History of Stonehenge Essay -- Architecture Historical Essays

History of Stonehenge On May 20, 1996, TIME magazine contained an advertisement for the Mita DC-8090 copying machine. It included a vivid image of a very recognizable work of art, Stonehenge. TIME magazine is a weekly news magazine and its readers are educated and interested in current events, politics, business, science, and the arts. The text of the advertisement states, "The new Mita DC-8090 has the technology to manage complicated copying jobs from start to finish-it's fully automatic. Sunsets should be watched, not copiers." The advertisement utilizes the beautiful image as a setting to make the product look attractive and the text to suggest that the copier will save time and effort. It also assumes that the reader will associate Stonehenge with the sun and sunsets using common knowledge about this famous structure. Stonehenge is located on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. It is a megalithic monument built during the Neolithic Period, approximately between 2750 and 1500 B.C..(Stokstad, p.54-55) The builders of this magnificent monument remain unknown although it was once incorrectly thought to have been built by the Druids.(Balfour) Stonehenge was built in several different phases beginning with the large white circle, 330 feet in diameter, surrounded by an eight foot-high embankment and a ring of fifty-six pits now referred to as the Aubrey Holes.(Stokstad, p.53; Hoyle) In a subsequent building phase, thirty huge pillars of stone were erected and capped by stone lintels in the central Sarsen Circle, which is 106 feet in diameter.(Stokstad, p.54) This circle is so named because the stone of which the pillars and lintels were made was sarsen. Within the Sarsen Circle were an incomplete ring and a horsesho... ...he advertisers assumed that the readers of TIME magazine had seen the site before and knew something about its history. This is a fairly safe assumption since the readers of TIME would probably have had some exposure to this very famous work of art. The readers may not have known specific details about the original but, as with most art from the past that is reproduced in the present, the work is associated with certain well-known facts. Works Cited: Balfour, Michael Stonehenge and Its Mysteries New York 1979 Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia (Computer Program) Hoyle, Fred From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology San Francisco 1972 On Stonehenge San Francisco 1977 Humbert, Jean-Marcel Pantazzi, Michael Ziegler, Christiane Egyptomania Paris 1994 Stokstad, Marilyn Art History, Volume 1 New York 1995 Wainwright, Geoffrey The Henge Monuments London 1989