Avon

Many archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 B.C., before the large stones, known as sarsens, were put in place. The new dates provide strong clues about the original purpose of the monument and show that its use as a cemetery extended 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 (U.K.), who with National Geographic support leads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project. “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. 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.’”

The earliest cremation burial dated – a small pile of burned bones and teeth – came from one of the pits around Stonehenge’s edge known as the Aubrey Holes and dates to 3030-2880 B.C., roughly the time when Stonehenge’s ditch-and-bank monument was cut into Salisbury Plain. The second burial, from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, is that of an adult and dates to 2930-2870 B.C. The most recent cremation, Parker Pearson said, comes from the ditch’s northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman; it dates to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.

The work at Stonehenge is featured in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine. An exclusive look at the new discoveries will appear in a global premiere on the National Geographic Channel – “Stonehenge Decoded” – on Sunday, June 1, (9 p.m. ET/PT in the U.S.; check local listings internationally). Stonehenge also is featured in the June/July 2008 issue of National Geographic Kids magazine.

This is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The burials dated by Parker Pearson’s team were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

Another 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge during the 1920s, but all were put back in the ground because they were thought to be of no scientific value. Archaeologists estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all as cremation deposits.

Parker Pearson’s colleague at Sheffield, Andrew Chamberlain, a specialist in ancient demography, theorizes that the cremation burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty. One clue to this, Professor Chamberlain says, is the small number of burials in Stonehenge’s earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.

Another is the graves’ placement in such an impressive monumental site. “I don’t think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge – it was clearly a special place at that time,” Parker Pearson said. “One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials.”

“The people buried here must have been drawn from a very small and select living population,” he said. “Archaeologists have long speculated about whether Stonehenge was put up by prehistoric chiefs – perhaps even ancient royalty – and the new results suggest that not only is this likely to have been the case but it also was the resting place of their mortal remains.”

Besides conducting the radiocarbon dating, this season the archaeologists also excavated houses at nearby Durrington Walls, precisely dated Stonehenge’s cursus – the ditched enclosure that has long puzzled archaeologists – and made new discoveries about the “Cuckoo Stone” and timber monuments south of Woodhenge.

Much of the focus for the fifth year of the eight-year Stonehenge Riverside Project was at Durrington Walls, Stonehenge’s sister henge some 2 miles away, which like most of the Stonehenge landscape is owned and managed by the National Trust. Parker Pearson believes Durrington was built to accommodate the living, in contrast to Stonehenge’s more somber purpose as a monument to the dead.

Last year the project archaeologists announced the discovery in 2006 of a large seasonal village where Stonehenge’s builders are thought to have lived some 4,600 years ago, grouped around a timber version of Stonehenge. This season (2007) the team excavated four of those houses that once sat on a hillside, one of them especially well-preserved. Excavation of it turned up a wall made of cobb – a mixture of broken chalk and chunky plaster – that is the oldest such wall found in Britain. The other houses were found to be mostly of wattle-and-daub construction.

In the well-preserved house, which measured 4.8 by 5.2 meters (about 16 feet square), researchers unearthed bits of Stone Age life – flint tools, the end of a broken-off dress pin and two teacup-sized pits in the house’s corners containing tiny, sharp chippings of flint, apparently swept there by the residents. Imprints of beds and a dresser also were visible around the edges of the floor. In the house’s center, by the remains of an oval-shaped hearth, two thick grooves are visible in the floor, “right in that part of the fire where the floor has been stained with ash,” Parker Pearson reports. “Whoever was in charge of the housework and the cooking was kneeling there.”

The team also uncovered several houses along a broad avenue that links Durrington Walls with the nearby River Avon. These were three-sided structures with fireplaces, Parker Pearson said, perhaps used by spectators at processions that once moved up and down the avenue to the river.

The season’s work leads Parker Pearson to believe that Durrington Walls was made up of a large, circular village of more than 300 houses, making it the largest village of its time in northwest Europe. “We think that both men and women and presumably children were living there – everybody seemed to have been involved in the building of Stonehenge,” he said.

