Stonehenge: Origins of those who built world-famous monument revealed by groundbreaking scientific research
Fascinating insight from perhaps our most iconic rural tourist location….
A new scientific research collaboration is, for the first time, revealing who built Stonehenge. The cutting-edge study sheds a remarkable light on the geographical origins of the Neolithic community that first constructed the ancient site.
Complex tests carried out on 25 Neolithic people who were buried at or following the time of the initial construction of the now world-famous monument, have revealed that 10 of them lived nowhere near Stonehenge, but in western Britain, and that half of those 10 potentially came from southwest Wales (where the earliest Stonehenge monoliths came from).
The other 15 could be local to Stonehenge, Wiltshire-origin individuals, or the children of other descendants of migrants from the west. All the remains were cremations.
Up until now, it has always been assumed that it was not possible to carry out place-of-origin tests on burned bones – but recent research at Oxford University by Belgian scientist, Dr Christophe Snoeck of the Free University of Brussels, has now discovered that the act of cremation actually crystallises a bone’s structure and prevents the crucial origin-indicating isotope evidence from being contaminated by isotopic signals in the surrounding soil.
The cremated remains from Stonehenge of the 10 individuals of probable western British origin, were buried at various stages between the 33rd century BC and the 28th century BC.