Customer Reviews

A Brief History of Stonehenge: One of the Most Famous Ancient Monuments in Britain

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I have always been confused about Stonehenge. Was some ancient monument recently adopted by pot smoking greenies? What about all those stories linking it with Merlin, the Romans, devilry and druids?

Here, despite the many claims we will never be sure about its past, Aubrey Burl provides a large number of objective, rather than mythical or speculative answers. Rooted in historical and archaeological fact, this brief work becomes a text book of Stonehenge, exposing myths, confirming facts.

Burl's genius is that it does not read like a text book. He injects himself, his opinions and emotions into his writing, while maintaining significant objectivity at the same time.

True, it is technical in parts, which means this is not a novel or a piece of light entertainment. But the effort is well worth discovering the truth of what we factually know and can reliably reconstruct about this ancient monument.

If you were wondering about the truth behind the stories, this is about as close as it comes.

As a historical linguist, I have an interest in archaeology, and picked this up as what looked like a good introduction to the archaeology of one of the most famous sites in Britain. This book's information on the archaeology may be good - I'm not an archaeologist, so I'm not qualified to judge - but the author took not one single second to research the Welsh language before writing that it was the language of the builders of Stonehenge!

The author also sets up a list of Welsh words (in an appendix) and compares them to some modern European languages, claiming that they are so different that the Welsh language could not possibly be derived from any of them. Well, this is, actually, true - Welsh isn't derived from any of them. But if he had picked up a single introductory work on linguistics (which I would think he would have wanted to do before writing about the subject), he would have learned that Welsh is, ultimately, descended from the same distant common ancestor as most other languages of Europe, and furthermore that (the ancestors of) Welsh and the other Celtic languages cannot have been assumed to have been spoken in Britain as early as Stonehenge was being built.

So I'm concerned that if the author did no research on this topic (and even acts like he's presenting a new and revolutionary look at the history of the Welsh language without citing a single historical grammar of Welsh), he might not have researched other subjects that I'm not qualified to spot the errors in.

Non-specialists are obviously interested in Stonehenge, and a good introduction to the subject for a general audience is needed. Unfortunately, I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to anyone knowing that the author made such egregious mistakes.

I picked up this book before visiting Stonehenge last fall.I wasnt looking for the complete book on this monument,just an introduction that would help me appreciate Stonehenge.This books helped me do that.The author tries very hard to keep the story of Stonehenge simple and easy to follow.This is not an easy task since the history of Stonehenge is far from being understood.The book helped me to pinpoint details in the ground and around Stonehenge that you would normally dont even know they exist or what they are.This book does a very good job in introducing Stonehenge and in giving it some explanation which helps when you visit the site.