Preliminary results of environmental analyses suggest this was a seasonal settlement. The absence of certain items, such as newborn pigs and cattle, together with archaeological evidence of culling of pigs in the midwinter period, suggest that people journeyed to the site with prepared foodstuffs and animals only at certain times of the year, Parker Pearson said.
New radiocarbon dates of an antler pick used for digging tell a story about the Stonehenge Greater Cursus, a cigar-shaped ditched enclosure nearly two miles long. The new date – 3630 to 3375 B.C. – puts the cursus 1,000 years before the erection of Stonehenge’s sarsens. Archaeologist Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester in England, who led that investigation, says the cursus’ two parallel ditches enclosed a linear space that might have been considered sacred. “Our excavation shows it’s almost clean – no other animal bones or other deposits,” Professor Thomas said. The exact purpose of the cursus is unknown.

On the same axis as the cursus, the Cuckoo Stone was the source of another of the season’s revelations. The archaeologists, led by Colin Richards of the University of Manchester, found that the stone, a squat sarsen boulder that lies on its side, had originally come from that location, unlike many other stones at Stonehenge. In Neolithic times, the stone was placed vertically near special pits used for depositing items, according to Richards. “We find again and again that the antler picks used for digging – still perfectly usable – have been deliberately buried in pits as if for ritual,” Parker Pearson said.

Along the cliff top south of the timber monument known as Woodhenge, archaeologists led by Joshua Pollard of the University of Bristol discovered two oval-fenced areas enclosing dramatic, monumental timber structures, each anchored by four large posts. “These obviously were not domestic buildings,” Pollard said. “Their purpose is uncertain, but it’s possible they supported raised platforms where bodies of the dead were left to decay.”

“All in all, we’re finding that Stonehenge was a sophisticated society with great achievements,” Parker Pearson said. “I doubt they realized they would create such a great mystery for the world to come.”

The Stonehenge Riverside Project is funded by the National Geographic Society and Britain’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, with support from English Heritage. Directors of the Project include Mike Parker Pearson (Sheffield), Julian Thomas (Manchester), Joshua Pollard (Bristol), Colin Richards (Manchester), Chris Tilley, University College London, and Kate Welham, University of Bournemouth.

More on Stonehenge can be viewed at www.nationalgeographic.com/stonehenge.

Many archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 B.C., before the large stones, known as sarsens, were put in place. The new dates provide strong clues about the original purpose of the monument and show that its use as a cemetery extended 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 (U.K.), who with National Geographic support leads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project. “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. 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.’”

The earliest cremation burial dated – a small pile of burned bones and teeth – came from one of the pits around Stonehenge’s edge known as the Aubrey Holes and dates to 3030-2880 B.C., roughly the time when Stonehenge’s ditch-and-bank monument was cut into Salisbury Plain. The second burial, from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, is that of an adult and dates to 2930-2870 B.C. The most recent cremation, Parker Pearson said, comes from the ditch’s northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman; it dates to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.

The work at Stonehenge is featured in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine. An exclusive look at the new discoveries will appear in a global premiere on the National Geographic Channel – “Stonehenge Decoded” – on Sunday, June 1, (9 p.m. ET/PT in the U.S.; check local listings internationally). Stonehenge also is featured in the June/July 2008 issue of National Geographic Kids magazine.

This is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The burials dated by Parker Pearson’s team were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

Another 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge during the 1920s, but all were put back in the ground because they were thought to be of no scientific value. Archaeologists estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all as cremation deposits.

Parker Pearson’s colleague at Sheffield, Andrew Chamberlain, a specialist in ancient demography, theorizes that the cremation burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty. One clue to this, Professor Chamberlain says, is the small number of burials in Stonehenge’s earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.

Another is the graves’ placement in such an impressive monumental site. “I don’t think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge – it was clearly a special place at that time,” Parker Pearson said. “One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials.”

