Recently there was a scientific article with new data on Stonehenge. What have we learned in recent years about the monument, which we have been studying for centuries?
Two rings of stones, two inner stone "horseshoes", two earthen ramparts and a moat - the famous Neolithic monument and cultural symbol of Great Britain looks unpretentious, and it would seem that it has been studied up and down over the past hundreds of years. But recently, scientists again discovered something new about the British ring of dolmens - where the people buried in this place came from. "Attic" figured out what else they managed to find out about Stonehenge over the past decade.
Stonehenge is a complex of megalithic stones located in Wiltshire near the city of Salisbury and about 130 kilometers southwest of London. It was built about 3000 years BC, and then another 1300 years were completed, adding new stones. The number of guesses about who and why built Stonehenge is enormous: it was considered a temple of the Druids, a fortress, a giant calendar or ritual burial complex, an ancient observatory, or just a useless heap of stones that the Romans forced the ancient Britons to collect in order to extinguish their ardor for rebellion. But the ancient megaliths are silent, and scientists have to come up with new tricks every time to knock out the next bit of information from them.
Stone from the mountain
For example, new data on the Salisbury complex became known last month. One of the mysteries of Stonehenge is the origin of some of its stones. The outer ring of the monument is formed by trilithons - compositions of three 30-ton sandstone slabs, folded in the shape of the letter "P". Presumably, they were mined 30 kilometers from Stonehenge. The inner circle and "horseshoe" are made of so-called bluestones - blue stones. Back in the 1920s, British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas, comparing the rock debris, suggested that the blue stones were mined in the Preselli Mountains in western Wales - about 260 kilometers from Stonehenge.
For a long time, his hypothesis was considered the main one. In the 10s of our century, scientists began to investigate the monument using the latest methods of optical microscopy and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and here it is, the cherished discovery: in fact, the origin of the stones is a little further north than Thomas thought. Their homeland is the rock formations Craig-Ros-y-Felin and Carn Godog in the same Preselli mountains. Not a sensation, of course, but in archeology any clarification and clarification of data is a blessing.
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Aubrey Pits People
Another fact became known to us just yesterday. From afar, not only stones, but also people came to Stonehenge. Back in the 17th century, the British antiquities lover John Aubrey, having visited the megalithic structure, discovered 56 small pits around its inner half-ring in a special ditch and documented this fact. But only in the 1920s, excavations were carried out on the pits named after him, and the remains of burials were unearthed - the cremated bones of 25 people.
An unearthed grave near Stonehenge.
Fire, from the point of view of historians, only spoils everything, because it literally destroys material monuments. But a team of researchers from Oxford University has figured out how to extract new information even from bone ash using radiocarbon dating methods. Researcher at the Oxford School of Archeology Christoph Snoek investigated the effects of intense heat on bone tissue and eventually found that heat reliably "seals" strontium isotopes into bones. Since isotopes enter the bone from the environment, knowing their half-life, as well as the isotopic composition of the terrain and remains, we can judge whether we are dealing with local or "alien" dead.
After analyzing fragments of a cremated human bone from the Early Stonehenge layer dating back to 3000 BC. (then it was apparently used as a cemetery), scientists concluded that at least 10 out of 25 people did not live near the megalithic complex shortly before death. Their bones were found to contain such a strontium isotope content that corresponds to the western territories of Britain and Wales. This, by the way, is exactly the area where the blue stones were taken from for Stonehenge itself. So it turned out that people in the late Neolithic moved between West Wales and the location of Stonehenge and, as scientists suggest, may even have taken those very blue stones with them for construction.
“This is a rare glimpse into Neolithic contacts and material exchanges 5,000 years ago,” archaeologists say.
Not one Henge - many Henges
Stonehenge, in fact, is not a unique structure - in the north of Britain, as well as in Germany and Eastern Europe, many ordinary henge have been found - round or oval earthen plots surrounded by a moat. It is believed that it was the moat and the site that were primary, and the stones in Stonehenge were added later, thanks to which it became a "stone".
Moreover, today Stonehenge is not the largest of its kind: in 2015, British archaeologists discovered the remains of a stone monument 15 times larger in size than Stonehenge, and only 3.2 kilometers from it, in Darrington Walls - one of the largest Neolithic structures …
There were about 90 stones in total, and each was about 4.5 meters high. True, these stones will no longer amaze anyone with their scale: they were all buried underground and none of them stand upright. It is not yet clear why they were installed and whether at the same time as Stonehenge. Scientists hope that the study of all the found henj together will shed light on the ancient history of Britain and, possibly, reveal the meaning of these structures, which today are evasively called ritual.
Ritual landscape
The speculation of an entire complex of ritual structures centered on Stonehenge was reinforced in 2014 with the completion of a four-year project to explore the "hidden environs" of Stonehenge. Using GPR, scientists scanned the surroundings of the monument, made a 3D map on their basis and found 17 previously unknown artificial structures on it - pits, ditches and ditches, mostly in the form of concentric circles, like Stonehenge itself, as well as a mound with a wooden structure inside …
“Stonehenge is undoubtedly a large ritual object, to which people probably went on purpose from afar. But it doesn't stand on its own. It is part of a much more complex landscape, and ritual activities were carried out in many places around the monument,”said then project manager, archaeologist at the University of Birmingham Vincent Gaffney. (And, as we now know, he was absolutely right!)
There was an ax and other words here
Back in 2012, scientists made the first comprehensive 3D scan of Stonehenge and found that the stones were carefully grinded, removing the upper - rough and ugly - layer of stone in order to expose the lower, lighter and smoother layers. Moreover, even that part of the stone that lay in the ground was processed.
A thousand years later, the Bronze Age began - people who knew how to forge metal were considered almost shamans, and, as archaeologists assume, it was this status of theirs that prompted the ancients to carve small images of daggers and ax heads on the stones of Stonehenge. In total, 71 were found, and this only convinced scientists of the exceptional ritual importance of the megalithic complex. Finally, already in the 17th century, Christopher Wren, a mathematician and architect, who rebuilt London after the famous fire of 1666, was noted on one of the stones, and later numerous Victorian tourists left signatures on the stones.
Sir Christopher Wren's work on the Stonehenge stone.
Thus, scientists have confirmed: people have always been drawn to huge slabs. Some painstakingly grinded them 4500 years ago, others drew the tips of axes on them a thousand years later, and still others tried to write something on them quite recently.
Perhaps soon archaeologists will find another unobvious way to explore Stonehenge, we will find someone else's names on its stones - and we will begin to understand it a little better.
Evgeniya Shcherbina