Skeleton may be Stonehenge 'king'

The richest early Bronze Age burial site ever found has been discovered within a short walk of Stonehenge, archaeologists revealed today.

It is possibly the grave of the man who ordered the rebuilding of the previously wooden monument in stone. It contains the earliest metal knives yet known in Britain, as well as finely-crafted arrowheads, gold ornaments, butchery tools and ritual stone versions of an archer's tools.

The grave was discovered near the village of Boscombe Down during work on a new school.

The shapes of the objects suggest strongly that it was dug in about 2,300BC - exactly contemporary with the rebuilding of Stonehenge, which lies less then 30 minutes' walk away.

In all, 100 objects were found with the skeleton of a mature, well-built man. "We don't know whether there were kings at this time in Britain," said Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, of Wessex Archaeologythe unit which found the grave. "It is possible, though, that this man was alive when the stones were added to Stonehenge.

"This would have been a small community in which appearance was everything, and this man would have been like a peacock," he says. The knives predate by several hundred years the oldest metal tools known in this country, said Dr Fitzpatrick, who added: "The arrowheads were scattered in the grave, not as though they had been laid onto his body by the mourners."