Stonehenge may have been a Sun-worship site

LONDON: Stonehenge, the UK's most famous ancient site, may have been a place of worship some 500 years before the first stone was erected, a research has claimed. Archaeologists from the universities of Birmingham, Bradford and Vienna claim that the sanctity of Stonehenge's location may have determined the layout of key aspects of the surrounding sacred landscape.

The research increases the likelihood that the site was originally and primarily associated with sun worship, 'The Independent' reported. The research has also enabled the archaeologists to reconstruct the detailed route of a possible religious congregation or other ritual event which they suspect may have taken place annually to the north of Stonehenge.

In their research, the archaeologists discovered two great pits, one towards the enclosure's eastern end, the other nearer its western end. When they modelled the relationship between these newly discovered Cursus pits and Stonehenge on their computer system, they realized that, viewed from the so-called "Heel Stone" at Stonehenge, the pits were aligned with sunrise and sunset on the longest day of the year. The chances of those two alignments being purely coincidental are extremely low.