Mystery Man of Stonehenge: who was he and where did he come from? And what was his role in the making of the great monument? The discovery of a 4,300-year-old skeleton surrounded by intriguing artifacts has archaeologists abuzz.

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-AUG-05

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In the spring of 2002, archaeologists were nearly finished excavating the site of a planned housing development in Amesbury, a town in southwestern England. It had been a "routine excavation--bread and butter, as it were," says archaeologist Andrew Fitzpatrick, leader of the team from Wessex Archaeology conducting the dig. The team had uncovered a small Roman cemetery, a fairly common finding. Now all that was left to check out were two rough patches of ground--"blobs," Fitzpatrick calls them--in a far corner of the site.

Early on that Friday in May, the crew went to work on the blobs with their trowels. By midmorning, they had determined that the blobs were graves. By lunchtime, they'd realized the graves predated the Roman cemetery by more than 2,500 years; in one, they uncovered the first of five clay funerary pots, having a "beaker" style associated with Britain's Bronze Age (2300-700 b.c.). Then a worker found "something shiny," as the crew leader reported that afternoon in a phone call to Fitzpatrick, who hurried to the site. The shiny "something" was a piece of gold.

Fitzpatrick ordered the workers to collect all the earth from the graves so that his staff back in the lab could sift through it and recover any fragments of relics or remains. With no way to hire guards for the site on the eve of a three-day holiday weekend, the team had to complete the job right away. After the sun went down, they illuminated the area with car headlights, finishing at 1:42 a.m. that Saturday. Later, when the sifting was done, 100 artifacts...

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