HISTORY
The largest stone in Stonehenge’s inner circle, known as the Altar Stone, may have come from farther afield than its neighbouring monoliths, possibly even from northern England or Scotland, according to a new study that questions a 100-year-old idea about the stone’s origins. A century has passed since British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas published his seminal 1923 study on Stonehenge, in which he traced the origin of the ‘bluestones’ that make up the monument’s inner circle to the Preseli Hills in western Wales.
Among these bluestones, so called because they acquire a bluish tinge when wet or freshly broken and to distinguish them from the ‘sarsen’ stones that make up the outer circle, Thomas included a 4.9 metres flatlying, grey-green slab of stone known as the Altar Stone. “It seems as though he wanted all the non-sarsen stones to come from a limited geographic area and this basic assertion has not been challenged for 100 years,” said Richard Bevins, an honorary professor of geology and Earth sciences at Aberystwyth University, Wales. It now appears that Thomas’ assessment was flawed, Bevins and his colleagues have found. While Thomas quite rightly pinpointed the source of some stones to outcrops in western Wales, the Altar Stone likely came from a different location, possibly an unknown quarry in northern Britain, Bevins said.
Stonehenge was erected during Britain’s Late Neolithic period, roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, in southern England. The monument was built, rebuilt and added to over thousands of years, with the bluestones brought to the site during an early construction phase. Early excavators of Stonehenge called the bluestones ‘foreign stones’ because they are exotic to Wiltshire. Their long-haul transport over 140 miles from western Wales to Stoneh
