Excavations

The explorer William Cunnington (1754-1810) began researching the modern Stonehenge. Cunnington excavations and observations confirm the dating of Stonehenge in the pre-Roman times. His research will be published in the years 1812 to 1819 in the work of local history Ancient History of Wiltshire, the historian Richard Colt Hoare.

By 1900, John Lubbock shows based in neighboring grave mounds found bronze objects that Stonehenge was used as early as the Bronze Age.

William Gowland (1842-1922) restored parts of the plant and is making the most careful excavation by then which will be finalized 1,901th From his findings, he concludes that caused at least parts of the monument at the time of transition from the Neolithic Age to the Bronze Age.

Archaeologist William Hawley digs in the years 1919 to 1926, about half of the site. His methods and reports are so inadequate, that there are no new insights. The geologist H. Thomas succeeds in this time, however, the evidence that the blue stones were brought from the creators of the plant from South Wales.

1950, instructed the Society of Antiquaries ", the archaeologist Richard Atkinson, Stuart Piggott and Marcus Stone with further excavations. You will find many hearths and further develop the classification of the various phases of construction as it is today represented most frequently.

In the second half of the 20th Century to take the archaeologist Richard Atkinson and Stuart Piggott continually further excavations. With the development and perfection of radiocarbon dating from the mid-20th Century succeed now safe datings of the first plant in the first half of the 2nd Millennium before Christ. Atkinson and Piggott also restore other parts of the plant by some of the fallen stones and erect in jeopardized again and concreting in the ground. These reconstructions can be limited until now to those stones, which were shown only in modern times or fallen or got into difficulties.
Many of the modern damage to the monument are both due to the historic needs of the surrounding population of stones, on the other hand, the souvenir needs of previous visitors. In the meantime, offered a blacksmith in nearby Amesbury town tourists a hammer for hire, who could refuse to order bits of the stones as souvenirs.

Digging under the Stonehenge Riverside Project archaeologists Walls 3.2 kilometers away from Stonehenge Durrington since September 2006 in the ruins of a Neolithic village from the period 2600 to 2500 BC (Grooved Ware) from. "We think we have found the village of the builders of Stonehenge," said in January 2007 Mike Parker Pearson, head of the excavation project of the University of Leeds.

Of 31 March to 11 April 2008 is the first excavation in the stone circle held since 1964. Headed by Timothy Darvill and Geoff Wainwright, a ditch, the excavations at the Hawley and Newall was created in the 1920s, reopened to search for organic material. Thus it is possible using mass spectrometry and radiocarbon dating, the time it was erected on which the blue stones to determine accuracy of a few decades.