We went to a similarly historic place in Ireland, north of Dublin, where the oldest structure still in existence stands (it is a chamber under a man-made mound of earth) - and archaeologists believe that the rocks used to make that structure were transported over a hundred years' time, like those in Stonehenge.
Stonehenge May Have Been Built Somewhere Else First, Then Moved
by Ed Mazza, Huffington Post 12/8/15
Stonehenge may not look very portable, but scientists say part of the massive ancient monument may have been first built somewhere else before being moved hundreds of years later.
The new finding, published on Monday in the journal Antiquity, traces the bluestones -- or the smaller stones used at the 5,000-year-old monument -- to two quarries in Wales.
But while the mystery of where the stones came from may have been solved, a new one has just emerged: Those stones were pulled from the quarries some five centuries before Stonehenge itself was built in what is now Wiltshire, 140 miles away.
"It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that’s pretty improbable in my view," Professor Mike Parker Pearson of UCL Institute of Archaeology and director the research team behind the study said in a news release. "It's more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire."
Stonehenge's large "sarsen" standing stones, which weigh about 25 tons each, are from a quarry relatively close to the the monument. Researchers have long believed the smaller two-ton bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, but the team of geologists and archaeologists behind the new study says they've found the exact locations in Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin.
|Credit: Adam Stanford/Aerial-Cam Ltd
The research team uncovered an ancient "loading bay" from which the stones were pulled as well as the remains of burnt hazelnuts and charcoal from the quarry workers' campfires.
Radiocarbon dating on the hazelnuts and charcoal puts the Craig Rhos-y-felin quarry at 3400 BC and Carn Goedog at 3200 BC. Work on Stonehenge is believed to have begun in 2900 BC.