Synopses & Reviews
A completely new and convincing solution to the key puzzles of Stonehenge.
As Anthony Johnson reveals in this astonishing book, patient detective work and detailed computer analysis of clues hidden within this famous monument can be made to yield remarkable new insights into how the earthwork and stone circle were conceived and laid out.
The story begins with a reappraisal of over 250 years of fieldwork, excavation, and speculation, including John Wood's highly accurate but often overlooked survey of 1740. It is the most important record of Stonehenge ever made, and the only reliable plan of the monument before the fall of several major stones and their subsequent re-erection in the twentieth century.
The prehistoric engineering skills involved in the construction of Stonehenge have long been recognized, but Johnson presents for the first time tangible evidence to show that locked within the symmetry of the stones are precise formulae that determined their numbers, spacing, and relationships. He explains how the Neolithic surveyors set out the fifty-six Aubrey Holes, four Station Stones, and the thirty stones in the Sarsen Circle; and the significance of the horseshoe arrangement of massive trilithons at the heart of the monument. The implications are far reaching, demonstrating that the people who designed Stonehenge in all its phases of construction, spanning over 1,000 years, employed simple and elegant geometric rules.
Elaborate sightline theories, alignments, and astronomical computations are questioned, allowing the rationale behind Stonehenge and other prehistoric sites, some of which conformed to the same model, to be reassessed.
Synopsis
Stonehenge is seeing a massive surge of interest at present, something which this major reassessment of the monument by geophysics expert Anthony Johnson can only fuel further. Echoing much earlier approaches Johnson focuses his attention on the placement of the stones themselves, but offers quite new conclusions. Using documentation and results from the last 250 years of surveying at stonehenge he shows that the stones were laid out to a premeditated design, and that the symmetry and geometry involved were extremely complex, so much so that it must have been geometrical considerations which played the leading role in the design of the structure. A fascinating and well argued work, which is bound to re-ignite old debates and start new ones.
About the Author
Anthony Johnson is an experienced archaeologist based in Oxford, with more than 300 archaeological surveys and site reports to his name.