“The people buried here must have been drawn from a very small and select living population,” he said. “Archaeologists have long speculated about whether Stonehenge was put up by prehistoric chiefs – perhaps even ancient royalty – and the new results suggest that not only is this likely to have been the case but it also was the resting place of their mortal remains.”

Besides conducting the radiocarbon dating, this season the archaeologists also excavated houses at nearby Durrington Walls, precisely dated Stonehenge’s cursus – the ditched enclosure that has long puzzled archaeologists – and made new discoveries about the “Cuckoo Stone” and timber monuments south of Woodhenge.

Much of the focus for the fifth year of the eight-year Stonehenge Riverside Project was at Durrington Walls, Stonehenge’s sister henge some 2 miles away, which like most of the Stonehenge landscape is owned and managed by the National Trust. Parker Pearson believes Durrington was built to accommodate the living, in contrast to Stonehenge’s more somber purpose as a monument to the dead.

Last year the project archaeologists announced the discovery in 2006 of a large seasonal village where Stonehenge’s builders are thought to have lived some 4,600 years ago, grouped around a timber version of Stonehenge. This season (2007) the team excavated four of those houses that once sat on a hillside, one of them especially well-preserved. Excavation of it turned up a wall made of cobb – a mixture of broken chalk and chunky plaster – that is the oldest such wall found in Britain. The other houses were found to be mostly of wattle-and-daub construction.

In the well-preserved house, which measured 4.8 by 5.2 meters (about 16 feet square), researchers unearthed bits of Stone Age life – flint tools, the end of a broken-off dress pin and two teacup-sized pits in the house’s corners containing tiny, sharp chippings of flint, apparently swept there by the residents. Imprints of beds and a dresser also were visible around the edges of the floor. In the house’s center, by the remains of an oval-shaped hearth, two thick grooves are visible in the floor, “right in that part of the fire where the floor has been stained with ash,” Parker Pearson reports. “Whoever was in charge of the housework and the cooking was kneeling there.”

The team also uncovered several houses along a broad avenue that links Durrington Walls with the nearby River Avon. These were three-sided structures with fireplaces, Parker Pearson said, perhaps used by spectators at processions that once moved up and down the avenue to the river.

The season’s work leads Parker Pearson to believe that Durrington Walls was made up of a large, circular village of more than 300 houses, making it the largest village of its time in northwest Europe. “We think that both men and women and presumably children were living there – everybody seemed to have been involved in the building of Stonehenge,” he said.

Preliminary results of environmental analyses suggest this was a seasonal settlement. The absence of certain items, such as newborn pigs and cattle, together with archaeological evidence of culling of pigs in the midwinter period, suggest that people journeyed to the site with prepared foodstuffs and animals only at certain times of the year, Parker Pearson said.
New radiocarbon dates of an antler pick used for digging tell a story about the Stonehenge Greater Cursus, a cigar-shaped ditched enclosure nearly two miles long. The new date – 3630 to 3375 B.C. – puts the cursus 1,000 years before the erection of Stonehenge’s sarsens. Archaeologist Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester in England, who led that investigation, says the cursus’ two parallel ditches enclosed a linear space that might have been considered sacred. “Our excavation shows it’s almost clean – no other animal bones or other deposits,” Professor Thomas said. The exact purpose of the cursus is unknown.

On the same axis as the cursus, the Cuckoo Stone was the source of another of the season’s revelations. The archaeologists, led by Colin Richards of the University of Manchester, found that the stone, a squat sarsen boulder that lies on its side, had originally come from that location, unlike many other stones at Stonehenge. In Neolithic times, the stone was placed vertically near special pits used for depositing items, according to Richards. “We find again and again that the antler picks used for digging – still perfectly usable – have been deliberately buried in pits as if for ritual,” Parker Pearson said.

Along the cliff top south of the timber monument known as Woodhenge, archaeologists led by Joshua Pollard of the University of Bristol discovered two oval-fenced areas enclosing dramatic, monumental timber structures, each anchored by four large posts. “These obviously were not domestic buildings,” Pollard said. “Their purpose is uncertain, but it’s possible they supported raised platforms where bodies of the dead were left to decay.”

