Radiocarbon dating of cremated bodies excavated from Britain's Stonehenge appears to have solved part of the ancient mystery surrounding the 5,000-year-old site: It was a burial ground for what may have been the country's first royal dynasty.
The new dates indicate burials began at least 500 years before the first massive stones were erected at the site and continued after it was completed, British archaeologists said Thursday .
The pattern and relatively small number of graves suggest all of the interred were members of a single family.
The findings provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least the lower portion of England during this early period, exerting enough power to mobilize the manpower necessary to move the massive stones from as far as 150 miles away and maintaining that power for at least five centuries, said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, leader of the current excavations.
"It was clearly a special place at that time," he said. "One has to assume that anyone buried there had some good credentials."
Parker Pearson presented the new data at a teleconference organized by the National Geographic Society. It will also appear in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the television special "Stonehenge Decoded," to be shown Sunday.
Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain southwest of London, consists of concentric circles of massive stones -- some weighing as much as 50 tons -- surrounded by an earthen bank and a ditch.
Some of the stones were imported from Wales, about 150 miles away, and others were quarried about 20 miles away at Marlborough Downs. Construction began about 4,500 years ago, about the time the pharaohs were building the Great Pyramids of Giza.
The structure is aligned with sunrise at the summer solstice, and researchers have long viewed the monument as both an astronomical observatory and a cemetery, although they thought that the burials took place only over a relatively short period, perhaps a century.
But research over the last three years has provided a wealth of new information indicating that Stonehenge is only part of a much larger ceremonial and religious complex.
Excavations at Durrington Walls, two miles northeast of Stonehenge, revealed a village that is now thought to contain as many as 1,000 houses and a wooden henge that is virtually identical in design to Stonehenge but is aligned with sunrise at the winter solstice. It was built at the same time as Stonehenge.
