Fans of the 1984 heavy metal mockumentary ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ will remember the scene in which the band has a set built that replicates Stonehenge, the Neolithic ruin in Wiltshire, England. Sadly, a careless set of measurements leads the musicians to play alongside a model that’s a disappointing 18 inches high instead of 18 feet tall, a failure shown on a tour and, shivering, accentuated by the dancing dwarfs who were called in to perform the prop to look bigger.
Thirty-seven years later, it turns out that the boulder of the film contains some historical truth. On Friday, a team of archaeologists reported in Antiquity magazine that they had excavated a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, which they believe was partially dismantled, pulled 175 miles to Salisbury Plain, and reassembled as Stonehenge.
Mike Parker Pearson, a professor at University College London who led the study, said the stones could be transported as part of a larger movement of people to the area. “Stonehenge is a second-hand monument,” he said sardonically. The investigation will be featured in a BBC documentary, “Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed,” which will air in Britain on Friday night.
Stonehenge was built in stages from about 3,000 to 1,500 BC, starting with a circular ditch and bank along with 56 Aubrey holes, a ring of chalk pits surrounding a stone circle. A 2008 excavation of a well led by Dr. Parker Pearson, revealed that it contained an upright bluestone, so named for its blue-gray hue. The secluded ring of this igneous rock, each about ten feet high, was built centuries before larger sandstone slabs known as sarsens are said to have originated from West Woods, 25 miles away on the southern edge of the Marlborough Downs.
Geologist Herbert Thomas determined in 1923 that the dolerite used to build Stonehenge came from a spur in the Preseli Hills in West Wales. In 2011, Dr. Parker Pearson established two megalithic quarries in that region and began searching nearby for ritual structures that may have provided the bluestone and blueprint. Although several circular monuments were explored and excavated, none turned out to be Neolithic. In an interview, Dr. Parker Pearson said his investigators had a “terrible time” trying to find evidence of a proto-Stonehenge.
The researchers were about to give up when they returned to a spot called Waun Mawn, where a handful of fallen bluestone had seemingly been placed in an arc. “The arrangement was first recorded a century ago,” said Dr. Parker Pearson. “Early archaeologists’ theory that it could be a circle was largely rejected or simply ignored.”
In 2011, his own magnetometer and earth resistance surveys had failed to locate geophysical anomalies that could provide evidence of a circle or monument. “We concluded that since the instruments didn’t show us anything, there couldn’t be anything there,” recalls Dr. Parker Pearson himself. “A serious mistake.”
In the summer of 2017, the archaeologists dug trenches at both ends of the arch from serving stones and discovered two holes that each had once contained stones. When further investigations involving earth resistance, ground penetrating radar and electromagnetic induction came to nothing, the team did what was literally a last ditch effort beyond the arch and discovered four distinctive tubular wells from which standing monoliths had been removed.
Extrapolating from the positions of the empty greenhouses and the fallen bluestone, the researchers sketched a circle about 100 meters wide – the same diameter as the earth ditch that originally enclosed Stonehenge. Dr. Parker Pearson, raised with boyish joy, noted that Waun Mawn and Stonehenge are the only two Neolithic monuments in Britain to meet those specifications. To his further delight, the entrance to both circles aligned with the midsummer solstice sunrise.
The team was able to determine when the sediment in the well openings was last exposed to light. The study suggested that Waun Mawn is the oldest known stone circle in Britain, dating back to about 3,400 BCE, and that the circle shortly before the construction of Stonehenge in 3,000 BCE. Was dismantled.
Dr. Parker Pearson theorized that the six ghost holes and four remaining standing stones were part of a larger circle of 30 to 50 pillars, spread out haphazardly than the initial grouping of bluestone at Stonehenge. Those four stones are about the same size and size as the 43 bluestone that remain in Stonehenge, and are exactly the same rock type as three of them. One of the Stonehenge hard stones has an unusual cross-section with a pentagonal shape corresponding to one of the openings at Waun Mawn.
“It could have been in that hole,” said Dr. Parker Pearson. “The evidence isn’t categorical, but it’s really very suggestive.”
When asked why the Waun Mawn Stones were moved to Salisbury, he turned to his colleague, a Madagascar archaeologist named Ramilisonina, who developed a new interpretation of the ritual landscape around Stonehenge: the megaliths were used to represent the ancestors and more or less their memories alive for eternity.
“The dismantling of Waun Mawn and the rise of Stonehenge could have been part of a larger migration to an axis mundi where the earth and the sky are in harmony,” said Dr. Parker Pearson. These ancient people, he speculated, “may have taken their monuments as a sign of their ancestral identity, which they needed to settle in a New Jerusalem.”
How were the megaliths transported from South Wales to Salisbury? Dr. Parker Pearson questions the once popular theory that they came by sea. “Our work has really had a bit of a spanner in the works,” he said. “The dominant sources of the bluestone are the quarries on the northern slopes of the mountains, and it seems unlikely that they would have floated up the steep northern ridge before being drained down the southern slopes into the valley.”
He favors a land route over which the massive stones, each weighing up to four tons, can be pulled by up to 400 people on rows of poles and wooden sleds. “This would have been like going to the moon,” he said, “but the Neolithic equivalent.”
Megan Specia contributed reporting.