Amelia Edwards
The British novelist and egyptologist Amelia Edwards once said,
“Were I asked to define it, I should reply that archeology is that science which enables us to register and classify our knowledge of the sum of man’s achievements in those arts and handicrafts whereby he has, in time past, signalized his passage from barbarism to civilization.” To put that in simpler words, Amelia means to say that archeology is the study and understandings of our past ancestors, who have grown to modern civilizations. If one is to imagine what the Neolithic period in Great Britain, at Stonehenge, was like, looking up at towering 20 foot megaliths and staring past the massive stones at the horizon, to see the perfectly aligned sun- people kneeling in prayer, letting …show more content…
3100 BCE and c. 1600 BCE, Stonehenge was built and was used for a cemetery for people. Archaeologists have excavated nearly 60 cremation and inhumation graves, with possibly hundreds of others who remain still buried. These graves, mainly consist of males between 25 and 40 years old, indicating that they were probably politically significant individuals. In one situation where the male skeleton lay almost completely intact, examination showed that the man had been shot by six flint-tipped arrows at close range, allegedly by two people, one from the left and the other from the right. With the arrows having been shot from a close distance and by two separate figures, the male was likely executed and sacrificed in a ritual. Druids were also noted to have worshiped near Stonehenge in sacred groves and forests, and have been accused by Roman’s, who claimed in numerous accounts, in which Druids had committed carnivorous human sacrifices. Later evidence of a bog mummified man with a mistletoe in his digestive track, which was very sacred to Druids, shows that a tightened rope was slung around his neck, before his throat was slit, so that a “fountain” of blood shot out in a sacrificial ceremony to please their Celtic gods. These many graves, filled with cremated and inhumed bones, which were found under Stonehenge, show that ceremonial burials happened at this megalithic
“Were I asked to define it, I should reply that archeology is that science which enables us to register and classify our knowledge of the sum of man’s achievements in those arts and handicrafts whereby he has, in time past, signalized his passage from barbarism to civilization.” To put that in simpler words, Amelia means to say that archeology is the study and understandings of our past ancestors, who have grown to modern civilizations. If one is to imagine what the Neolithic period in Great Britain, at Stonehenge, was like, looking up at towering 20 foot megaliths and staring past the massive stones at the horizon, to see the perfectly aligned sun- people kneeling in prayer, letting …show more content…
3100 BCE and c. 1600 BCE, Stonehenge was built and was used for a cemetery for people. Archaeologists have excavated nearly 60 cremation and inhumation graves, with possibly hundreds of others who remain still buried. These graves, mainly consist of males between 25 and 40 years old, indicating that they were probably politically significant individuals. In one situation where the male skeleton lay almost completely intact, examination showed that the man had been shot by six flint-tipped arrows at close range, allegedly by two people, one from the left and the other from the right. With the arrows having been shot from a close distance and by two separate figures, the male was likely executed and sacrificed in a ritual. Druids were also noted to have worshiped near Stonehenge in sacred groves and forests, and have been accused by Roman’s, who claimed in numerous accounts, in which Druids had committed carnivorous human sacrifices. Later evidence of a bog mummified man with a mistletoe in his digestive track, which was very sacred to Druids, shows that a tightened rope was slung around his neck, before his throat was slit, so that a “fountain” of blood shot out in a sacrificial ceremony to please their Celtic gods. These many graves, filled with cremated and inhumed bones, which were found under Stonehenge, show that ceremonial burials happened at this megalithic