Suburb of Stonehenge: Ritual village found near famed rock site
By Bruce Bower
Excavations in southern England of a village dating to 4,600 years ago are transforming archaeologists’ notions about the function of nearby Stonehenge, the legendary set of massive stones that people positioned on Salisbury Plain around the same time.
Researchers led by Michael Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield in England suspect that the same community built both the village and Stonehenge as parts of a religious complex devoted to the dead. “We think we’re looking at a village that was occupied by the builders of Stonehenge,” Parker Pearson says.