Dorset mega-henge may be ‘last hurrah' before arrival of European settlers

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An intense burst of building work took place in Britain at the end of the neolithic period, possibly as a “final hurrah” by stone-age man and woman as they sensed the approach of fundamental change, research on a prehistoric monument in Dorset has suggested.

A study of the Mount Pleasant “mega henge”, a sprawling site near Dorchester, has found it was not constructed over centuries as had previously been thought but in as little as 35 years.

     

The finding has led researchers from Cardiff University to put forward the theory that a frantic building programme was under way in southern Britain in around 2,500BC, just before people arrived from what is now mainland Europe with other belief systems, ways of life and materials.

“You could look at it as the last hurrah of the stone age. They could see the changes coming and decide to resist them – they may have been thinking: ‘We don’t need these changes. We’ll build bigger and better monuments to our gods. We’ll knuckle down and stick with what we know’.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/04/dorset-mega-henge-stone-age