All About Stonehenge

By Betty Anne

This week, mom and I went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We visited the new temporary Stonehenge exhibit. We learned a lot on this great field trip. This exhibit is where the LEGO exhibit was located before.

In this exhibit, I learned nothing but new facts. We first started out by walking into a room that had a “photo wall” of Stonehenge. Throughout the exhibit, there are clay models of Stonehenge’s stages from all the thousands of years it took to be built.

Now let me name some of the things this exhibit has taught me (because I can't name them all). I learned so much about Stonehenge on the trip to the museum. The first thing I will be naming is one that threw my mind. I noticed that on a wall in the exhibit there is a timeline. Now, I'm not normally a timeline kind of person, but I loved the timeline they had. It had the years and stages of the making of Stonehenge. And then, below that I saw that there were images of great historical events, such as the Pyramids of Egypt, Easter Island, Roman Colossium, etc. And Stonehenge was OLDER than all of them.

Another thing that I noticed is that they had many artifacts. When the scientists were digging around Stonehenge, they found a buried bag with a plaque on top of it. Inside this said bag, there were many things the scientists from 1935 found when they were searching around. They didn’t have the equipment to find what these objects were used for or if they were even from Stonehenge back then.

Scientists finally think they have found what Stonehenge was used for. The scientists that have been working on Stonehenge for about a decade now finally have agreed that they think Stonehenge was used for a burial site. This means they have found bones of humans and animals buried under the ground where there are slight indents from the stones. The stones used to be farther away than they are now. Stonehenge’s rocks have been through many changes in thousands of years. This brings us to our next topic.

How did these said people get the humongous rocks to where they are now? Well, scientists think that the people that were building this rock formation used sleds made out of logs to move these rocks to England from Wales.To be clear, the rocks they are moving from Wales are the Bluestones. Bluestones are the 8-feet tall rocks. These rocks were moved 150 miles on sleds. This took hundreds of years to get all the Bluestones to the specific location. The tallest rocks are called Sarsen rocks. These rocks are about 30 feet. THAT’S HUGE!!!

The next thing I'm going to talk about is how many awesome things are around Stonehenge. There are many other henges, rivers, etc. around Stonehenge. At the museum they have an interactive learning pallet in the Stonehenge exhibit all about the different things around Stonehenge, like there is a small rock arrangement nearby Stonehenge that some people think is related.

I don’t know about you, but I really want to visit Stonehenge someday. Well, that’s all for now. Thank you for reading this week's blog. I had so much fun writing it and experiencing this!