Fans of the 1984 heavy metal mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” will remember the scene in which the orchestra commissioned a play that is a replica of Stonehenge, the Neolithic ruin in Wiltshire, England. Unfortunately, an indifferent series of measurements results in the musicians playing with a model who is 18 inches tall, rather than 18 feet tall, a failure that is displayed on the tour and, emphatically, emphasized by the dancing dwarfs used to make the prop look bigger.
Thirty-seven years later, it appears that the rock of the film contains a pebble of historical truth. On Friday, a team of archaeologists reported in Antiquity magazine that they had excavated a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, part of which was demolished, moved 175 miles to Salisbury Plain and reassembled as Stonehenge.
Mike Parker Pearson, a professor at University College London who led the study, said the stones could be transported to the area as part of a larger movement. “Stonehenge is a second-hand monument,” he said sardonically. The study will appear in a BBC documentary, “Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed”, which will be broadcast in Britain on Friday night.
Stonehenge was built in phases from about 3000 to 1,500 BC, beginning with a circular ditch and shore along with 56 Aubrey holes, a ring of chalk pits that surrounded a stone circle. An excavation in 2008 of a well, led by dr. Parker Pearson, revealed that it held a stand of bluestone, so named because of its blue-gray color. The remote ring of these igneous rocks, each about nine feet long, was erected centuries before larger sandstone slabs, known as sarsens, presumably from West Woods, about 15 miles away, formed on the southern edge of the Marlborough Downs.
The geologist Herbert Thomas determined in 1923 that the dolerite used to build Stonehenge came from an outside world in the Preseli Hills of West Wales. In 2011, the team of dr. Parker Pearson discovered two megalithic quarries in the region and began searching the area for ritual structures that may have provided the bluestone and blueprint. Although several circular monuments have been surveyed and excavated, none of them have been found to be Neolithic. In an interview, dr. Parker Pearson said his investigators had a “terrible time” finding evidence of a proto-Stonehenge.
The researchers were about to give up when they returned to a site called Waun Mawn, where a handful of bluestones that had fallen over were apparently placed in an arch. “The arrangement was first taken up a century ago,” said Dr. Parker Pearson said. “The theory by early archaeologists that it could be a circle was largely rejected or simply ignored.”
In 2011, its own magnetometer and earth resistance surveys could not detect any geophysical aberrations that could yield evidence of a circle or monument. “We came to the conclusion that there could be nothing in the instruments for us,” said dr. Parker Pearson remembers. ‘A serious mistake. ‘
During the summer of 2017, archaeologists dug trenches on both sides of the serving stone trenches and discovered two holes that each held in stone once. When further surveys using ground resistance, ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic induction came to naught, the team literally made one last attempt outside the arc and discovered four distinctive pit-shaped pits from which standing monoliths had been removed.
The researchers extrapolated the positions of the empty pedestals and the fallen bluestones and sketched a circle about 360 feet across – the same diameter as the ore ditch that Stonehenge originally enclosed. Dr Parker Pearson, with a boyish cheerfulness, remarked that Waun Mawn and Stonehenge are the only two Neolithic monuments in Britain that meet these specifications. To his further delight, the entrance to both circles was in line with the sunrise of midsummer.
The team was able to determine when the sediment in the plinth holes was last exposed to light. The study suggested that Waun Mawn is the oldest known rock circle in Britain, dating from around 3,400 BC, and that the circle was dismantled shortly before the founding of Stonehenge in 3000 BC.
Dr Parker Pearson theorizes that the six ghost holes and four surviving standing stones form part of a wider circle of 30 to 50 pillars, although more randomly spread than the initial bluestone grouping at Stonehenge. These four stones are about the same size and dimensions as the 43 bluestone stones left behind at Stonehenge, and are exactly the same rock as three of them. One of the Stonehenge bluestones has an unusual diameter whose pentagonal shape corresponds to one of the gaps at Waun Mawn.
“It could have been in that hole,” said Dr. Parker Pearson said. “The evidence is not categorical, but it’s really suggestive.”
When asked why the Waun Mawn stones were moved to Salisbury, he refers to his colleague, an archaeologist from Madagascar named Ramilisonina, who developed a new interpretation of the ritual landscape around Stonehenge: the megaliths were used to to represent ancestors and more or less keep their memories alive for eternity.
“The dismantling of Waun Mawn and the rise of Stonehenge could have been part of a larger migration to an as-mundi where the earth and the sky are in harmony,” said Dr. Parker Pearson said. These ancient people, he speculates, “may have taken their monuments with them as a sign of their ancestral identity, which they needed to root themselves in a New Jerusalem.”
How were the megaliths transported from South Wales to Salisbury? Dr. Parker Pearson doubts the once popular theory that they came by sea. “Our work really talked a little bit into that,” he said. “The predominant sources of the bluestones are the quarries on the northern slopes of the mountains, and it seems unlikely that they would have been erected up the steep northern edge before being carried down the southern slopes to the valley.”
He prefers a country route, to which the massive stones, each weighing up to four tons, can be towed by as many as 400 people on rows of poles and wooden sledges. “It would have been like going to the moon,” he said, “but the Neolithic equivalent.”
Megan Specia contribution made.