Stonehenge

Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in southern England, its construction carried out in several phases beginning around 3000 BC and continuing for well over a thousand years, making it one of the most extensively studied prehistoric monuments in the world. Its outer ring of massive sarsen stones, some weighing over 25 tons, was quarried roughly 25 kilometers away, while its smaller inner bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills in Wales, roughly 225 kilometers distant, a feat of Neolithic engineering and organization whose exact methods remain debated among archaeologists. The stones' alignment with the sunrise on the summer solstice and sunset on the winter solstice has long suggested the monument served an astronomical or ceremonial calendrical function, though its full original purpose is not established with certainty and remains a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. Stonehenge forms part of a wider prehistoric landscape of burial mounds and earthworks and was inscribed, together with the nearby site of Avebury, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.