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One Mystery of Stonehenge’s Origins Has Finally Been Solved:

For more than four centuries, archaeologists and geologists have sought to determine the geographical origins of the stones used to build Stonehenge thousands of years ago. Pinning down the source of the large blocks known as sarsens that form the bulk of the monument has proved especially elusive. Now researchers have resolved the mystery: 50 of the 52 extant sarsens at Stonehenge came from the West Woods site in the English county of Wiltshire, located 25 kilometers to the north of Stonehenge. The findings were published on Wednesday in Science Advances.

[...] The team’s breakthrough came unexpectedly in 2018, when a sample core that had been drilled from one of Stonehenge’s sarsens during a 1958 restoration project was returned to England after it spent 60 years in a private collection. The researchers were granted permission to destroy part of the core for a more detailed analysis. [...] Using two types of mass spectrometry, the team determined the levels of 22 trace elements in the core and compared them with the levels in sarsen samples from 20 different sites dotting southern England. The chemical signature of the core exactly matched that of one of the sites—West Woods, which encompasses about six square kilometers.

The finding “looks to be fairly convincing and fairly conclusive,” says Joshua Pollard, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in England, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s a major achievement.” Located just south of the River Kennet, West Woods has often been overlooked in archaeological research, he adds.

[...] Future research will seek to uncover the route that the builders of Stonehenge used to transport the stones.

Journal Reference:
David J. Nash, T. Jake R. Ciborowski, J. Stewart Ullyott, et al. Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc0133)

Original Submission