How was Stonehenge built in ancient Britain 5,000 years ago?
New evidence suggests the Late Stone Age people who made the colossal structure would have to have used advanced transport methods to move the stones even further than previously thought.
According to English Heritage, the largest stones – called sarsens and weighing up to 30 tonnes – are believed to have been transported from Marlborough Downs, about 32 kilometres away from the site.
The smaller stones weigh less than 10 tonnes. They were thought to have all come from the Preseli Hills in Wales more than 200km away. Transporting these gigantic stones this far would have been a monumental feat for ancient people in Britain.
But new research published in the journal Nature suggests that one stone, the 6-tonne Altar Stone, has its origins even further afield in Scotland.
The team used mass spectrometry to examine the composition of the rock-forming minerals in the stones.
“Our analysis found specific mineral grains in the Altar Stone are mostly between 1000 to 2000 million years old, while other minerals are around 450 million years old,” says lead author Anthony Clarke, a PhD student at Western Australia’s Curtin University. “This provides a distinct chemical fingerprint suggesting the stone came from rocks in the Orcadian Basin, Scotland, at least 750 kilometres away from Stonehenge.”
“Given its Scottish origins, the findings raise fascinating questions, considering the technological constraints of the Neolithic era, as to how such a massive stone was transported over vast distances around 2600 BC,” Clarke says.
Clarke notes his personal connection to Stonehenge.
“This discovery also holds personal significance for me. I grew up in the Mynydd Preseli, Wales, where some of Stonehenge’s stones came from. I first visited Stonehenge when I was one year old and now at 25, I returned from Australia to help make this scientific discovery – you could say I’ve come full circle at the stone circle.”
“Transporting such massive cargo overland from Scotland to southern England would have been extremely challenging, indicating a likely marine shipping route along the coast of Britain,” explains co-author Chris Kirkland, a professor at Curtin. “This implies long-distance trade networks and a higher level of societal organisation than is widely understood to have existed during the Neolithic period in Britain.”
No one is quite sure why Neolithic people in Britain built Stonehenge. Theories suggest it could have been a place of ceremony, a pilgrimage location or even an ancient calendar.
One thing is for sure – the lengths the ancient people went to build it suggests it was very important to them.
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