Letter from the
Superintendent
Dr. Gary Peiffer
“In our work today with students, we want to
impart upon them the value of team work and the
value of working for a goal for the common good
that is bigger than their own private concerns.”
Dear Parents, Friends, and Students,
I
t often seems that student academic
performance and test scores serve
as the focus for all we strive for as
educators. While those are important,
there are so many additional skills that
we want students to develop as they
progress through our schools. Leadership,
responsibility, civic duty, and empathy
for others are all traits that we strive to
develop as character traits in our young
students. But among the character traits
that I believe are the most useful to help
students succeed, in college and work after
graduation, is that of being able to be a
productive and contributing member to
a successful team. No one, save perhaps
Isaac Newton, succeeds on his or her own.
It takes a team of people, from family to
friends to trusted colleagues and adults,
who help one to achieve a goal. Moving
beyond individual accomplishments, the
word teamwork is often applied to those
tasks that seem greater than the individual,
deserving of more recognition and earning
more importance than something that could
be achieved on one’s own.
It is in this sense of working with others
for the greater good that I want to touch on
the idea of teamwork. And when one thinks
of team work, one immediately thinks of...
Stonehenge.
Stay with me here.
Constructed in multiple stages over
a period of 1,500 years, Stonehenge
continues to inspire wonder and inspiration
among people
to this day.
Silhouetted
against the sky
on the Salisbury
Plain in Wiltshire,
England, what
visitors see
today is the
stone remains of
the ceremonial
center of a ritual
landscape that encompassed a much larger
area surrounded by burial mounds and other
earth works. Many think these rituals involved
honoring one’s ancestors and the dead.
Stonehenge is made up of rings of blue
stones and massive grey sarsen stones
placed upright like doorways. They have
supporting posts and stone lintels. These
doorways are called trilithons. They are
arranged in a circle, with the largest
trilithons forming a horseshoe shape in the
center of that circle. The trilithons and blue
stones are surrounded by an earthen
embankment and ditch. (The embankment
and ditch form the “henge” of Stonehenge.)
The henge was constructed first, and
then around 2500 BCE, the trilithons were
constructed.
The size and weight of the sarsen stones
alone required 200 people just to move
one. The average weight of a sarsen stone is
40 tons. The height of these stones ranges
from 22-32 feet. The sarsen stones were not
available on site but were at a place called
Marlborough Downs twenty miles to the
north, while the blue stones originate from
the Preseli Mountains in Wales, some 150
miles from Stonehenge. Some estimate
that it would have taken between 4,000
and 5,000 days to deliver one sarsen stone
from Marlborough Downs to Stonehenge,
10 years to get them all there. Once there,
it may have taken over 100 people to raise
the stones to upright positions. Using a
ramp or a lever with a wooden platform,
a lintel could then be installed on two
uprights to form the trilithon.
Originally, there were 82 sarsen stones
to support 10 trilithon uprights, 5 trilithon
lintels, 30 circle uprights, 30 circle lintels, 4
station stones, and 3 slaughter stones. In
addition, there were 80 bluestones. Today,
there are only 83 stones still remaining at
Stonehenge.
The creation and use of Stonehenge as
a site of communal use is more remarkable
when one thinks of the team effort needed
to create it. In the Neolithic era, there were
no power tools, no blueprints, no written
instructions, no photos. Yet, someone had
to envision what the site would look like.
Someone had to share that vision with the
others and get them to support it. With
crude measuring devices, people had to
work together to plot out what stones
would go where and how those stones
would align with the night sky for the
Winter and Summer Solstices. Someone
had to organize that team of 200 to move
the stones to the site and coordinate the
transportation route.
To build the henge and prepare the site
for the stones, people dug with red deer
antlers. They used hammerstones to shape
The Greensburg Salem School District pages are edited and compiled by the Community Relations Department. For more
information please contact Julie Ebersole, at 724.832.2907 or [email protected].
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GREENSBURG SALEM