Scholars have long debated Stonehenge’s purpose and the meaning of its construction, with a notable critique of the idea that the stones served as a precise calendar. A recent discussion in Antiquity revisits the question, highlighting that the monument’s purpose remains unsettled despite its striking alignment with solar events.
Stonehenge, erected around 2600 BCE, has often been described as an ancestral ceremonial site set within a remarkable landscape. Many researchers have linked its orientation to solstitial sunrise and sunset, suggesting a strong association with ritual observations of the Sun. In several Neolithic cultures, the winter solstice carried associations with the afterlife, and communities marked that day with special remembrance. A recent article in Antiquity proposed that Stonehenge functioned as a genuine astronomical calendar, supposedly encoding a 365-day year with twelve 30-day months, plus five epogomenal days and a leap-day every four years. The interpretation relies on the arrangement and types of stones, including claims like thirty horizontal elements corresponding to the months.
However, a critique led by Juan Belmonte of the Institute for Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, along with colleagues, challenges this calendar theory. First, while the monument’s solar orientation is precise, it does not deliver calendar-like precision. The days nearest the solstices show sunrise positions that shift only slightly, and the stone placements do not reliably distinguish dates within a short arc of the year, making it difficult to determine a date with minute or even tenth-of-a-degree accuracy.
Second, the calendar interpretation appears to be built on numerical associations that do not hold under scrutiny. For instance, although the number twelve represents the calendar year in many systems, the stonework at the portal comprises two stones and does not explicitly encode that number. In other words, the argument relies on selecting elements that fit a predefined calendar narrative while disregarding elements that do not align with it.
Finally, the proposed calendar hypothesis fails to fit within the broader cultural context of the time. The earliest solar calendars with leap-year corrections emerged much later, with Egyptian practice appearing in the Hellenistic period, more than two millennia after Stonehenge’s construction. The Egyptians influenced other ancient cultures, yet there is no clear example of calendar-focused monumental architecture akin to Stonehenge among their legacy, complicating any direct borrowing of a calendar model into the monument’s design.
Consequently, many scholars regard the calendar theory as untenable, arguing that it reflects wishful interpretation rather than a substantiated function. The consensus emphasizes Stonehenge as a symbol-rich, ritual and ceremonial place whose astronomical alignments are significant but not necessarily a literal, working calendar. In this view, the monument’s value lies in its ability to evoke seasonal and solar cycles within a ceremonial landscape, rather than to encode a precise daily timetable—a perspective supported by cross-cultural studies and comparative archaeology. The debate illustrates how early researchers and modern scholars approach ancient monuments through different lenses, underscoring the importance of corroborating evidence and resisting overly tidy explanations.