For winter solstice, crowds usually gather at Stonehenge to watch the Sun set between the uprights of the tallest trilithon. That practice has been taking place since our ancient ancestors erected the sarsen stones about 2500 BC. But there is more to Stonehenge than observing its alignments to the sunrise and sunset at solstice. When people gather for rituals, they speak and make music—sounds that are amplified and altered by reflections from the stones. To fully understand Stonehenge, visitors need to look beyond its appearance, including the archaeological artifacts dug up at the site, to quantify how the monument’s acoustics altered its sounds and how the stones’ prehistoric geometry might have influenced what went on there.
Sunrise and sunset at solstice can still be experienced at the site. Although it is possible to get a sense of scale and be awed by the staggering feat of construction, listening to the current structure gives a misleading impression of what our ancestors heard in the late Neolithic period and early Bronze Age. The current thinking is that around 2200 BC the monument had 157 stones. That’s roughly double the number of stones and fragments that are left at the modern ruin, and many of those are now displaced or fallen over.
I got interested in ancient sites such as Stonehenge when I wrote about sounds of the past for my 2014 book Sonic Wonderland. While researching the topic, I realized that no one had investigated prehistoric stone circles by using acoustic scale models. That awareness prompted me to construct such a model on a 1:12 scale, as seen in the photo. Two research questions I and my collaborators—acoustician Bruno Fazenda (University of Salford) and archaeologist Susan Greaney (the nonprofit English Heritage)—wanted to address were, How is sound altered by the stones? and What does that reveal about where rituals might have taken place in the structure?
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