“All in all, we’re finding that Stonehenge was a sophisticated society with great achievements,” Parker Pearson said. “I doubt they realized they would create such a great mystery for the world to come.”

The Stonehenge Riverside Project is funded by the National Geographic Society and Britain’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, with support from English Heritage. Directors of the Project include Mike Parker Pearson (Sheffield), Julian Thomas (Manchester), Joshua Pollard (Bristol), Colin Richards (Manchester), Chris Tilley, University College London, and Kate Welham, University of Bournemouth.

More on Stonehenge can be viewed at www.nationalgeographic.com/stonehenge.

Many archaeologists previously believed that people had been buried at Stonehenge only between 2700 and 2600 B.C., before the large stones, known as sarsens, were put in place. The new dates provide strong clues about the original purpose of the monument and show that its use as a cemetery extended 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 (U.K.), who with National Geographic support leads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project. “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. 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.’”

The earliest cremation burial dated – a small pile of burned bones and teeth – came from one of the pits around Stonehenge’s edge known as the Aubrey Holes and dates to 3030-2880 B.C., roughly the time when Stonehenge’s ditch-and-bank monument was cut into Salisbury Plain. The second burial, from the ditch surrounding Stonehenge, is that of an adult and dates to 2930-2870 B.C. The most recent cremation, Parker Pearson said, comes from the ditch’s northern side and was of a 25-year-old woman; it dates to 2570-2340 B.C., around the time the first arrangements of sarsen stones appeared at Stonehenge.

The work at Stonehenge is featured in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine. An exclusive look at the new discoveries will appear in a global premiere on the National Geographic Channel – “Stonehenge Decoded” – on Sunday, June 1, (9 p.m. ET/PT in the U.S.; check local listings internationally). Stonehenge also is featured in the June/July 2008 issue of National Geographic Kids magazine.

This is the first time any of the cremation burials from Stonehenge have been radiocarbon dated. The burials dated by Parker Pearson’s team were excavated in the 1950s and have been kept at the nearby Salisbury Museum.

Another 49 cremation burials were dug up at Stonehenge during the 1920s, but all were put back in the ground because they were thought to be of no scientific value. Archaeologists estimate that up to 240 people were buried within Stonehenge, all as cremation deposits.

Parker Pearson’s colleague at Sheffield, Andrew Chamberlain, a specialist in ancient demography, theorizes that the cremation burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty. One clue to this, Professor Chamberlain says, is the small number of burials in Stonehenge’s earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent centuries, as offspring would have multiplied.

Another is the graves’ placement in such an impressive monumental site. “I don’t think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge – it was clearly a special place at that time,” Parker Pearson said. “One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials.”

“The people buried here must have been drawn from a very small and select living population,” he said. “Archaeologists have long speculated about whether Stonehenge was put up by prehistoric chiefs – perhaps even ancient royalty – and the new results suggest that not only is this likely to have been the case but it also was the resting place of their mortal remains.”

Besides conducting the radiocarbon dating, this season the archaeologists also excavated houses at nearby Durrington Walls, precisely dated Stonehenge’s cursus – the ditched enclosure that has long puzzled archaeologists – and made new discoveries about the “Cuckoo Stone” and timber monuments south of Woodhenge.

Much of the focus for the fifth year of the eight-year Stonehenge Riverside Project was at Durrington Walls, Stonehenge’s sister henge some 2 miles away, which like most of the Stonehenge landscape is owned and managed by the National Trust. Parker Pearson believes Durrington was built to accommodate the living, in contrast to Stonehenge’s more somber purpose as a monument to the dead.

