Stonehenge -- No Women Allowed, I Guess

Am I the only one who was annoyed about the way the recent stories on the purpose of Stonehenge were played in the local dailies?

Star Tribune, headline: "Stonehenge, marker for dead royalty?" Deck: "The circle of stones that has fascinated tourists for decades was a burial ground for nation's first line of kings, researchers say."

Pioneer Press, headline: "Solved." Deck: "Evidence of a cemetery for an ancient line of kings unlocks a secret of Stonehenge."

Kings, hmm. What make everyone so sure they were kings?

The remains that were found were all cremated. I may be mistaken, but isn't it impossible to tell the sex of the deceased from completely cremated remains? Probably there are some bones, and if they were the right types of bones, that could be revealing, but the stories don't give many details from which to judge this. The one specific mention in the Strib's compilation of news service stories said "A third [set of remains], that of a woman about 25 years old, dates from 2570 B.C. to 2340 B.C."

The PiPress, reprinting an LA Times story, paraphrased University of Sheffield archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, to say the remains "provide the first substantive evidence that a line of kings ruled at least the lower portion of the British island..." Who knows if the archaeologist actually said "kings," though, since they didn't actually quote him. A quick look through Google to see what types of things Parker Pearson was quoted as saying didn't turn up anything about kings.

From what I could gather, Parker Pearson merely said that the burials indicated the existence of a dominant group over a period of centuries. His team also excavated a nearby village built around a "woodhenge," set up to mirror Stonehenge. He hypothesizes that this place was where the people came to celebrate the winter solstice and bury their dead at the nearby Stonehenge. The BBC story on Parker Pearson doesn't mention anything about kings.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the researchers obviously know what they found -- what sex the different remains were if that was determinable, or that most couldn't be determined, or whatever -- but there's no way to find that out from the newspaper stories or even from looking online.

So I'll just gripe about it here.