Stonehenge: Making Space

This book is an imaginative exploration of a place that has fascinated, intrigued and perplexed visitors for centuries. Instead of seeing Stonehenge as an isolated site, the author sets the stones within a wider landscape and explores how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present.Throughout the millennia, the Stonehenge landscape has been used and re-used, invested with new meanings, and has given rise to myths and stories. The author creatively explores how the landscape has been appropriated and contested, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often conflicting experiences of the same place. Today, heritage managers, archaeologists, local people, free festivallers, and druids come to the place with entirely different understandings and agendas. The book demonstrates that the creation of spaces and places for people to express divergent viewpoints is powerfully constrained by social and political forces that allow some voices to be heard while others are marginalized. With dialogues and illustrations that range from the conventional to the cartoon strip, this multi-vocal book not only presents a wide range of views in an innovative way, but provides important new insights on how people shape and are shaped by landscape.

Barbara Bender has contributed to Stonehenge: Making Space as an author.Barbara Bender is Professor of Heritage Anthropology at University College London and author of Stonehenge: Making Space and other works on landscape archaeology.Paul Gilroy has contributed to Stonehenge: Making Space as an editor.Paul Gilroy is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and has held posts at various universities in the UK and the US. He has written widely on race, culture, nationalism, music and literature.