New research suggests early Britons used megaliths from a dismantled Welsh monument to construct the iconic ring of standing stones
Stonehenge’s construction some 5,000 years ago is widely considered one of the most impressive feats of engineering in the Neolithic world. Now, new evidence suggests that the English monument actually dates back to an even earlier time—and an entirely different location.
The findings, published in the journal Antiquity, indicate that prehistoric people first erected a near-identical monument containing at least some of the same towering stones in Wales. Only later did they move the stone circle to its current location in southwestern England, roughly 150 miles away.
“I’ve been researching Stonehenge for 20 years now and this really is the most exciting thing we’ve ever found,” lead author Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London, tells the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge.
Researchers had already known that ancient Britons mined the famous 6- to 10-foot-tall “bluestones” of Stonehenge in the Preseli hills of what’s now Pembrokeshire on the Wales coast. British geologist Herbert Thomas first suggested the hills as the likely source of the stones around a century ago, and more recent research has narrowed the location down.
In 2015, Pearson’s team found carbonized hazelnut shells believed to be remains from the miners’ meals while surveying rocky outcrops near the Preseli quarries. Radiocarbon dating of the shells suggested that the stones were mined almost 400 years before Stonehenge was built. (Other larger stones used to construct Stonehenge originated in the West Woods of Wiltshire, a site 15 miles away from the monument, as Steven Morris reported for the Guardianlast year.)
Previous studies have theorized that the bluestones were probably used in some way prior to their transport to Stonehenge’s current location. The new research finds that the remains of a stone circle just three miles away from the ancient quarry, at a site known as Waun Mawn, is a near-perfect match. Its 360-foot diameter is identical to the original layout of Stonehenge, which people reshaped over the millennia. And, like the famous monument, the circle is oriented in a way that perfectly highlights the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset.
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