Neolithic people sprinkled the crystals over burials:
Hundreds of fragments of a rare transparent type of quartz called "rock crystal" suggest Neolithic people used the mineral to decorate graves and other structures at a ceremonial site in western England, archaeologists say.
The rock crystals were likely brought to the site from a source more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) away, over mountainous terrain, and the crystals appear to have been carefully broken into much smaller pieces, possibly during a community gathering to watch the working of what must have seemed like a magical material.
"You can think of it as a really special event," Nick Overton, an archaeologist at The University of Manchester in England, told Live Science. "It feels like they're putting a lot of emphasis on the practice of working [the crystal] ... people would have remembered it as being distinctive and different."
Overton is the lead author of a study published in July in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal that describes the discovery of more than 300 of these quartz crystal fragments at a 6,000-year-old ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in western England, about a mile (1.6 km) south of the monument known as Arthur's Stone. As well as being almost as transparent as water, several of the crystal fragments are prismatic, splitting white light into a visible rainbow spectrum.
Quartz crystal is also triboluminescent — that is, it gives off flashes of light when it's struck — and that peculiar property must have enhanced the process of breaking the crystals into smaller fragments, Overton said.
"If you bash two of these crystals together, they emit little flashes of bluish light, which is really fascinating," Overton explained. "It must have been an arresting experience — the material is quite rare and quite distinctive in this period where there is no glass and no other solid transparent material."
Journal Reference:
Nick J. Overton, Elizabeth Healey, Irene Garcia Rovira, et al., Not All That Glitters is Gold? Rock Crystal in the Early British Neolithic at Dorstone Hill, Herefordshire, and the Wider British and Irish Context [open], Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2022. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774322000142
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2022, @10:42AM
"This rock makes light when you break it, it's so cool... Look at it"
"Whoaaa! Let me try it too!"
"Watch this!"
etc
Hours later there's enough for a bunch of academic papers...
Kids sneaking off to play at burial sites (even at night) is not that unlikely right?...