Welsh Stones Helped Make Stonehenge A Monument To Deceased Ancestors, Archaeologists Say

Stonehenge. (Photo by Diego Delso, at wikimedia commons, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.)

New research published today in the journal Antiquity suggests that the inner horseshoe circle of bluestones at Stonehenge were transported from Wales, possibly in a ceremony to celebrate ancestral identity. If the stones are representative of deceased ancestors, this could mean that Neolithic Britain was undergoing a kind of early political unification.

Archaeologists have debated the form and function of Stonehenge for centuries. This circle of stones is the best known of a number of ancient henges, which all date to about the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age periods and are associated with burial mounds. In 2008, cremations found at Stonehenge provided archaeologists with three radiocarbon dates from a thousand-year period. University College London archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, who leads the Stonehenge Riverside Project, noted at the time that “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge’s sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument’s use and demonstrates that it was still very much a domain of the dead.”

Today’s publication provides support for the hypothesis about Stonehenge’s function as a monument to the deceased, through an analysis of the origins of the bluestones from the inner circle. Parker Pearson and colleagues headed up five seasons of excavation at Craig Rhos-y-felin in Wales in an attempt to find the source of the specific rhyloite that made up many of the bluestones at Stonehenge.

Excavations at Craig Rhos-y-felin (Courtesy of Adam Stanford © Aerial-Cam Ltd)

Human activity at the quarry of Craig Rhos-y-felin dates back to the Mesolithic period, with evidence of carbonized food remains and four hearths, but the archaeologists found no indication that people were working the stone at that time. But in the Neolithic period, they found “three features associated with quarrying of megaliths” and that radiocarbon dates on “carbonised hazelnut shells from this layer provide dates of 3500-3120 cal BC and 3620-3360 cal BC,” as noted in theirAntiquity article.  Three additional quarrying features were found dating to the Bronze Age, pointing to the longstanding interest in the rock outcropping at Craig Rhos-y-felin. These new dates, then, show that Stonehenge was almost certainly even older than previously assumed.