The earliest megalithic circle at Stonehenge was first built more than 5,000 years ago in west Wales before its stones were excavated and dragged more than 225 kilometers to its current site in the west of England.
The findings also support a wild legend that the mythical wizard Merlin ordered giants to move Stonehenge out of Ireland and rebuild it in its current location.
The researchers discovered the remains of the original stone circle in the Preseli Hills in Wales, near the old quarries where geologists determined that Stonehenge’s famous bluestone had been hewn. The new study, published in the journal Thursday (February 11) Antiquity, suggests that the tombstones that formed the first phase of Stonehenge may have symbolized the ancestors or lineages of the Neolithic people who lived near the quarries, and this was the reason why they took the stones with them when they went to a remote region has departed.
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The research may explain the mysterious origins of Stonehenge and why the first builders made such efforts to transport the massive stones almost halfway across Britain. “I had a feeling,” said Michael Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London, who led the team that made the discovery. “Why would anyone say, ‘We’re going to build a circle with stones from a quarry about 140 kilometers away?'”
To solve the mystery, Parker Pearson and his team investigated neolithic stone monuments around the Preseli Hills for more than five years. In 2017, they determined that four stones on a site called Waun Mawn – ‘peat heaths’ in Welsh, were left of a much larger circle of up to 60 stones that exactly matched the layout of the original 360 feet wide. (110 m) circle of bluestone at Stonehenge. The rest of the stones at Wuan Mawn have been excavated for a long time, Parker Pearson told WordsSideKick.
Antique stones
Stonehenge is best known for the giant “sarsens” in its main circle, but these large stones were erected centuries after the monument was first built. Recent research shows that the sarsens are local sandstone rocks that were transported to the Neolithic monument about 4500 years ago.
But geologists and archaeologists have long known that the many blue stones that ring Stonehenge, some weighing up to 5 tons (4.5 tons), were transported from quarries in the Preseli hills in ancient times. Some of the stones have a blue color when newly broken or wet.
Scientific dating of charcoal and sediments from some of the now empty rock pits suggests that Waun Mawn was built about 5,400 years ago, about 400 years before the earliest stage of Stonehenge, the researchers said. One of the rock holes at Waun Mawn also has an unusual pentagonal cross-section that matches one of the bluestone stones at Stonehenge and contains chips of the same type of rock.
Parker Pearson said it seems likely that the Waun Mawn Rock Circle and other rocks nearby were demolished when whole families left the area to live far to the east, and that up to 80 of the rocks later on the current Stonehenge site erected.
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Striking levels of strontium isotopes in the enamel of human teeth found in ancient tombs at Stonehenge show that many of the earliest people buried there did not grow up near their present location in Wessex. Archaeological evidence suggests that they migrated from further west, possibly modern Wales, and the original stone circle thus probably indicated the site of a new Neolithic cemetery.
Each of the bluestones may have symbolized a significant ancestor or lineage for the local population. Therefore, they erected the stones at the new cemetery, he said.
Merlin legend
The researchers are not sure why so many Neolithic families have suddenly left the Preseli Hills to live so far away. Parker Pearson believes that for political or social reasons, they wanted to unite the community with a distant group of people, so they brought their ancestral stones with them to confirm their presence in their new territory.
Calculations of the labor associated with the transportation of the bluestones, probably by sleigh, suggest that the journey from Waun Mawn to the present Stonehenge site could have been in one summer.
“You can cover 3 miles [5 km] one day, if you’ve prepared your job, “he said. Maybe they were feasting, eating and drinking … just like a party moving from one place to another. ‘
Like Stonehenge, the circle at Waun Mawn has been aligned so that some of its rocks are aligned with the sunrise at the summer solstice; similar adaptations have been found at other Neolithic monuments throughout the British Isles, and may reflect the eternal movement pattern of the sun in the sky.
The idea that Stonehenge was first built from a circle of stones transported from a great distance sounds strikingly much like a medieval legend that Stonehenge was built on the orders of Merlin, the legendary wizard who defeated the equally legendary King Arthur helped.
According to legend, the stone circle was originally located in Africa, and giants moved it to Ireland to serve as a magical center for healing. Later, legend has it, Merlin giants had the stones transported to the present site in Salisbury Plain and reassembled there as a monument to the death of the British as they fought against the invading Saxons.
Parker Pearson said that when the legend was written down in the 12th century, the far west of Wales was considered part of Ireland; but it was unlikely that the legend described a 5,000-year-old folk memory of the relocation of Stonehenge – the oldest known oral history, the Sanskrit Vedas from India, is estimated to be only 3,000 years old. But ‘I have to admit that the evidence is very interesting,’ he said. “Maybe – just maybe – there’s a little grain of truth in it.”
Originally published on Live Science.