The paper reports on...

6. Compress paragraphs 2 and 3 into a statement using the phrases:

A careful account is given to...

It is reported that...

The paper claims that...

Much attention is given to...

The paper points out that...

7. Summarize the content of the paper.

STONEHENGE

1. It was natural that Stonehenge should attract early and hold con­sistently the attention of Antiquaries and pre-historians. It is far and away the most impressive prehistoric monument north of the Great Pyramids. And, like the Pyramid of Cheops, it has been the subject of innumerable esoteric and mystical theories and cults that are still - in the teeth of all scientific evidence – very much alive.

2. It was John Aubrey who started the ball rolling. A widely traveled antiquary of the Stuart period, he had in 1649 discovered the immense stone circle of Avebury, not many miles from Stone­henge and lying below the slopes of that Windmill Hill which was later to give its name to the first Neolithic colonists of England. The tremendous stone circle of Avebury and its encircling embankment surrounds an area of twenty-eight and a half acres and encloses a whole village. More than thirty times the area of Stonehenge, it loses by its very vastness the impressiveness of the latter structure. It is simply impossible for the eye to take in the whole scope of the monument. But John Aubrey was at no loss for an explanation of the structure. It was, he stated blandly, a temple of the Druids. And when, thirty years later, he was ordered by Charles II to make a report on Stonehenge, he attributed this monument also to the Druids.

3. As we saw when we examined the story of the megalithic tombs, the Druids have always fascinated British and, to a lesser degree, French antiquaries. The known facts about Druids are few, and speculation has therefore had free rein.

4. They are first mentioned about 200 B. C. by Sotion of Alexan­dria, who calls them the philosophers among the Celts. Julius Caesar gives the fullest account of them in his description of his conquest of France about 50 B.C. The druids, he says, are both priests and judges; they form, among the anarchically independent Celtic tribes, an intertribal organization under an archdruid, and they meet each year near Chartres. As judges they gave decisions both on personal and on tribal questions. As priests they wor­shipped all the multifarious gods of the Celtic pantheon, but they believed in immortality and in the transmigration of souls. They carried out human sacrifices, burning their victims in wicker cages. Julius Caesar did not find Druids in England, but heard in France that their "training college" lay in England.

5. It is Pliny in his Natural History who, a century later, tells us that the oak was regarded by the druids as a sacred tree, and de­scribes the cutting of the mistletoe with a golden sickle. Diodorus Siculus gives further details of the human sacrifices, claiming that prophecies were made on a basis of examination of human en­trails.

6. The only other mention of druids in Britain is by Tacitus, who refers to their presence in Anglesey in A. D. 61.

7. Welsh and Irish legends of doubtful authenticity, later date, and ambiguous meaning suggest that druids continued to exist there until the coming of Christianity.

8. And that is all. But it was enough for Aubrey – and more than enough for William Stukeley, who was capable of creating a whole new mythology and hierocracy on much more slender foundations.

9. As a medical student at Cambridge in the first years of the eighteenth century William Stukeley showed a scientific bent of a rare order – and a tendency to steal dead dogs for dissection. He was a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton, and became a surgeon of repute. He showed an early interest in archaeology and was at­tracted to field studies by the necessity of taking long rides in the country as a part of his self-prescribed treatment for gout. After his election to the secretary ship of the Society of Antiquaries in 1718 he did some extremely useful work in this field. His surveys of Avebury and Stonehenge are the first accurate plans to be made of these monuments, and they are of value to this day as revealing a wealth of detail which two hundred years of wear and tear have since destroyed. But he accepted Aubrey's explanation of the pur­pose of the two monuments, and gradually over the years his ob­session with druids grew. Although a doctor by profession, he felt called upon to take holy orders and counted it as his mission in life to reconcile Christianity with the "aboriginal patriarchal religion" of the druids. His original plans of Avebury and Stonehenge were taken out again and reinterpreted. His very valuable drawings and cross-sections of the barrows of Salisbury Plains were labeled in a complicated and completely baseless system as burials of druids, archdruids, priests, priestesses, and kings.

10. The impetus given by Stukeley to the cult of druidism devel­oped during the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An attempt was even made to reconcile the esoteric theories concerning the Great Pyramid with the druid cult of Stonehenge, and the druids were put forward as the repos­itories of the Ancient Wisdom of the East. Stonehenge was inter­preted as a stellar observatory, its alignment Worked out in rela­tion to the heavens, and various of the barrows that in large num­bers surround the monument selected as observation platforms for the astrologers who had, it was believed, established their col­lege there.

11. It was during this period that the solar alignment of Stone­henge – one of the few demonstrable facts in the welter of theo­rizing – was worked out. From the earthwork that surrounds Stonehenge an avenue formed of two banks of earth leads away to the northeast, traceable for about five hundred yards. Less than a hundred yards along this avenue stands an unhewn monolith, known from ancient times as the Hele Stone. A line drawn from the Hele Stone to the "altar stone" in front of the center trilith bi­sects exactly the two horseshoe-shaped patterns of stones at the center of the monument and marks the undoubted axis of the whole complex. And if you stand at the center of the altar stone at dawn on Midsummer Day and look along this axis, then you will see the sun rise almost precisely over the Hele Stone.

12. The precision is not quite exact, and the inaccuracy was the factor that gave the first clue to the date of Stonehenge. The slight wobble of the axis of the earth results in a gradual movement of the point at which the sun rises at the midsummer solstice, and this movement can be measured by astronomers in terms of years. In 1901 Sir Norman Lockyer, the Astronomer Royal, carried out accurate measurements of the alignment between the center of the altar stone and the center of the Hele Stone, and worked out the date at which the sun would have been directly aligned on the Hele Stone at Midsummer Day. Although he was himself a con­vert to the concept of Stonehenge as a druid temple, his results gave a date for the erection of Stonehenge as “lying between 1900 and 1500 B. C.,” a date well over a thousand years earlier than the first historical mention of druids. A carbon-14 dating of charcoal found in 1950 in one of the holes dug during the original erection of the monument gives the date as 1847 B. C. with a possible error of 275 years in either direction.

13. Stonehenge typifies for us the story of the settlement of Eu­rope. In it we gather together all the threads that unite to form the warp and the woof of the continent. It was founded by the im­memorial inhabitants of the land, the hunters, but only after the hunters had been roused to higher things by the stimulating im­pact of the first farmer colonists and in particular of the mission­ary settlements of the megalith-builders with their Eastern reli­gion. It was translated into stone by the beaker folk of Spain who had wandered and traded their way across the breadth of Europe and had mixed their culture with that of the battle ax nomads from the steppes of Russia. And finally it took form as the mightiest ex­pression of the wealth and far-reaching power of the mercantile princes of Bronze Age Europe. The story of its investigation, too, symbolizes the course of archaeological progress, from the semi-mystical rationalizations and the esoteric druid-worship of Aubrey and Stukeley to the precise stratification and carbon-14 dating of Stuart Piggott and the modern school.

TASKS

1. Name the paragraphs describing the steps and achievements in the research in problems of Stonehenge.

2. Name the paragraphs that do not provide information about the history of research of Stonehenge.

3. Thoroughly read the paragraphs presenting various explanations of the possible meaning and functions of Stonehenge.

4. Summarize the content of the paper using the phrases:

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