BELIEFS × SOCIETY × TECHNOLOGY
Stonehenge
~3000 BCE
History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian
Stonehenge is a monument of standing stones on Salisbury Plain, in southern England, raised in stages across roughly five centuries. Its first stage, about 3000 BCE, combines a circular earthwork with a ring of pits, the Aubrey Holes, which held small bluestone uprights and received deposits of cremated bone; burials continued there until about 2500 BCE and make up the largest assemblage of cremated Neolithic dead known in Britain. None of the stone was quarried on the spot. The bluestones were cut in west Wales, and the sarsens, silcrete megaliths that carry the main architecture, were traced in 2020 to West Woods, 25 kilometres north: fifty of the fifty-two that survive share one trace-element chemistry, hence one source area.
Why it matters
Building the monument drew people and stone from opposite ends of Britain. Strontium isotopes in the cremated bone show that at least ten of the twenty-five individuals analysed had not lived on the chalk of Wessex, and west Wales, source of the bluestones, is the most plausible region they came from. The Altar Stone, a shaped block of six tonnes, was cut at least 750 kilometres away in northeast Scotland, a distance its authors judge easier to cross by sea than overland and read as evidence of organisation reaching across the island.
Dating & uncertainty
The monument has no single date. Radiocarbon on the cremated bone places the first deposits at about 3000 BCE and the last at about 2500 BCE, and the sarsen settings are referred to around 2500 BCE; the date carried here is that of the beginning. Taking it for the date of Stonehenge as it now stands would be wrong by some five centuries, since the sarsen circle and the trilithons, the silhouette the name calls up, belong to the later half of that span.
Sources
- Nash et al. (2020), Science Advances · Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehengedoi:10.1126/sciadv.abc0133
- Snoeck et al. (2018), Scientific Reports · Strontium isotope analysis on cremated human remains from Stonehenge support links with west Walesdoi:10.1038/s41598-018-28969-8
- Clarke et al. (2024), Nature · A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehengedoi:10.1038/s41586-024-07652-1
- Willis et al. (2016), Antiquity · The dead of Stonehengedoi:10.15184/aqy.2016.26
Our species’ history as one day
23:37:0822 min 51 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day