Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
See:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...e-carried-230km-over-land-research?CMP=twt_gu
"T[FONT="]hey are among the most famous and most enigmatic mysteries in all of archaeology: how did neolithic builders, using only stone, wooden and bone tools, carve Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars from the hilltops of western Wales – and how on earth did they transport them more than 230km (143 miles) to Salisbury plain?[/FONT][FONT="]Now, an excavation has found intriguing new evidence of the method by which the huge stones were chiselled out of the rock face at two craggy outcrops of the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The location of the two monolith quarries, according to the archaeologists, undermines the theory that the stones were taken to Wiltshire by sea, instead suggesting the two-ton blocks, up to 80 in number, were dragged or carried over land."
"The archaeologists’ research also supports the tantalising possibility, they say, that the bluestones – thought to date from the very first phase of construction at Stonehenge – may have first been used in a stone circle in Wales, before that monument was dismantled and transported hundreds of kilometres south-east, for reasons which remain a mystery."
"Stonehenge’s bluestones are not the enormous sarsen trilithons for which it is most famous, but a separate set of stones which now stand inside the sarsen ring but which, it is thought, may once have formed a much larger circle when the monument was first built, about 3,000BC.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Though smaller than the sarsens – and often overlooked by visitors as a result – they are still about two metres in height and would each have weighed about the same as a car, according to Dr Rob Ixer, one of the report’s co-authors."[/FONT]
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...e-carried-230km-over-land-research?CMP=twt_gu
"T[FONT="]hey are among the most famous and most enigmatic mysteries in all of archaeology: how did neolithic builders, using only stone, wooden and bone tools, carve Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars from the hilltops of western Wales – and how on earth did they transport them more than 230km (143 miles) to Salisbury plain?[/FONT][FONT="]Now, an excavation has found intriguing new evidence of the method by which the huge stones were chiselled out of the rock face at two craggy outcrops of the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The location of the two monolith quarries, according to the archaeologists, undermines the theory that the stones were taken to Wiltshire by sea, instead suggesting the two-ton blocks, up to 80 in number, were dragged or carried over land."
"The archaeologists’ research also supports the tantalising possibility, they say, that the bluestones – thought to date from the very first phase of construction at Stonehenge – may have first been used in a stone circle in Wales, before that monument was dismantled and transported hundreds of kilometres south-east, for reasons which remain a mystery."
"Stonehenge’s bluestones are not the enormous sarsen trilithons for which it is most famous, but a separate set of stones which now stand inside the sarsen ring but which, it is thought, may once have formed a much larger circle when the monument was first built, about 3,000BC.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Though smaller than the sarsens – and often overlooked by visitors as a result – they are still about two metres in height and would each have weighed about the same as a car, according to Dr Rob Ixer, one of the report’s co-authors."[/FONT]