Scientists recently announced they have finally deduced the long-ago purpose of Stonehenge -- again.

In the past, we've been told that the 4,300-year-old rock pile in England had been built as a gigantic calendar to help folks spring forward and fall back every six months; a great-great-great-grandfather clock with no moving parts (thus never needed winding); a beacon for the Space Family Robinson and other misguided celestial visitors; a frat house vantage point for peeping into the dorm windows at Salisbury Plain Girls College; a nightclub for pagan dancers, witches and politicians; or the headquarters of Stone Haulers Union, Local 109.

From excavations and analysis of skeletons found there, archaeologists now say they know why somebody (they don't know exactly who) sometime (ditto), lugged those monoliths hundreds of miles, stood them up in a circle and laid other rocks across them, like big, hernia-inducing Legos.

They reported last week that Stonehenge was actually a healing spa, a shrine for mind, body and soul, where prehistoric people from across Europe flocked to be fixed. The June issue of National Geographic had hinted along similar lines.

Maybe. But I wonder ...

Perhaps those researchers are wrong again. Maybe they are so close that they can't see the rocks for the stones. I, on the other hand (which is 5,000 miles from Britain and relatively clean), have my own answer to (ominous music, please) the Mystery of Stonehenge:

This British version of Rock City is all that's left of the world's first shopping mall.

If you squint ("go snake-eyes," as they say) at the still-standing stones, can't you picture a once-thriving retail center where deerskin capri pants were imported from the nearby forest, where food shops hawked wild boar on a stick, where kiosks sold freshly chipped flint jewelry and fish-bone necklaces?

Had the scientists known where to look when excavating, they might have found that the skeletal men suffered fallen arches from trudging behind their wives or dates on daylong bargain hunts. The women could have succumbed while waiting in line at customer service, hoping to return a woolly mammoth fur sweater that was a tad too small. Did the soil contain remnants of a half-digested latte? Look, over there in the ruins of a novelty shop, that looks like shards of the world's first lava lamps -- made with real lava.

They might even unearth the unerring proof that it was a mall: a slab of rock carved with a map of Stonehenge's shops -- and down in the corner, a stick figure, an arrow and words in some rudimentary language saying, "You are here."

Don't scoff. Closer to home, we've all seen malls fall out of favor and fall into disrepair. All it takes is the wrong shops for the customer base, or the perception of high crime, or sometimes a tribal curse carried out with chicken bones and goat blood. Who is to say why Stonehenge isn't open for business today?

I'm just throwing my theory out there. Is a mall any more farfetched than a spa? You make the call.

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.