HMNS BRINGS STONEHENGE DOWN TO EARTH
The Houston Museum of Natural Science is hosting an exhibit on the legendary English monument Stonehenge — complete with artifacts — and the biggest revelation is how unmagical it all is while still being incredibly impressive.
If you grew up with Time-Life books and “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World,” you might have this image of Stonehenge as this impossible feature of the English landscape that could only be explained with sorcery or aliens or possibly alien sorcerers. That mindset has sort of eroded the public understanding of what Stonehenge was and is, as well as the ongoing archaeology being done their to understand what life was like 5,000 years ago.
To that end, the new exhibit is long on two things: rocks and bones. The rocks are various castoff pieces or hammerstones used in the creation of the monument. The bones are so we know that ancient peoples had giant Neolithic barbecues on the site. These things tell us a huge amount about Stonehenge. It explains how the makers formed tools, what they ate, where they gathered and how much of a society it required to dedicate months and years to establishing an impressive gathering place that lasted in importance for centuries.
The exhibit even makes little jokes about the theories, using stations with cartoons of archaeologists explaining — in simple terms and with small quizzes — how Stonehenge was not constructed by extraterrestrial technology or druid magic (the druids came long after the creation of Stonehenge).
The exhibit does dabble in some mythmaking of its own, though. One prominent feature is a Woodhenge (not just a clever Eddie Izzard joke as it turns out) movie theater where a Stone Age #GirlBoss next to a campfire tells an audience how her family has worked on Stonehenge for generations and why the site is significant. its significance. Unfortunately, the video follows you throughout the last half of the exhibit and gets a little annoying.
It does complete a stellar setting, though. Across the exhibit are impressive re-creations of people working on Stonehenge, and all the information set-ups are displayed in solid black standing stones that make you feel as if you are truly walking through a dreamlike representation of Stonehenge before it was ruined. A more subtle touch is the presentation of bones and stone tools. These are often arranged in strange geometric patterns that add a pagan significance to their display, as if past debris was being used in an arcane summoning ritual. Another remarkable display was the cremains of a woman buried on the site, the pieces of her displayed in a set of transparent cubes, like a macabre game of Jenga. It makes you think about the layers of history that are present when talking about Stonehenge.
Stonehenge continues to fascinate people to this day. There is still truly no one reason to explain why such a massive campus of incredible stone work was constructed at that particular spot in Wiltshire, though from archaeology we know that it was both a cemetery and fairground, at least some of the time. The mundane nature of its construction, as taught through this wonderful exhibit, has a lot to say about what humans build and why it matters.
Maybe Stonehenge wasn’t an ancient computer contemplating the universe in perfect space-time position with the heavens. Maybe it was just a really fancy place to drop bones of both human and lunch categories. Like a decaying, abandoned mega-mall, it still has a commentary to offer us bereft of mythology and crazed theories. It’s so amazingly real, and that makes it a helpful anchor point for us in a post-fact world.