Fans of the 1984 heavy metal mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” will remember the scene in which the band commissioned a scenario that is a replica of Stonehenge, the Neolithic ruin in Wiltshire, England. Unfortunately, a careless set of measurements results in musicians playing alongside a model that is 18 inches tall instead of 18 feet tall, a flaw displayed on the tour and, shuddering, accentuated by the dancing dwarves recruited to make the stand look bigger .
Thirty-seven years later, the film’s stone gag was found to contain a stone of historical truth. On Friday, a team of archaeologists reported in the Antiquity newspaper that they dug up a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, part of which they believe was dismantled, transported 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 have been transported as part of a larger movement of people to the area. “Stonehenge is a second-hand monument,” he said wryly. The study will be presented in a BBC documentary, “Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed”, to be broadcast in Britain on Friday night.
Stonehenge was built in phases from about 3,000 to 1,500 BC, starting with a circular ditch and margin along with 56 Aubrey holes, a ring of chalk pits that encircled a stone circle. A 2008 excavation of a well, led by Dr. Parker Pearson, revealed that there was a column of blue stone, so named because of its bluish-gray hue. The outer ring of these igneous upright stones, each about three meters high, was erected centuries before the largest sandstone slabs, known as sarsens, are believed to have originated from West Woods, 15 miles away at the south end from Marlborough Downs.
Geologist Herbert Thomas established in 1923 that the dolerite used to build Stonehenge came from an outcrop on the Preseli hills in western Wales. In 2011, Dr. Parker Pearson’s team discovered two megalithic quarries in that region and began to search nearby for ritual structures that could have provided the blue stones and the project. Although several circular monuments were researched and excavated, none were considered to be Neolithic. In an interview, Dr. Parker Pearson said his investigators spent “a terrible time” trying to find evidence of proto-Stonehenge.
The researchers were about to give up when they returned to a place called Waun Mawn, where a handful of dropped blue stones were apparently placed in an arch. “The arrangement was first registered a century ago,” said Parker Pearson. “The theory of early archaeologists that it could be a circle has been largely dismissed or simply ignored.”
In 2011, his own magnetometer and Earth resistance research were unable to locate any geophysical anomalies that could provide evidence of a circle or monument. “We concluded that, as the instruments showed us nothing, there could be nothing there,” recalls Parker Pearson. “A serious mistake.”
During the summer of 2017, archaeologists dug trenches at both ends of the arch of the stones served and discovered two holes that once housed stones. When other research using terrestrial resistance, ground penetrating radar and electromagnetic induction came to nothing, the team did what was literally one last effort beyond the arc and found four distinct socket-shaped ditches from which standing monoliths were removed.
Extrapolating from the positions of empty cavities and fallen blue stones, the researchers drew a circle about 360 feet – the same diameter as the earth ditch that originally involved Stonehenge. Dr. Parker Pearson, enthusiastic about youthful joy, noted that Waun Mawn and Stonehenge are the only two Neolithic monuments in Britain that meet these specifications. To his even greater delight, the entrance to both circles was aligned with the sunrise of the summer solstice.
The team was able to determine when the sediment inside the socket holes was last exposed to light. The study suggested that Waun Mawn is the oldest known stone circle in Britain, dating from around 3,400 BC, and that the circle was dismantled shortly before the construction of Stonehenge in 3,000 BC
Dr. Parker Pearson theorized that the six phantom holes and four surviving permanent stones were part of a larger circle of 30 to 50 pillars, although spread out more randomly than the initial blue stone cluster at Stonehenge. These four stones are approximately the same size and dimensions as the 43 blue stones that remain at Stonehenge and are exactly the same type of rock as three of them. One of Stonehenge’s blue stones has an unusual cross section whose pentagonal shape corresponds to one of the gaps in Waun Mawn.
“It could have been in that hole,” said Parker Pearson. “The race is not categorical, but it is very suggestive.”
Asked why the Waun Mawn stones were moved to Salisbury, he gave in to his colleague, an archaeologist from Madagascar named Ramilisonina, who developed a new interpretation of the ritual landscape around Stonehenge: Megaliths were used to represent ancestors and more or less keep your memories alive for eternity.
“The dismantling of Waun Mawn and the rise of Stonehenge may have been part of a larger migration to an axis mundi where the earth and the skies are in harmony,” said Parker Pearson. These ancient peoples, he speculated, “may have taken their monuments with them as a sign of their ancestral identity, which they required to take root in a New Jerusalem.”
How were megaliths transported from South Wales to Salisbury? Dr. Parker Pearson doubts the once popular theory that they came by sea. “Our work really emphasized that,” he said. “The dominant sources of blue stones are quarries on the northern slopes of the mountains, and it seems unlikely that they would have been brought upwards by the steep north edge before being carried down the southern slopes into the valley.”
He prefers a land route, on which massive stones, each weighing up to four tons, can be transported in rows of poles and wooden sleds for up to 400 people. “That would have been like going to the moon,” he said, “but the Neolithic equivalent.”
Megan Specia contributed reports.