It was during this time that the foundations of the site that would later become Stonehenge were first laid. These stones are set just inside the bank and, like the Heel Stone , align approximately to the Summer and Winter solstices.
In , John Aubrey — an English antiquarian and writer — visited Stonehenge and observed a series of holes dug around the circumference of the henge. Excavations have revealed cremated human bones mostly men, with some women and children in and around the holes. New research indicates these bones may have — mysteriously — come from people who lived more than kilometres miles away from Stonehenge. Crude picks made of deer antlers that were used to dig the ditch were also found in the holes, as well as the bones of cattle and deer.
The exact purpose of the holes remains a mystery, although the likelihood is that they were originally used to support wooden posts or smaller bluestones before later being used to bury cremated remains. One theory is that the Aubrey Holes remember those? The cluster of poles at the north-eastern entrance may have served as markers for astronomical events, or it is possible that they were used to create a palisade fence that acted as an entrance to Stonehenge which may have guided people through narrow paths to the ceremonial centre.
The longest and most dramatic of all periods. To track down the source of the sarsens, archaeologists first had to solve a more recent mystery: what happened to three missing chunks of Stonehenge? One of the trilithons arch-like structures made of two upright stones supporting a horizontal lintel stone in the central horseshoe fell down in A century and a half later, in , a restoration project set the massive stones in place again—but one of the uprights, called Stone 58, had cracked along its length.
To help hold the cracked stone together so it could stand and support its half of the lintel stone, restorers drilled three holes through the stone and inserted metal ties. In , one of the restorers, Robert Phillips, returned a broken but complete core from Stone 58 to the UK. Part of a second core turned up in the Salisbury Museum in , but one and a half of the stone cores are still out there somewhere. Samples from the Phillips core gave Nash and his colleagues the chance to compare the chemical makeup of Stone 58 to sarsen boulders from sites all over Britain.
The match turned out to be exactly what various researchers had assumed for the last years. The only boulders that matched Stone 58 came from one site in the southeastern Marlborough Downs: West Woods, in Wiltshire, about 25km 16 miles north of Stonehenge and just 3km 2 miles south of where most studies had looked for Neolithic sarsen quarries.
West Woods is a six square kilometer four square mile plateau, partially wooded and dotted with large sarsen boulders and pits from millennia of quarrying. Thousands of years ago, many of the woods were open farmland, which probably fed the same people who built Stonehenge and Avebury and feasted at nearby Durrington Walls.
From West Woods, ancient builders probably hauled the sarsens down into the Vale of Pewsey and along the River Avon to Stonehenge, where the bluestones had already stood for centuries. Nash and his colleagues used portable X-ray fluorescence to check the chemical makeup of all 52 sarsens at Stonehenge the only survivors of the 80 sarsens that once stood at the site. Stonehenge, an icon of European prehistory that attracts more than a million visitors a year, is rarely out of the news. Finding the sources of the stones used to build the monument is a fundamental question that has vexed antiquaries and archaeologists for over four centuries.
Our results confirm that the nearby Marlborough Downs were the source region for the sarsens, but also pinpoint a specific area as the most likely place from where the stones were obtained. Research in the last decade has confirmed that the igneous bluestones were brought to Stonehenge from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, over km to the west. The sandstones have been tracked to eastern Wales although the exact outcrops have yet to be found.
However, the origins of the sarsen stones has, until now, remained a mystery. Stonehenge is a complicated and long-lived monument constructed in five main phases.
The earliest, dated to about BC, comprised a roughly m-diameter circular enclosure bounded by a bank and external ditch. Inside were various stone and timber structures, and numerous cremation burials. The sarsen structures visible today were erected around BC and comprised five trilithons the doorway-like structures formed from two uprights joined by a lintel surrounded by a circle of a further 30 uprights linked by lintels.
The trilithons were arranged in a horseshoe formation with its principal axis aligned to the rising midsummer sun in the northeast and the setting midwinter sun to the southwest. Conventional wisdom holds that the sarsens were brought to Stonehenge from the Marlborough Downs, some 30km to the north, the closest area with substantial scatters of large sarsen boulders. However, the Marlborough Downs are extensive and greater precision is needed to understand how prehistoric peoples used the landscape and its resources.
We started by analysing the geochemistry of all 52 remaining sarsens at Stonehenge 28 of those originally present are now missing, having been removed long ago.
0コメント