Shock as study shows famous Stonehenge Altar Stone came from Scotland, not Wales
Researchers were astounded to discover that the megalith travelled over 450 miles to its resting place in Wiltshire, England. What does this revelation mean for our understanding of Neolithic peoples?
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We
00:25analysed minute microscopic grains from the Altarstone and in doing so we can determine
00:30the age and chemical characteristics of each of these grains. And for the Altarstone we
00:35can say that we're greater than 95% confident that the Altarstone matches the Orcadian Basin
00:41in terms of provenance. Now in terms of how it got to its position on the Salisbury Plain,
00:47when we first got this Scottish provenance for the Altarstone we thought no way, no way
00:51did people move this rock, this 6 tonne megalith all the way from the North East of Scotland,
00:57at least 700 or so kilometres away. Did they do it using an overland transport route? Well
01:03even today going overland from Scotland to Southern Britain is quite an arduous journey
01:07down the motorway. Back then, no motorways of course, the UK was heavily forested, it
01:12was a temperate rainforest and rivers. These combined would have been formidable barriers
01:19which for us left the option of marine transport as a feasible, really credible option for
01:26this transport south.