Stonehenge Cursus Stonehenge Cursus The Stonehenge Cursus (sometimes known as the Greater Cursus) is a large Neolithic cursus monument on Salisbury plain, near to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. It is roughly long and between and wide. Excavations in 2007 dated the construction of the earthwork to between 3630 and 3375 BCE, several hundred years before the earliest phase of Stonehenge in 3000 BC. The cursus, along with adjacent barrows and the nearby 'Lesser Cursus' are part of the National Trust's Stonehenge Landscape property, and is within the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Cursus comes from the Latin for 'racecourse'. Early antiquarians
Stonehenge the first to advance the idea that Stonehenge was constructed as a funerary monument. Whatever religious, mystical or spiritual elements were central to Stonehenge, its design includes a celestial observatory function, which might have allowed prediction of eclipse, solstice, equinox and other celestial events important to a contemporary religion. There are other hypotheses and theories. According to a team of British researchers led by Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, Stonehenge may have been built as a symbol of "peace and unity", indicated in part by the fact that at the time of its construction, Britain's Neolithic people