British archaeologists have finally dug out some really hard evidence to help them solve the mystery surrounding the prehistoric circle of giant stones located in the south west of England.

It turns out that Stonehenge may have served as a burial ground for at least 500 years after it was build around 3,000 B.C., according to new radiocarbon dates of human remains excavated from the ancient stone monument.

It was initially believed that Stonehenge was used as a cemetery between 2700 B.C. and 2600 B.C. but researchers with the Stonehenge Riverside Project announced on Thursday that they are convinced the area was built and then grew as a "domain of the ancestors."

"It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages," said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in England, "Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C."

The role of Stonehenge has been the focus of heated debate for years, with archaeologists claiming that it might have been an astronomical observatory, a cemetery, or a religious complex. But until recently, there was no strong proof to any of the hypotheses.

Pearson and his team studied the remains of three people, all of which were excavated in the 1950s and had been stored at the nearby Salisbury Museum. It's only in the past few years that radiocarbon dating methods have advanced enough to determine the remains' age, Pearson explained. 49 other cremation remains were discovered in the 1920s but were reburied after researches determined they couldn't be scientifically useful. They estimated that up to 240 people were buried there, all as cremation deposits.

"Fifty-two cremation burials were actually excavated in the 20th century, when excavations took place on a big scale," Pearson was quoted by ABCnews as saying on ABC Radio's AM program.

"Although most of them got thrown away, three of them were kept in a museum.

"With new developments in radio-carbon dating, we can actually date burnt bone now, and we've been able to find out that people were buried at Stonehenge right from its kick-off, right from the beginning, all the way through until after the really big stones were put up."

Other evidence from the British Isles shows that skeletal burials were rare at this time and that cremation was the custom for the elite.

Researchers also discovered nearly 1,000 homes nearby at Durrington Walls, 3 kilometers north west of Stonehenge, which they said appeared to be seasonal homes related to Stonehenge.

"It's a quite extraordinary settlement, we've never seen anything like it before," Parker Pearson said. The village appeared to be a land of the living and Stonehenge a land of the ancestors, he said.

Presenting his data at a teleconference organized by the National Geographic Society, which will run a story about Stonehenge in its June issue and feature the new burial data on National Geographic Channel on Sunday, another member of Pearson's team, Andrew Chamberlain, also a professor at the Sheffield University, said they have reasons to believe that the cremation burials represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty.

"I don't think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge — it was clearly a special place at that time. One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials," Pearson added.