English physician and archaeologist who made careful surveys of the Stonehenge and Avebury stone circles in Wiltshire. Having mapped these huge prehistoric monuments, he then speculated as to their purpose. He suggested that, by analogy with the nearest equivalents of medieval times, the European cathedrals, they must have had a religious function. They must have been places where the Druids held religious rites and offerings their temples in effect. Antiquarian John Aubrey had made drawings of Stonehenge for King Charles I in 1663, and it was Aubrey who had first proposed that it was a Druidic temple and a place of sacrifice. Stukeley enthusiastically adopted and embroidered on this explanation. He concluded that Stonehenge and other stone circles had been places for the worship of the serpent and that the Druids were of Phoenician origin.
Stukeley’s measurements were meticulous, unlike Aubrey’s comparatively sloppy approach, and he made a serious attempt to analyze what he found. He was the first, in 1723, to identify the Avenue of stones running off to the northeast of Stonehenge, and the Cursus, a low mound to the north. He thought that the Stonehenge builders had used a unit of a druid cubit of 52.8 centimeters (20.8 inches), and he tried, using the science of the time, to date the monument. He arrived at a figure of about 460 B.C.E., not accepted today. He recorded his observations and deductions in Stonehenge, a Temple Restored to the British Druids (1740). Probably his most important observation was that “. . . . the principal line of the whole work, (points to) the northeast, where the sun rises, when the days are longest.” It is on that fact that much of the research on Stonehenge has focused during the last century. In 1771, John Smith, continuing Stukeley’s astronomical observations, speculated that Stonehenge was a kind of astronomical calendar, calling it “the Grand Orrery of the Ancient Druids.” In 1796, Henry Wansey suggested it was a predictor of eclipses.