Register here - as a registered user you get more features and fewer ads.
I'm a little late (11 years) in responding to this splendidly detailed posting, which I found by googling (cursus chalk), checking out a hunch that cursus (plural) might be restricted to chalk - which I've now learned is not the case.
Never mind. That doesn't necessarily put paid to the hunch I've advanced on my latest sciencebuzz posting. I believe that the cursus, or at any rate the more compact ones, were excarnation sites (defleshing of the dead, "sky burial"). The purpose of the exposed chalk was to recreate the kind of seascape look to inland sites, attracting in the right kind of scavenger bird with a voracious appetite, specifically, probably, the seagull.
I've used Google Earth and white marker pen in MS Paint to show how the Stonehenge Cursus might look to a seagull on the wing that is exploring inland from the Solent and Southhampton Water, some 30 miles to the south, or Avebury Stone Circle some 25 miles further north from Stonehenge. Yes, I consider the bank/ditch or ditch/bank configuration of the henge or cursus to have served the same role, creating a "white cliff" in miniature, the top of which was initially where the birds could perch between beak-fulls. Then someone had the idea of installing timber posts, then standing stones, with or without lintels, as superior bird perches. Hey presto, one has an explanation for otherwise 'enigmatic' Neolithic outdoor landscaping and garden furniture. Whether it's true or not is a totally different matter, but one has to start with a hypothesis, does one not, when answers are not self-evident?
Colin Berry
Might Stonehenge have been designed as an easily-spottable feeding station for high-flying seagulls – as perhaps was the nearby “Cursus”?
(googleable)
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road