What is the secret of Stonehenge?

Answer 1

It depends what people want to regard as 'the secret'. Most would imagine the secret to be related to the question 'what was it for'. But there are no written records, no exact cosmological model. We have to work from the hard evidence in an attempt to get a glimpse of the mindset that inspired the construction. However it is possible to work out what the builders knew, and how those skills and knowledge were applied and to then determine a set of rules that contributed to its design. And that's very important - the design, most approaches are preoccupied with its purported final use, or the phenomenal engineering involved. It takes just a moments thought to understand it first had to be carefully worked out, surveyed and largely prefabricated, all these are retrievable details that take us inside the prehistoric mindset and a little closer to understanding 'what it was for'.

What anyone then chooses to make of this 'embedded knowledge' is something else, but the approach is more constructive than the grand theories which select parts of the evidence to fit a particular theme.