2870 B.C. A third, that of a woman about 25 years old, dates from 2570 B.C. to 2340 B.C., when the first stones were being raised at the site.

Few objects were buried with the remains, Parker Pearson said. One significant find, however, was a mace head made out of stone. Such maces -- the enlarged end of a clubbing weapon -- have long been a symbol of authority in Britain, and still serves that function in the House of Commons.

"All in all, we're finding that Stonehenge was a sophisticated society with great achievements," Parker Pearson said. The site fell into disuse around 1500 B.C., and over the centuries some of its stones were hauled off and broken.

The research was supported by the National Geographic Society, which features Stonehenge in the June edition of its magazine.

The team believes that family members for as many as 30 to 40 generations were buried there, with the largest number of burial sites dating from the last stages of the site's use.

Both the small number of such sites -- 150 to 240 -- and its increase over the centuries -- as the number of offspring would have multiplied -- suggest that all came from a single family of rulers, said archaeologist Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Sheffield, who is part of the current excavation team.

Not all archaeologists agree with Parker Pearson's theory.

Indeed, the June issue of National Geographic Magazine quotes Mike Pitts, editor of the journal British Archaeology, as saying some details of the theory are problematic with gaps remaining to be filled.

Uses of the landscape in the area for farming and grazing, for example, do not seem compatible with a ritualized place.

"The value of this interpretation is not just the idea of linking stones and ancestors, but that it works with the entire landscape," Pitts was quoted as saying.

Platforms for the dead?

Other new evidence also suggests that the site was funereal in purpose. On the cliff overlooking the river, researchers have discovered a series of postholes that are architecturally the same as those found in the houses at Durrington Walls but much larger.

These poles, the team believes, supported elevated platforms where the dead were placed so that their bones could be stripped of flesh by weathering, a common practice throughout much of the world.

In other recent findings at Stonehenge and adjacent sites, archaeologists uncovered a piece of a red-deer antler that was apparently used as a pick for digging. It was found in what is known as the Stonehenge Greater Cursus, a cigar-shaped ditched enclosure nearly 2 miles long that is thought to have a sacred significance. Discovered in the 1700s, it was originally thought to be a Roman-era racetrack.

Julian Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester, who led this investigation, said the antler was dated at 3630 to 3375 B.C.

That puts the cursus about 1,000 years before the large stones were erected, meaning, he said, that "this landscape maintains its significance over a long period of time."

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Associated Press contributed to this report.