Stonehenge and Jeffers Petroglyphs

The June 2008 edition of The National Geographic features its cover page article entitled "It the Stones Could Speak: Searching for the Meaning of Stonehenge" pages 34-59. The writer is Caroline Alexander and the Photographer is Ken Geiger.

Estimating the time of the creation of Stonehenge to be about 4,500 years ago makes it a near contemporary with the Petroglyph's at Jeffers. The same question cluster about each site. What did the creators have in mind? As the article says "we know little about who these early Britons were, how they were organized, or what language they spoke." More is known in England than in Minnesota about the possible creators because of bones and some artifacts. The various stages of construction at Stonehenge are described in the article. Unearthing Neolithic villages, especially at Durrington Walls, reveals a bit of the life style. The importance of summer and winter solstice observances is understood by the style of the standing stones of Stonehenge.

I read the article with a poignant sense of regret that we know so little of the creators of the Petroglyph's. There are no grand myths of dramatic events out here on the prairie. At this stage we have not learned enough from the geographic setting to project the movement of people following the retreat of the glaciers. To this point, our imaginations are not yet engaged with this challenge - this reaching into the crevices of the mind to mark out the traces of ancient times that continue to be shaped in us by the geography, the weather, the skies above.