precision. It is necessary, in order to understand the complexity involved in the assembling of Stonehenge, to know the process by which and the environment in which the monument was built. By the time Stonehenge was built, the landscape around the area on Salisbury Plain was rather open with more farmland and grazing land, and less forest. Underneath the first few feet of soil on Salisbury Plain there was a substantial layer of hard chalk, which made building rudimentary structures somewhat easier for the people of the era. The first phase in building Stonehenge was that of the earth monument, which consisted of a circular bank of dirt (originally about 6 feet tall, now barely 2 feet tall) with a ditch running along the outside of the bank. There are two breaks in the ditch and bank, forming two entrances, and in addition there are 56 Aubrey Holes, named for John Aubrey, their discoverer, in a circle just inside the earth bank. This first phase, Stonehenge I, built by the Windmill Hill people, took from about 2950 to 2900 BC to construct. Slightly more detailed than the first, the second phase of building Stonehenge involved the creation of a wooden monument. The postholes scattered about the floor of the monument are evidence for this stage. There seem to have been a roughly corridor shaped structure at the southern entrance of the earth monument, and a more detailed setting around the northeastern entrance. The Avenue, made up of a pair of long, straight, and parallel ditches, was also said to have been part of this second phase of Stonehenge. Stonehenge II could be credited to the Beaker people, approximately between the years 2800 and 2300 BC. The third and most impressive stage of the monument is that of the stone monument. Since the building of this phase extended from about 2500 to 1600 BC, it was the longest and most complex of the three, and was so divided up into six sub phases. First in the sequence was the arrival of the bl...
