Pearson believes that Stonehenge's true significance is in its relationship to a sister temple found at Durrington Walls. He believes that the two temples served as centers for religious observance -- Durrington Walls as a site of feasts for the living, Stonehenge as a series of statues of the dead.
"There is certainly a debate going on amongst archaeologists in the UK at the moment," Fitzpatrick said. "We're all kind of waiting to see how it pans out; we're waiting to see if the new excavations provide dating, which will help us resolve some of these questions."
Now that researchers have come to believe the bluestones came from Wales, the question is why. If prehistoric people believed they were ordinary rocks, surely they would not have labored to move them so far.
One clue may lie in the burial mounds that surround the site: Are they commemorations of the dead or evidence of attempts to heal the living?
"There's people in the landscape buried here who have come here perhaps like pilgrims, in order to benefit from the things here," Darvill said. "You can imagine a big temple like this is going to have shamans, it's going to have witch doctors, it's going to have all the sorts of people who in prehistoric terms would look after those who were ill."
Many of the remains uncovered during previous excavations show signs of ailments and, in some cases, primitive surgery.
"One, for example, has a trepanation taken out of the top of the skull, a circular piece of bone taken out to relieve pressure on the brain," Darvill said.
"You've got to be feeling pretty unwell to let somebody get a flint blade and cut the top of your head off."
Although the Romans may have destroyed some of the evidence that the two scientists were hoping to find, they refuse to be deterred. Their research "ties in with some big questions about the interpretation of Stonehenge," Darvill said.
"Once these bluestones were moved here, people believed the place was important, it was sacred, they could become pilgrims, they could come here." But for what?
For Darvill and Wainwright, inching closer to an answer is all they can ask for.
thea.chard@latimes.com