LONDON – For thousands of years, Stonehenge has been in the lowlands of what is now southern England. With its origins and purpose shrouded in mystery, the enormous prehistoric monument has long captivated the imagination of mankind.
In his 12th century book “The History of the Kings of Great Britain”, the Welsh clergyman Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that Merlin, the prominent wizard in the legend of King Arthur, was summoned to lead an army to Ireland and transport a ring of mystical stone giants, called the Dance of the Giants, to what is commonly believed to be the Salisbury Plain, a chalk plateau in the English county of Wiltshire, where Stonehenge is located.
Although Geoffrey’s book is a work of pseudo-history, a new discovery raises the possibility that there is a grain of truth in the 900-year tale of Stonehenge’s origins.
A team of archaeologists, led by Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, dug up Britain’s third largest stone circle in Preseli Hills in western Wales, which they believe was dismantled, moved 175 miles to Salisbury Plain in England and rebuilt as Stonehenge, according to research to be published on Friday in Antiquity, a peer-reviewed archeology journal.
“It’s amazing that only last year did we really come up with answers to the origins of Stonehenge stones,” Parker Pearson told ABC News. “The sarsens from 15 miles north of Stonehenge and the blue stones – or at least some of them – derived from an ancient stone circle in the Preseli hills.”
Stonehenge is made up of two main types of rock. The sarsens, sandstone slabs weighing an average of 25 tons, form the iconic central horseshoe, the pillars and lintels of the outer circle, as well as the station stones, heel stone and massacre stone. A variety of igneous rocks of 2 to 5 tons known as blue stones, due to their bluish tone when wet or freshly broken, form the smallest inner horseshoe.
Scholars have known for decades that most of the blue stones at Stonehenge were carried, dragged or rolled to the Salisbury plain from the hills of Preseli. In 2019, Parker Pearson and his team provided evidence of the exact location of two of the bluestone quarries. And last year, another team of researchers led by David Nash of the University of Brighton revealed that most Stonehenge sarsens come from a forested area in Wiltshire, about 15 miles from where they are in Salisbury Plain.
Blue stones are believed to have been the first to be erected at Stonehenge, some 5,000 years ago, centuries before the larger sarsen stones were brought there. The discovery by Parker Pearson and his team that the blue stones were mined from two quarries on the Preseli hills before the first stage of Stonehenge was built in 3000 BC led them to re-investigate a nearby partial stone circle called Waun Mawn, so that they could determine these monoliths were the remains of a stone circle supplied by the quarries, which was then dismantled to build Stonehenge.
Parker Pearson said he identified Waun Mawn’s location in the Preseli Hills “from the start, but disregarded it due to the disappointing results of geophysical research”.
“It was hard work for eight years with a great team and we came to a lot of dead ends,” he said. “We had to start excavating the bluestone quarries, then doing geophysical surveys on rough terrain, excavating possible locations, discovering that none of them were what we were looking for and, finally, returning to a location we discarded.”
“So going back to the subject and finding out that we should have persisted from the start was certainly a surprise,” he added. “But the intervening years have not been lost because we really know the landscape and we have eliminated all other possible possibilities.”
Even when they returned to Waun Mawn, more geophysical research – including radar, magnetometry, earth resistance and electromagnetic induction – “went all blank”, forcing Parker Pearson and his team to manually remove grass from their trenches without mechanical excavators.
“Being in the middle of the mountain, we often had to dig with strong winds and torrential rain,” he said. “But it was even sweeter in the end.”
His archaeological excavations at Waun Mawn in 2018 discovered six empty holes for lost monoliths, confirming that the remaining four stones were part of an ancient circle. The results of his research, which will be presented in a BBC documentary that airs on Friday night, also revealed significant links between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge, suggesting that at least part of the old circle was brought from Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain.
Parker Pearson and his team found that Waun Mawn shares an identical diameter with the Stonehenge ditch, that the two locations are aligned at the sunrise of the summer solstice and that one of Stonehenge’s blue stones has an unusual cross section corresponding to a of the holes left in Waun Mawn and chips in that hole are the same type of rock as Stonehenge stone, according to the research article in the February 2020 issue of Antiquity.
The stones at Waun Mawn may have been moved as part of a population migration out of western Wales, as the first people to be buried at Stonehenge probably already lived in that region, according to the newspaper. But more questions remain.
“We don’t know enough about the blue stones at Stonehenge,” admitted Parker Pearson. “Many are totally buried under the grass and were last seen in the 1950s and 1960s, when no one bothered to correctly identify the types of rock, so it is a very necessary, but straightforward job, to raise some grass and collect samples. “
“We have not yet traced the sources of all the different types of blue stone in Preseli or identified the source of Pedra do Altar, which is believed to have come from Brecon Beacons,” he continued. “And I suspect there were more stone circles in Wales that contributed their blue stones to Stonehenge. It would be great to track them, but it won’t be easy.”
Despite what the legend says, none of the rocks at Stonehenge came from Ireland and the evidence suggests that the rocks were not transported by a Neolithic magician and his army. But Parker Pearson and his team still pose the question in their research article: “Is Waun Mawn the Giants’ Dance described by Geoffrey de Monmouth?”
“Archeology and myth are strange companions,” they wrote.