Secrets of Stonehenge Revealed at Words Bookstore

A jackets-off, sneakers on, picture-perfect early Spring day found the inside of Words bookstore in the heart of Maplewood Village packed with young and old, curious to find out new information about a circle of large stones, 4,500 years old.

Historian and author, Marc Aronson, a Maplewood resident, and prolific author of non-fiction books for young people, has just written, If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge, published by the National Geographic Society. As extra folding chairs were arranged to accommodate the crowd, he began his talk by encouraging questions.

Aronson made the point that it is by questioning existing understandings of history, new discoveries can be made. To research his book, Aronson joined renowned archaeologist Mike Parker-Pearson and his research team on the site of  Stonehenge in Surrey, England. Parker-Pearson had spent the last seven years asking questions and challenging the conventional wisdom about the origins of Stonehenge. The audience at Words was caught up in the suspense of the quest.

"Why was it built?" one audience member asked. As in the book, Aronson presented the different understandings through history, and showed illustrations from a picture of Merlin the Magician lifting a stone in place, circa the 1300s, to a drawing of an ancient druid from the 1700s.

New technologies have revealed connections impossible to make in the past. But even more, it was investigative curiosity and  attention to the voices of experts and non-experts alike, such as a visiting archaeologist from Madagascar and the observations of a ten-year old boy, that led the Parker-Pearson team to make the groundbreaking discoveries revealed in If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge. Interwoven in Aronson's talk was the very method that the book employs, which makes understanding history as much about the adventure of discovery as discovering the answers.

At the conclusion of the presentation, Words bookstore owner Jonah Zimiles commented, "I went to Stonehenge with my parents when I was a boy, and I thought it was boring because I didn't have someone like Marc to explain it."

The palpable excitement of the children during and after the event, as they asked questions and discussed their own theories, was evidence that the thinking-work of future historians had begun.