22 October 2018

IFLScience: We May Have Discovered Who Built Stonehenge, And The Mystery Just Got Deeper

By sifting through the remains of 25 people buried in pits within the henge, the researchers, led by the University of Oxford, were able to work out where in the world they had spent most of the life. Many of the buried people there were, unsurprisingly, local to the nearby area of Wessex.

However, 10 of the people appear to have come from west Wales, at least 200 kilometers (124 miles) away. Given that this was the year 3,000 BCE, that's pretty unusual.

To add more fuel to the intrigue, it looks likely that the non-local people were from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, the known source of the henge’s bluestones. These are the smaller stones in the inner circle of Stonehenge, as opposed to the iconic large sarsen standing stones. [...]

“It is hard to identify any particular reason these two places should have been connected. There is no evidence for any other strong connection in terms of trade,” he added.

No comments:

Post a Comment