Last year the project archaeologists announced the discovery in 2006 of a large seasonal village where Stonehenge’s builders are thought to have lived some 4,600 years ago, grouped around a timber version of Stonehenge. This season (2007) the team excavated four of those houses that once sat on a hillside, one of them especially well-preserved. Excavation of it turned up a wall made of cobb – a mixture of broken chalk and chunky plaster – that is the oldest such wall found in Britain. The other houses were found to be mostly of wattle-and-daub construction.

In the well-preserved house, which measured 4.8 by 5.2 meters (about 16 feet square), researchers unearthed bits of Stone Age life – flint tools, the end of a broken-off dress pin and two teacup-sized pits in the house’s corners containing tiny, sharp chippings of flint, apparently swept there by the residents. Imprints of beds and a dresser also were visible around the edges of the floor. In the house’s center, by the remains of an oval-shaped hearth, two thick grooves are visible in the floor, “right in that part of the fire where the floor has been stained with ash,” Parker Pearson reports. “Whoever was in charge of the housework and the cooking was kneeling there.”

The team also uncovered several houses along a broad avenue that links Durrington Walls with the nearby River Avon. These were three-sided structures with fireplaces, Parker Pearson said, perhaps used by spectators at processions that once moved up and down the avenue to the river.

The season’s work leads Parker Pearson to believe that Durrington Walls was made up of a large, circular village of more than 300 houses, making it the largest village of its time in northwest Europe. “We think that both men and women and presumably children were living there – everybody seemed to have been involved in the building of Stonehenge,” he said.

Preliminary results of environmental analyses suggest this was a seasonal settlement. The absence of certain items, such as newborn pigs and cattle, together with archaeological evidence of culling of pigs in the midwinter period, suggest that people journeyed to the site with prepared foodstuffs and animals only at certain times of the year, Parker Pearson said.
New radiocarbon dates of an antler pick used for digging tell a story about the Stonehenge Greater Cursus, a cigar-shaped ditched enclosure nearly two miles long. The new date – 3630 to 3375 B.C. – puts the cursus 1,000 years before the erection of Stonehenge’s sarsens. Archaeologist Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester in England, who led that investigation, says the cursus’ two parallel ditches enclosed a linear space that might have been considered sacred. “Our excavation shows it’s almost clean – no other animal bones or other deposits,” Professor Thomas said. The exact purpose of the cursus is unknown.

On the same axis as the cursus, the Cuckoo Stone was the source of another of the season’s revelations. The archaeologists, led by Colin Richards of the University of Manchester, found that the stone, a squat sarsen boulder that lies on its side, had originally come from that location, unlike many other stones at Stonehenge. In Neolithic times, the stone was placed vertically near special pits used for depositing items, according to Richards. “We find again and again that the antler picks used for digging – still perfectly usable – have been deliberately buried in pits as if for ritual,” Parker Pearson said.

Along the cliff top south of the timber monument known as Woodhenge, archaeologists led by Joshua Pollard of the University of Bristol discovered two oval-fenced areas enclosing dramatic, monumental timber structures, each anchored by four large posts. “These obviously were not domestic buildings,” Pollard said. “Their purpose is uncertain, but it’s possible they supported raised platforms where bodies of the dead were left to decay.”

“All in all, we’re finding that Stonehenge was a sophisticated society with great achievements,” Parker Pearson said. “I doubt they realized they would create such a great mystery for the world to come.”

The Stonehenge Riverside Project is funded by the National Geographic Society and Britain’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, with support from English Heritage. Directors of the Project include Mike Parker Pearson (Sheffield), Julian Thomas (Manchester), Joshua Pollard (Bristol), Colin Richards (Manchester), Chris Tilley, University College London, and Kate Welham, University of Bournemouth.

More on Stonehenge can be viewed at www.nationalgeographic.com/stonehenge.

It all feels so remote now.

“Spider-Man” was one of the two musicals that captured headlines in 2011. The other — and its polar opposite in every respect — was “The Book of Mormon.”

