Stonehenge Had Lecture Hall Acoustics

No one knows why ancient people built Stonehenge. Its origin and purpose have long been question by man; but, now scientists think they may have the answer. Photo courtesy: Pete Strasser | nasa.gov

The stone slabs of England's Stonehenge may have been more than just a spectacular sight to the ancient people who built the structure; they likely created an acoustic environment unlike anything they normally experienced, new research hints.

"As they walk inside they would have perceived the sound environment around them had changed in some way,"said researcher Bruno Fazenda, a professor at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. "They would have been stricken by it, they would say, 'This is different.'"

These Neolithic people might have felt as modern people do upon entering a cathedral, Fazenda told LiveScience.

Fazenda and colleagues have been studying the roughly 5,000-years-old structure's acoustic properties. Their work at the Stonehenge site in Wiltshire, England, and at a concrete replica built as a memorial to soldiers in World War I in Maryhill, Wash., indicates Stonehenge had the sort of acoustics desirable in a lecture hall.

Stonehenge itself is no longer complete, so Fazenda and colleagues used the replica in Maryhill as a stand-in for the original structure. At both locations, they generated sounds and recorded them from different positions to see how the structure influenced the behavior of the sound.

At the replica, they found a reverberation time of just less than one second, the amount of time optimal for a lecture hall. Unlike an echo, which is a single response created when sound waves reflect off something, reverberation occurs when a sound is sustained by a quick succession of reflections arriving at different times.

Modern cathedrals can have reverberation times of about 10 seconds or more, while concert halls are designed so reverberation in them will last between two and five seconds, Fazenda said.

About one second of reverberation is "just enough for us to start becoming aware of it," he said.

Based on their work at Maryhill, the researchers believe the many stones within Stonehenge would have diffracted and diffused sound waves, creating reverberation. The large amount of diffusion and diffraction would have also lead to good sound quality regardless of where the listener was standing in relation the source of sound within the structure.

"What we found in Maryhill as a model for Stonehenge was you could almost stand behind a stone and keep talking with a good level of voice, and people would be able to hear you somewhere else," he said.

For the Neolithic people who built this structure, this sort of acoustic environment was likely quite unusual. They appear to have lived in smaller, thatched-roof homes made of wood, which would not have reflected sound as effectively. And the region around Stonehenge has no significant geographical features, like high cliffs, which are associated with echoes, or large caves, which are associated with reverberation, Fazenda said.

While some have suggested that Stonehenge was designed to create certain acoustic effects, Fazenda said he sees no evidence for this.

Rather than search for an acoustic motivation behind the construction of this mysterious structure, this research is intended to help better understand how the ancient people might have used the structure, he said.

Via livescience.com (Fazenda collaborated with Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield in the UK and with archaeologist Simon Wyatt on this project.)

Pits at Stone Henge Hint of Sun Worship

Stonehenge, the ancient megalithic monument in the south of England built around 5,000 years ago. (Carl Court/Getty Images). Photo courtesy: theepochtimes.com

Two huge pits discovered near Stonehenge might have been part of a route that people used in sun rituals at the summer solstice before the monument was built.

Measuring 5 m (16.4 ft.) across and at least 1 m (3.3 ft.) deep, the pits are positioned within the Neolithic Cursus pathway, an enigmatic linear enclosure 100 meters wide and 2.5 kilometers long, north of Stonehenge. One pit sits at the eastern end and the other at the western end of the Cursus.

The international archaeological survey team also found a gap in the northern side of the Cursus that may have been the entrance and exit to the ceremony procession following the sun’s path.

“The perimeter of the Cursus may well have defined a route guiding ceremonial processions which took place on the longest day of the year,” says project leader Vince Gaffney at the University of Birmingham in a press release.

Gaffney says that observers of the ceremony may have stood at the Heel Stone located at Stonehenge’s entrance, where the pits would have aligned with the sun as it rose over the eastern pit and set over the western pit.

Tall stones, wooden posts, or fires may have been placed in the pits to mark the sun’s path.

“These exciting finds indicate that even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important, ritual focus and the area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date,” Gaffney says.

Archaeologists have long established that Stonehenge can mark astronomical events, and was linked to the passage of the seasons and in particular the sun.

“If you measure the walking distance between the two pits, the procession would reach exactly half-way at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge,” says Henry Chapman at the University of Birmingham in the release.

“This is more than just a coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance.”

The survey was led by the University of Birmingham’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (VISTA), with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna (LBI ArchPro).