The big stone Altar Stone (“altar stone”), a 6-ton sandstone block at the center of the megalithic sanctuary of Stonehengewould come from the North East Scotlandto good 750 km from the Stonehenge construction site in southern England, much further away than previously thought (about 200 km). The discovery comes from petrographic analysis carried out by a multidisciplinary team led by geologist Anthony Clarke of Curtin University in Australia and was recently published in Nature. The discovery is important because it allows us to understand how the potential of men of the Neolithic (the time when construction of the Stonehenge site began) were even greater than previously known.
The sanctuary is one of the most famous sites of the Neolithic European, the final stage of the Prehistoryin which human groups revolutionized their lifestyle with the invention of theagriculture and of thefarm. Stonehenge is a cromlechor a megalithic stone circle composed of large stones fixed into the ground, and was built in several phases between the 3100 BC (final stages of the Neolithic) and the 1600 BC (full Bronze Age). In this remote time the Neolithic revolution led to the growth of human groups and more complex societies, capable of creating extraordinary megalithic monuments.
The megalithic sanctuary is composed of several concentric circles of stones fixed into the ground, at the centre of which is positioned a large horizontal stone known as Altar Stoneor altar stone. Given its position and characteristics, it is likely that this stone was the fulcrum of the religious activities that took place at Stonehenge. According to what is known so far, the stones of the innermost part of the sanctuary come from the West Walesto more than 200 km away in a northwesterly direction. A remarkable effort by the builders of Stonehenge, which shows their ability organizational And logistics.
A working group interdisciplinarycomposed of geologists, archaeologists And chemists British and Australians have shown that the altar stone actually appears to have come from much further back distant. The researchers have in fact carried out some petrographic analysisthat is, they compared the composition of some fragments of the stone in question with known samples from different areas of the United Kingdom. Based on the comparisons between the samples of the Altar Stone and those of the known sites, it has emerged that the central stone of Stonehenge comes not from West Wales, as previously thought, but from a sedimentary deposit of the North East Scotlandpractically from opposite side of Great Britain.
The distance between north-east Scotland and south-west England, where Stonehenge is located, is more than 750 km. In front of this discovery, the scholars were astonished. This would imply that the Neolithic populations who built the sanctuary had a commercial and contact network even wider than expected so far. Not only that: the builders of Stonehenge, in 3rd millennium BCin addition to having contacts with populations hundreds of km awaywere able to move this stone of considerable size, probably using a sea routethe fastest and most effective solution. Once again, what we discover about our prehistoric ancestors turns out to be increasingly surprising.
