Knowing what a site is about will not tell you all about it, as the work of archaeologists of Modern Era digs tell us

I have often thought it would be nice to time travel and have a look to see what was going on in the eras that science tells us these things were built. I would love to pop back to 5000 BC and find the sphinx already built and considered ancient! See people building Avebury without the use of pulleys? Simply some crazy control of gravitational fields that we don't remember anymore! Maybe Von Daniken is right and little green men will be building them! Who knows?! But without that time machine (and perhaps even with it) we will never know what these things were for. Maybe we would get there and the people would be building these monuments without really understanding why. Simply because there were older things (like woodhenge) there and they knew that at a certain point in history they needed to build something bigger and better.

But would I want to know? I think most of the appeal is not knowing. They are mysterious and beautiful and they can mean whatever we want them to mean and thats part of the attraction for me.

:)

To misquote one of the Mersey poets, probably Brian Patten or Roger McGough, maybe Adrian Henry, (in the hope of being enlightened) - To know know know know you is to love love love love you, but I don't.

I was watching an episode of Dr Who on dvd last night and he says "where in time do you want to go" and I thought about just that, Sanctuary. Wouldn't it be disappointing if it was just some megalalithic priest's mid life crisis building something bigger than anyone else had.

I must admit, I carve stones with my own versions of spirals and cup and ring or other suchlike marks. I then throw them into pools all over Scotland, preferably really deep ones like at Pattack Falls, say. I like the idea someone will find them in 300 years and say, this si modern, it isn't in the right time period, what the hell was going on there then?

Would it benefit any of us today?

Now there's a good question. I think it would, if you mean 'us' as our current modern pseudo-globaised culture as to understand what a site was about, would require a fairly major shift in consciousness for a lot of people, they'd need to be able to see things over a longer perspective, like Tiompan says above (I think), a lot/most/some sites were significant for different reasons over different periods to different people.

To be able to fully appreciate this, perhaps by the advent of a swarm of nanoscale fast-forwardable time-travelling video cameras, each with a microphone connected to auto-translation speech recognition software, so they could swarm throughout time and space to give us a full idea of the lives of all the cultures responsible for our prehistoric monuments, well, that'd be a good thing in my book.

It would make people stop and think. And perhaps for the really annoying ones who just concern themselves with status and material goods, perhaps it'd overload their synapses and make them less likely to get in the way of everyone else :)

Whilst it might spoil the magic I think on balance it would be preferable to know the exact truth, we must as a species know where we've come from to know what is yet to come, to know what Stonehenge and Avebury were made for, are part of the mystery of life, why are we here and whats it all for, to know the secrets of reality would set us free from any constraints, are there really as scientists say at least 11 universes, is there really a soul inside me and what if anything is god, I cant answer these questions myself, so I'll put myself in a position to know by exploring this country as fully as I can, maybe the answer will come maybe it wont, but I do love trying.
In short we must know the truth to take the right road into the future, what ever the cost.
If magic must be left behind in order to grow as a species so be it, but equally if magic must be rekindled in order to grow all the better.

I'd like to know, not so much what they explained them as or for, they are historical curiosities that would be interesting to know, but what really motivated groups of people to lay down a plan and organise such huge (and not so huge) investments of time and labour. Why certain structures were more satisfying than the alternatives and replicated over and over, why certain motifs carved in rocks spread across the wildest parts of the Atlantic facade.
I probably wouldn't get the really satisfying answers to these questions by asking the people who were involved, though the stories and explanations they would tell us would be fascinating to record. I'd love to get to the bottom of the part of human nature that drives people to build these things (now as in the past) and what draws us to the abandoned and forgotten sites today.

I would like to know. I don't think it would detract from visiting the sites. You could still appreciate the building skills and the views will still be there!