Professor Mike Parker-Pearson
Appearances
Global News Podcast
Fatalities and injuries in German Christmas market attack
We're looking at a time in prehistory when politics and religion were two sides of the same coin. I think there's been a misunderstanding for hundreds of years that Stonehenge was some kind of temple. I'm coming around increasingly to the idea that it's really a monument, that it was built to remember, monumentalize. It's particularly the ancestor's
Global News Podcast
Fatalities and injuries in German Christmas market attack
And the stones, of course, coming from different parts of Britain are indicative of where those people's ancestors resided. It might seem odd. Why would you want to put huge stones in your luggage and pull them hundreds of miles? But of course, we've got to understand that these stones were more than just objects. These must have been emblems of identity and ancestral belonging.
Global News Podcast
Fatalities and injuries in German Christmas market attack
So to actually move them from one part of the country to the other is making a huge statement about joining in and belonging within a wider and larger territorial group.
Global News Podcast
Fatalities and injuries in German Christmas market attack
I think what they're trying to do is to construct it. The moment that the altar stone arrived at Stonehenge, as far as we can gauge, around 2500 BC, so that's four and a half thousand years ago, that's a really pivotal moment in not just British but European prehistory with the arrival of groups from the continent of Europe.
Global News Podcast
Fatalities and injuries in German Christmas market attack
So it may well have been that this indeed was part of a legitimation process of the sense of unity, which of course was very much under discussion and possibly under threat.