Stonehenge

Barbara Bender treats Stonehenge not as a lone monument but as part of the wider land around it. Her account traces how people have used that ground, given it new meanings, and told stories about it, from prehistory to the present day. Across thousands of years the landscape has been reused and reinterpreted, and it has been claimed and disputed along the way. The book also looks at the people who visit it now: heritage managers, archaeologists, local residents, festival-goers and modern druids, each arriving with different ideas and goals. Bender argues that the chance to voice such competing views depends heavily on social and political forces, which decide whose voices are heard and whose are pushed aside. The text mixes conventional prose with dialogues and illustrations, some of them comic strips, presenting many perspectives in an inventive form. It is a study of how people both shape a landscape and are shaped by it.