UCL Professor Finds Stonehenge Remnants in Wales

SAM FEARNLEY REPORTS ON THE LATEST EVIDENCE THAT SHOWS STONEHENGE MAY HAVE BEEN FIRST ERECTED IN WALES

In an announcement on Monday, a team of researchers from UCL are said to have found evidencethat  two sites in Wales supplied stones for the Stonehenge monument. The quarries are about 180 kilometres away from the actual Stonehenge site.

The stones in question are called the ‘bluestones’, which form an inner arc at the site, in Salisbury, Wilshire.

The team identified that these sites in Wales are the only places where one can find spotted dolerite, a specific type of rock in common with the bluestones.

Archaeologists have also found evidence of stone tools, dirt ramps, and an ancient road which would have led out of the quarry.

Professor Mike Parker Pearson, Professor of British Later Prehistory at UCL, said:

They built extensive facilities here: platforms, ramps, a loading bay. You can see chisel marks where they drove in wooden wedges at the recesses on the outcrop.

The gap between activity at the quarries and the actual construction was about 400 years. Parker Pearson suggests that this is because the stones were first used in a local monument, and then they were taken down to Wiltshire at a later date.

Parker Pearson, in conversation with CNN, said:

We don’t make that many fantastic discoveries in a lifetime of archeology but this is certainly one them…

The discovery has been widely covered in the national media.