Lately revealed analysis tracing the origins of a central megalith at Stonehenge has supplied new clues into the development of one in every of England’s most well-known and puzzling landmarks.
Based on the findings of a research launched within the British scientific journal Nature final Wednesday, August 14, a global group of geologists has uncovered proof that Stonehenge’s Altar Stone was sourced from northeast Scotland, indicating that it was transported throughout a minimal of 430 miles (~700 kilometers) to its current location on Salisbury Plain in southern England.
The researchers say that this trek is the longest identified journey for any stone used to create a monument in the course of the Neolithic interval (also called the New Stone Age), offering new perception into the technological developments of prehistoric communities within the area.
“That is an unbelievable distance for Neolithic instances, earlier than the wheel is assumed to have arrived in Britain,” wrote researchers Nicholas Pearce, Richard Bevins, and Rob Ixer in an article on their findings.
Constructed in a number of phases roughly 5,000 to 4,200 years in the past, Stonehenge consists of various clusters of stones, categorised into two varieties often called sarsens and bluestones. Bigger in dimension, the sarsen stones comprise the landmark’s outer ring and inside horseshoe of trilithons (two vertical stones topped with a horizontal slab); they largely originate from the close by West Woods in Marlborough. There are additionally two inside arcs made up of bluestones — a generic time period used to tell apart the landmark’s non-local igneous rocks. Geologist H.H. Thomas present in 1923 that almost all of Stonehenge’s bluestones initially got here from the Preseli Mountains in southwest Wales.
Mendacity recumbent on the heart of Stonehenge is a pale inexperienced micaceous sandstone often called the Altar Stone. Weighing over 13,000 kilos (greater than six tonnes) and measuring practically 16 and a half toes (5 meters) in size, it’s the largest of the landmark’s bluestones. Its function and exact arrival date are nonetheless unknown, however it’s speculated to have been positioned within the web site’s major trilithon horseshoe in the course of the second building stage round 2620 to 2480 BCE. Thomas recommended that the Altar Stone originated from pink sandstone positioned within the south and east of the Preseli Mountain vary.
Nonetheless, fragments held in museum collections that have been analyzed by researchers utilizing handheld X-ray fluorescence, a non-destructive technique to investigate an object’s chemical composition, revealed that this data was incorrect. Additional investigation into the age of the stone’s mineral grains indicated that it had initially been sourced from the Orcadian Basin in northern Scotland.
“It’s thrilling to know that the end result of our work over virtually twenty years has unlocked this thriller. We are able to say with confidence that this iconic rock is Scottish and never Welsh, and extra particularly, that it got here from the previous pink sandstones of north-east Scotland,” Pearce, Bevins, and Ixer wrote of their follow-up article.
Though the research didn’t reveal how the stone had made this lengthy journey (nor the explanation why), it definitely has positioned researchers one step nearer to uncovering the traditional puzzle of Stonehenge.
“This provenance for the Altar Stone is only the start,” Anthony Clarke, a Curtin College researcher who contributed to the research, informed Hyperallergic.