“Mormon”A is a terrific show sustained by a consistent vision; its critical and commercial success is well deserved.A “Spider-Man” supplied us with a continuous stream of gossip, accidents, rumors, intrigue, mishapsA and backstabbings. In an unprecedented move, critics reviewedA it in February — among the many blownA opening dates –A and again in June , when it finally made its official debut. Then we promptly cleared it from of our minds.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the year?

Looking at my Top 10 list below, itas plays that shine brightest. Two ofA my fave showsA were by that old hat Shakespeare — the most prominent author of 2011, with so many productions that there were no less than three high-profile “King Lears” — and one was based on a book by Ernest Hemingway. ButA new voices also made themselves heard.A

Here’s the list, in alphabetical order:

1. “As You Like It” (Lincoln Center Festival at the Park Avenue Armory) The first of five plays presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of its Lincoln Center Festival residency was a marvel. Admittedly some of the charm had to do with the setting, which recreated the RSC’s Stratford-Upon-Avon venue inside the Armory — almost anything would feel special in there. But Michael Boydas production, headed by the velvet-voiced Katy Stephens as Rosalind, had a bracing energy all its own.

2. “The Book of Mormon” (Eugene OaNeill Theatre) Yes, it’s that good.

3. “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (Second Stage) After the somber “Ruined,” Lynn Nottage made an 180-degree turn with a sophisticated screwball comedy about at Hollywoodas racial politics. The first act, a marvel of acid timing, boasted some of the seasonas most incisive jokes.

4. “The Comedy of Errors” (BAM Harvey Theatre) The UK’s Propeller company and director Edward Hall slipped a firecracker under this Shakespeare comedy andA cracked a match. Mariachis? Of course!

5. “Good People” (Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre) A great show about no less than class conflict brought to us by David Lindsay-Abaire and Manhattan Theatre Club: color me stunned.

6. “Once” (New York Theatre Workshop) This wonderful musical preserved the essence of its source material (the Irish movie of the same name) while offering purely theatrical solutions to the storytelling challenges. Right behind “War Horse” in terms of getting my tear ducts pumping.

7. “Other Desert Cities” (Vivian Beaumont Theatre) Though the production currently at the Booth on Broadway is very good, overall I preferred the initial one at Lincoln Centeras Beaumont . Nobody can sell a line like Linda Lavin, and while Rachel Griffiths was more than fine in the key role of the prickly daughter, I enjoyed Elizabeth Marvel more — she suggested a volatility that only added strain to the already tense family dynamics. Good news for MarvelA fans: She’s rejoining the cast in the spring.A

8. “The Select (The Sun Also Rises)” (New York Theatre Workshop) Director John Collins and his Elevator Repair Service company’s adaptation of the Hemingway novel was eye-opening, sharply provocative and unexpectedly funny. Few book-to-stage projects manage to be as insightful and as surprising.

9. “Sons of the Prophet” (Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre) The out-of-the-blue hit of the year, this lovely show was a big breakthrough for playwright Stephen Karam. It was hard to tell if you were laughing or crying

10. “War Horse” (Vivian Beaumont Theatre) Many — not me, though — pooh-pooh the play itself but itas hard to contest the sweeping power of Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’ puppet-driven production. Question: Why are the Brits so good at this kind of sophisticated entertainment, while weare constantly infantilizing the audience and insulting its intelligence?

Honorable mentions:

* Based on a MoliA”re play, David Ives’ hilarious “The School for Lies,” written entirely in rhymed couplets, was a fantastic showcase for the comic talents of Mamie Gummer and Hamish Linklater.

* At Playwrights Horizons, “The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World” was a sui generis musical about a band of New Hampshire sisters making outsider music.

* “Lysistrata Jones” and “Sister Act” : two ridiculously fun musicals whose fluffy exteriors hide excellent bone structure.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mentionA “Sleep No More,” which was the spectacle of the year. Presented by London’s Punchdrunk company, the show may or may not be theater — it’s closer to an art installation sprinkled with live performances. But no matter the nature of the beast, it was one inventive (head) trip.

Stay tuned for more musings on the year’s trend, as well as shout-outs to some of my favorite performances.