Stonehenge: The Questions Five Thousand Years Have Not Answered
On Salisbury Plain in southern England stands the most intensively studied prehistoric monument on Earth, and it still keeps its secrets. Stonehenge rose in stages over roughly a thousand years, beginning around 3000 BC with a circular ditch and bank and reaching its familiar shape around 2500 BC, when the great sarsen stones were heaved upright and capped with lintels. Work and rework continued at the site until about 2000 BC, which means the monument we see is the last version of many.
For centuries nobody could say where the stones came from. Then, in 2020, a team led by geomorphologist David Nash matched the geochemical fingerprint of the sarsens, sandstone blocks weighing about 25 tons each, to West Woods on the Marlborough Downs, roughly 25 kilometres to the north. Fifty of the fifty-two surviving sarsens share that signature. Moving them would have taken hundreds of people, timber sledges and remarkable coordination, yet by Stonehenge standards the sarsens are the easy part.
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