Scholars Debate on Use of Stonehenge

New evidence unearthed at Stonehenge has archeologists divided about what the ancient site's actual purpose was. You may recall back in April, when researchers Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright announced that they believed the spot was once a sort of prehistoric version of Lourdes, to which pilgrims traveled to experience healing.

Now experts with a new dig say it's possible that the standing stones are actually much older than the previous study suggests, and that instead of being used for healing, the site was actually a giant crematorium. Mike Pitts, British Archaelogy editor, said that the study overturns the theory Darvill and Wainwright had presented. "This means there were earlier connections with Wales, where the standing stones came from, than previously thought and that Stonehenge was always about death and ancestors and burial and not healing," Pitts said.

Wainwright, however, maintains that healing was in fact one of the uses of Stonehenge, although he concedes that it was probably a "multi-use" sort of monument. That would make sense, because really, if you're going to build something of that size and magnitude -- especially 3,000 years ago -- it would make sense that it's had more than one function. Particularly in the case of healing and death, two aspects of the human experience which go hand in hand, it seems perfectly reasonable that the site could have been used both for healing and for rituals related to death and dying.