For many years, researchers have been puzzling over how the huge stone blocks were delivered to the site for the construction of Stonehenge. Not so long ago, archaeologist Mike Parker-Pearson from University College London proposed a version according to which boulders were brought here on wooden sleighs along a road made of rotating logs.
Ancient monument
The famous megalithic complex Stonehenge near Salisbury in Wiltshire, England, is one of the world's greatest mysteries. The purpose of the structure is not known exactly. Who believes that this is a cult building. Who believes that this is an ancient astronomical observatory …
Scientific research of the complex, included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, has been carried out since the 19th century. Until now, it has not been possible to accurately determine his age. It is believed that the "start" of the construction of Stonehenge came at the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. That is, it may be over five thousand years old.
The stone structures of the complex (megaliths or triliths), as well as some roughly worked stones (menhirs), consist of grayish limestone sandstone. At the same time, some of the smaller stones differ in color. Because of their bluish tint, the stones are called blue and it is believed that the ancients used them for construction, attributing to them a "heavenly" origin. To date, it has been found that they consist of siliceous sandstone, which is harder than limestone (gray blocks) and more aesthetic in appearance. All this grandeur frozen in stone forms cromlech - several concentric circles of roughly cut stones. Now they are destroyed …
The mystery of the blue stones
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As the researchers found, the outer circumference once consisted of 30 upright grayish stones. Inside this man-made circle there was another one, consisting of 30 blue stones, much smaller in size than the gray stones of the outer circle. To date, no more than a dozen of them have survived.
The stones interested scientists not by chance, because on the Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located, there are no sedimentary sandstone rocks. This whole area rests on a limestone foundation.
Sandstone, and even more so blue, is present on the gentle slopes of the Cambrian Mountains of South Wales. Geologists have discovered the exact "birthplace" of the most ancient stones of Stonehenge, which were laid in its foundation about five thousand years ago. Comparing their fragments with rock samples in the southwest of Wales, specialists were able to find a layer of rocks from which building material for an ancient monument was extracted thousands of years ago. The work was carried out by geologists Robert Ickser (University of Leicester) and Richard Bevins (National Museum of Wales). The source of the "building material" was a 70-meter outcrop known as Craig Ros-y-Felin, located in the north of Pembrokeshire, Wales. In this case, we are talking about the rarest and most mysterious blue stones.
Xer and Bevins analyzed fragments of the blue stones of Stonehenge and selected one rare type of volcanic rock up to 460 million years old. Then they found the "suspects" among the rock outcrops of blue stones in Wales and finally discovered the true source of the stone by comparing the structure of the smallest crystals. Since there are no blue stones in the vicinity of Stonehenge, and there were no, they had to be delivered from afar - at least from the east of Wales …
Mysterious routes
Scientists are still arguing about how ancient people, who did not know the wheels, transported huge blocks (the weight of each blue stone is four tons) over a distance of 380 kilometers. Various routes are offered, including by water …
So far, the most realistic version is that the path of giant stones from Pembrokeshire to Wiltshire lay around the Cornwall Peninsula, or along the Bristol Bay, and the remaining 80 kilometers to the valley were dragged overland.
Back in December of last year, Mike Parker-Pearson suggested that fragments of Stonehenge were transported from Wales to Wiltshire. But how? To prove their hypothesis, the scientist and his students decided to conduct a series of field experiments, reports The Telegraph.
Previously, experts have already considered the version of the delivery of boulders to the construction site on a sleigh, which were to be moved with the help of ropes by several people. However, the hypothesis was soon rejected as unlikely. But the experiments of Parker-Pearson showed that, in fact, a dozen people are quite enough to manually move a stone weighing one ton at a speed of 0.6 meters per second (provided that they pull the load continuously).
In the Neolithic era, to which the construction of Stonehenge belongs, several thousand people lived in the vicinity of the future complex. Most likely, it was the local residents who were involved in the transportation of goods, says Parker-Pearson. And they successfully completed their task.