We still don’t know why ancient Britons used a series of gigantic rocks to build the stunning monument of Stonehenge.
But scientists believe they may have cracked an ancient mystery and discovered who was involved in its construction.
It’s already known that the ‘bluestones’ of Stonehenge came from West Wales and were probably sourced from the Preseli Mountains.
Now a team of scientists led by Oxford University have discovered that many of the men who dragged the rocks into place to make the famous circles of standing stones hailed from Wales too.
The new study suggests a number of the people buried at the Wessex site may have transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument’s construction.
An analysis of 25 skull bones left over from being cremated at the site found at least 10 did not live near Stonehenge prior to their death.
Scientific analysis of the remains indicate these men lived in western Britain, a region that includes west Wales.
The findings show how people moved between west Wales and Wessex in the Late Neolithic era as well as demonstrating the importance of inter-regional connections for moving both materials and people in the construction and use of Stonehenge.
It combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.
The 25 skulls were originally excavated n the 1920s from a network of 56 pits placed around the inner circumference and ditch of Stonehenge, known as ‘Aubrey Holes’.
Lead author John Pouncett, a spatial technology officer at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, said the research ‘gives us a new insight into the communities who built Stonehenge’.
‘The cremated remains from the enigmatic Aubrey Holes and updated mapping of the biosphere suggest that people from the Preseli Mountains not only supplied the bluestones used to build the stone circle but moved with the stones and were buried there too,’ he continued.
Dr Snoeck, now at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, demonstrated that cremated bone faithfully retains its strontium isotope composition.
This technique allowed archaeologists to investigate where these people had lived during the last decade or so of their lives.
The cremated human bone came from an early phase of the site’s history around 3000 BC when it was mainly used as a cemetery.
The cremated remains from Stonehenge were first excavated by Colonel William Hawley in the 1920s, who reburied them at the site to be dug up at a later date.
Dr Snoeck said: ‘The recent discovery that some biological information survives the high temperatures reached during cremation (up to 1000 degrees Celsius) offered us the exciting possibility to finally study the origin of those buried at Stonehenge.’
Dr Rick Schulting, lead author and associate professor in scientific and prehistoric archaeology at Oxford, explained: ‘To me, the really remarkable thing about our study is the ability of new developments in archaeological science to extract so much new information ¬from such small and unpromising fragments of burnt bone.
‘Some of the people’s remains showed strontium isotope signals consistent with west Wales, the source of the bluestones that are now being seen as marking the earliest monumental phase of the site.’
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports and is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, University College London, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris.
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