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Here’s what you’ll learn from this story:
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Chemical fingerprints collected from the Stonehenge altar stone show that no As previously understood, from Wales.
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Instead, researchers believe the stone came from Scotland’s Orcadian Basin – about 466 miles from the Stonehenge site.
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While the discovery upends previous research, it also raises questions about how trade networks helped transport the stone to the site.
Stonehenge is full of mystery. When we think we have solved a problem, we must re-solve the problem we thought we had answered. This is the case with the origin story of the Altar Stone, one of some 80 stones still extant in southern England.
Stonehenge’s stones have a variety of compositions and come from many potential source locations. Scholars previously thought they knew most about the altar stone – the largest non-Sarsen stone at the site and now partially buried under two fallen stones. But researchers led by a team at Curtin University may have turned that history on its head, writing that a stone long thought to have originated from Wales actually came from Scotland.
By studying the age and chemical composition of mineral grains in six-tonne fragments of Alterite, a 16ft x 3ft thick block of sandstone at the center of the iconic Wiltshire Circle, the team created a chemical fingerprint of the stone. The chemical composition matches rocks from northeastern Scotland and is clearly distinguished from Welsh bedrock.
“Our analysis found that the specific mineral grains in the altar stone were mostly between 1,000 and 2 billion years old, while other minerals were about 450 million years old,” said lead author Anthony Clarke, a Ph.D. students in the Mineral Systems Timescales Group in Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences said in a statement. “This provides a unique chemical fingerprint indicating that the stone comes from rocks in Scotland’s Orcadian Basin, at least 750 kilometers away [466 miles] Stay away from Stonehenge. “
According to English Heritage, the altar stone is a large greenish mass of old red sandstone. Geological studies have previously identified the source of the stone as the Brecon Beacons region in south-east Wales. But the study was published in the journal naturediscounting this dominant theory.
With chemical fingerprints tracing the iconic rock back to Scotland, the search for its exact origins now begins, study co-author Richard Bevins, a professor at Aberystwyth University, said in a statement.
Clark said the stone’s Scottish origins raised a fascinating question: How such a huge stone could have been transported to this day during the Neolithic period, around 2,600 B.C. The authors claim that it must have required an unexpectedly advanced form of transportation and complex social organization.
“Our discovery of the origin of the altar stone highlights the remarkable level of social coordination in the Neolithic and helps paint a fascinating picture of prehistoric Britain,” study co-author Professor Chris Kirkland of Curtin University said in a statement. “Transporting such large quantities of goods overland from Scotland to southern England would have been extremely challenging, suggesting there may have been a sea transport route along the British coast. This implies a higher level of long-distance trade networks and social organization than is generally thought to have existed in Neolithic Britain.”
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