Stonehenge was England's burial site

The famous Stonehenge monument was used as a burial site.

Archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 BC, before the large stones, known as sarsens, were put in place.

The new dates, estimated using the latest in carbon dating research, provide strong clues that the original purpose of the ancient monument was as a cemetery, and that it was used as a burial site for more than 500 years.

"It's now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages," said Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield in England, who worked with National Geographic Magazine on the study.

"Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium BC," the archaeologist said.

"The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge's sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument's use, and demonstrates that it was still very much a 'domain of the dead'," Parker Pearson said.

The artifacts dated by Parker Pearson's team were excavated from the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

Only 40 percent of the originals remain, but some 850,000 visitors each year come to visit the 17 stones which are still intact.