News that megalith was transported hundreds of miles to England suggests ambitious effort
. It made me wonder about the monument and the people who made it, and even what the place might mean to us today.
Unlike most of the site’s parts, we don’t know when it got there or whether or not it was once standing. It’s bigger than the stones that came from Wales, but smaller than all the large standing stones, which reached Stonehenge from 20 miles to the north. We barely know what it looks like: it’s all but buried, and invisible to the ordinary visitor. And it consists, uniquely, of sandstone found geologically nowhere near the site. Until now, even that source was a mystery.
I asked geological colleagues who have been successfully seeking sources for Stonehenge’s Welsh stones for decades in the hills of Pembrokeshire. They are on the altar stone team, though the actual analysis was done by a PhD student at Curtin University in Perth, Anthony Clarke, using hi-tech kit available thanks to Australia’s mining industry. Yes, I was assured, it’s good science.
Most remarkable is a lovely carved stone, looking like a large boiled sweet with a hole to take a handle, which was excavated at Stonehenge in the 1920s. It’s known as a, and geologically it came from the Hebrides, where the famous Callanish stone circles consist of the same rock. Very similar artefacts have been found in Orkney at sites from the same era as Stonehenge; archaeologists even wonder if the Stonehenge macehead was itself made in Orkney, with stone imported from the Western Isles.
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