I'm taking the week off to attend and take part in The Hurler's...Mapping the Sun project and noticed they are considered as being for ceremonial purposes.
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/hurlers-stone-circles/
Really looking forward to it as it is on my doorstep..Yay.
I think the "ceremonial" explanation makes a lot of sense as a theory; i.e. that they are the neolithic equivalent of cathedrals, temples, chapels and so forth. And the reason that makes sense is because our knowledge of other cultures suggest that one of the first things people do when they start building things... once they've progressed beyond tombs... is to construct temples.
But if you are basing your theory on that, then you have to acknowledge that cultures also start to produce other types of structure around the same time. Maybe their temples were all made of wood and we have no evidence of them at all... but their Courts of Justice (or equivalent) just had to be circles of stone for some reason. Courts are also important enough to put a lot of effort into; and depending upon the size of the community, could be of various different sizes.
Theatres / performance spaces are also important enough to put a lot of effort into (just look at some of the Amphitheatres of old). Or maybe stone circles were a competitive sports venue... of a sport whose rules we'll never know. Or perhaps they are globstopples*
As I say; I think most of us accept we'll never really know definitively. Which means we can all hold on to our pet theories, and so long as we accept they are just that - theories - that's a perfectly fine state of affairs I imagine.
On the "what does science have to offer?" debate, I would suggest that whatever additional factual information we do manage to uncover about these ancient monuments is likely to come via scientific investigation. Simply because that which we define as constituting "factual information" can only really be accessed through rational, scientific investigation.
That said, there are plenty of arenas where rational, scientific, purpose-orientated investigation is unhelpful; even counter-productive. But if we want to know more about something built thousands of years ago, then it's really the only useful tool we have.
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* Globstopple: a word I just made up to denote a building whose purpose has no direct equivalent in our culture.
