Stonehenge First Built in Wales, Study Claims

Stonehenge may have stood in Wales hundreds of years before it was dismantled and transported to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, a new research into megalithic bluestone quarries suggests.

The study, published in the current issue of the journal Antiquity, indicates that two quarries in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales, are the source of Stonehenge’s bluestones. Carbon dating revealed such stones were dug out at least 500 years before Stonehenge was built — suggesting they were first used in a local monument that was later dismantled and dragged off to England.

The very large standing stones at Stonehenge are sarsen, a local sandstone. The smaller ones, known as bluestones, consist of volcanic and igneous rocks, the most common of which are called dolerite and rhyolite.

Geologists have known since the 1920s that the bluestones were brought to Stonehenge from somewhere in the Preseli Hills, around 140 miles from Stonehenge. But the outcrops of Carn Goedog were only recently identified as the main source of Stonehenge’s dolerite and Craig Rhos-y-felin as the source for the rhyolite bluestones.

The new research focused specifically on the Craig Rhos-y-felin outcrops.

A team of scientists from University London College, University of Manchester, Bournemouth University, University of Southampton, National Museum Wales, and Dyfed Archaeological Trust, excavated the site in a five-year dig.

They found a series of holes cut into the rocky outcrops that match Stonehenge’s bluestones in size and shape.

They concluded that the special formation of the rock, which forms natural pillars, allowed the prehistoric quarry-workers to detach each megalith with a minimum of effort.

“They only had to insert wooden wedges into the cracks between the pillars and then let the Welsh rain do the rest by swelling the wood to ease each pillar off the rock face,” Josh Pollard, at the University of Southampton, said.

“The quarry-workers then lowered the thin pillars onto platforms of earth and stone, a sort of ‘loading bay’ from where the huge stones could be dragged away along trackways leading out of each quarry,” Pollard added.

Radiocarbon-dating of burnt hazelnuts and charcoal from the quarry-workers’ campfires showed surprising results.

“We have dates of around 3400 B.C. for Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3200 B.C. for Carn Goedog, which is intriguing because the bluestones didn’t get put up at Stonehenge until around 2900 B.C.,” Mike Parker Pearson, director of the project and professor of British later prehistory at University College London said.

The dating suggests Stonehenge was basically a second-hand monument from Wales.

“It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that’s pretty improbable in my view,” Parker Pearson said.

He believes the “first Stonehenge” was right in Wales; the monument was then dismantled and dragged off to Salisbury Plain.

According to the researchers, it is possible the bluestones were brought by communities migrating eastwards and settling on Salisbury Plain.

“The motivation for moving the bluestones such a distance was probably related to their significance as symbols of identity,” they wrote.

Parker Pearson noted that each of the 80 monoliths weighed less than 2 tons, so teams of people or oxen could have managed to transport them.

“We know from examples in India and elsewhere in Asia that single stones this size can even be carried on wooden lattices by groups of 60 – they didn’t even have to drag them if they didn’t want to,” Parker Pearson said.

He believes the bluestones were erected at Stonehenge around 2900 B.C., long before the giant sarsens were put up around 2500 B.C.

“Stonehenge was a Welsh monument from its very beginning. If we can find the original monument in Wales from which it was built, we will finally be able to solve the mystery,” Parker Pearson said.

According to Kate Welham, of Bournemouth University, the ruins of a dismantled monument are likely to lie somewhere between the two megalith quarries. The team has been using geophysical surveys, trial excavations and aerial photographic analysis to try identify the likely location.

“We think we have the most likely spot. The results are very promising. We may find something big in 2016,” Welham said.

The research has already raised controversy. According to geologist John Downes and geomorphologists Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and Brian John, no traces of a Neolithic quarry can be found at Craig Rhos-y-felin.

Read more at Discovery News