Stonehenge Revealed: Why Stones Were a "Special Place"
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What got you first interested in researching Stonehenge?
Well, I have to say I didn't actually have any interest at all in Stonehenge. I was working with Ramilisonina, a Malagasy archaeologist. He comes from a megalith-building culture, so I thought he'd be interested to see Stonehenge. I took him to take a look, and he said, "What do you mean you don't know what it's for? It's obvious." Then he said, "Mike, have you learned nothing in all of our work together with standing stones in Madagascar?"
He explained to me it was surely built for the ancestors. In Madagascar, they build in stone for the ancestors because it is a permanent medium—permanent like the ancestors—whereas they live in wooden houses because those will perish just like human life will end. I laughed initially and said, "Well, I don't think that's necessarily really going to have anything to do with Britain 5,000 years ago."
But I realized that actually we did have timber circles very close to the stone circle of Stonehenge. That was quite a bombshell for me.
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