WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND—Controversial art critic Julian Spalding suggests that “We’ve been looking at Stonehenge the wrong way—from the earth.” He thinks that what we now see as the monument may have been the base for a giant, circular wooden platform on which ceremonies were performed. As a “great altar,” Stonehenge would have supported hundreds of worshipers looking toward the sky. “All the great raised altars of the past suggest that the people who built Stonehenge would never have performed celestial ceremonies on the lowly earth. That would have been unimaginably insulting to the immortal beings, for it would have brought them down from heaven to bite the dust and tread in the dung,” Spalding told The Guardian. Archaeologists have reacted to this idea with some skepticism. “He could be right, but I know of no evidence to support it,” responded Sir Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of European archaeology at Oxford University. To read about new archaeological discoveries at the site, see "Under Stonehenge."
