Over the course of the semester we have talked about many different archaeological discoveries. All of these discoveries have been enormous and have given us tons of information and insight into life in the past. Each offers its own little piece of insight to a specific place or time period but there is one that sticks out to me that shows us a lot more than than that. And that place is stonehenge.

I talked about stonehenge in a previous post but that was about its ceremonial purpose in ancient times. Today I am going to be discussing the importance of stonehenge and why I think that it is the most important archaeological discovery that we have learned about this semester. The first reason for which I believe it is more important than other sites is that its building spanned for more than 7,500 years. Where as most of the other sites we learned about took only a fraction of that time. Stonehenge went through many different building phases and involved a large area of land.  It also involved a large amount of people in its creation. Which brings me to my next point. Which is that we have evidence of people from all over England and even Europe visiting Stongehene. Which shows us that this site had a great importance in history. Like I talked about in my last post, Stonghenge was a place for gathering and brought lots of people together. Not many of the other sites we learned about were gathering places for people and this long of a history and and such involvement with such a widespread amount of people from all over Europe. And the best part about Stongehenge is that while we have some bits and pieces of ideas, we still have no idea what exactly it was used for. Some believe it was used as an astrological viewing sight/observatory, some even believe that it was used for musical purposes. But what ever it was used for we still aren’t sure on. Which is why I think that Stonehenge is the most important archaeological site that we learned about this semester. It has a history of building spanning over many thousands of years and it had a very wide spread impact in ancient times and drew peoples interests from all over to it. And on top of all that there is still much that we can learn about this site which I think is the coolest part about archaeology and why stonehenge is so important.