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Bran Dawri wrote:
I think I heard someone say they're walking it back already.

The Venus or the Mars story?

Talking about about walking back, apparently there is a major Stonehenge stone that has now been traced to the north of Scotland, about 700km away.

Famous Stonehenge stone came from Scotland not Wales https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207lqdn755o

Common Scotland W.

 Flinty wrote:
Talking about about walking back, apparently there is a major Stonehenge stone that has now been traced to the north of Scotland, about 700km away.

Famous Stonehenge stone came from Scotland not Wales https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207lqdn755o

In before the "Eeeet wUz aLieNz" or the "Eeeeet waZ da kAngs" crowd

 Flinty wrote:
Talking about about walking back, apparently there is a major Stonehenge stone that has now been traced to the north of Scotland, about 700km away.

Famous Stonehenge stone came from Scotland not Wales https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207lqdn755o

Look, they were just having a few tins of Special Brew and it seemed like a good idea at the time…

In all seriousness, I’ve seen some stuff in the past about similarities between the various monuments in the Orkneys and Stonehenge and this seems to further the idea that these Neolithic sites are linked, which is wild given the distances and geography involved. Even today, getting to the very north of Scotland is a pain compared to most of the rest of Great Britain. Also the fact that you still have the Preseli blue stones from Wales as well suggests a degree of communication and common culture across the entire island. There’s going to have to be a fairly serious reexamination of our assumptions about the British society in the Stone Age.


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For starters, the fact that you probably can talk about a British society.

If memory serves from my successful sojourn to Orkney a couple of years ago? It’s believed those who built the Stones of Stenness originated in Portugal, arrived in Orkney, then worked their way South, or at the very least their knack for stone arranging worked its way south.

Extra fun fact? The homes discovered at Skara Brae showed a remarkable similarity to traditional Orcadian homes in terms of build and general layout, which were occupied until the early 20th Century.

I guess when you’ve a limited choice of materials to work with? When it works, it works and there’s little impetus to depart from it.

 Flinty wrote:
Talking about about walking back, apparently there is a major Stonehenge stone that has now been traced to the north of Scotland, about 700km away.

Famous Stonehenge stone came from Scotland not Wales https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c207lqdn755o

Very interesting. The identified region in Scotland is coastal, so my money would be on transportation by boat most of the way to Stonehenge.

Clearly a key Pictish chieftain was needed for the key vote in the British legislature, and wouldn't support the Stonehenge bill unless they won some jobs for North East Pictland

 Jadenim wrote:


In all seriousness, I’ve seen some stuff in the past about similarities between the various monuments in the Orkneys and Stonehenge and this seems to further the idea that these Neolithic sites are linked, which is wild given the distances and geography involved. Even today, getting to the very north of Scotland is a pain compared to most of the rest of Great Britain. Also the fact that you still have the Preseli blue stones from Wales as well suggests a degree of communication and common culture across the entire island. There’s going to have to be a fairly serious reexamination of our assumptions about the British society in the Stone Age.

The concept of primitive peoples migrating long distances and of trade lines that allow products to move vast distances in the ancient world is one of those areas where the literature is already there; but the public and media perception is still playing catch-up (as is common in a lot of sciences).

It's been ages since I last looked at any of it, but even over a decade ago the idea of ancient people moving and transporting goods over large regions is very well established. Let's not forget this isn't too far off when many peoples were nomadic in nature and if you look at nomadic tribes that survived in places like Africa, they would cover huge distances (or at least they used too before the land got carved up into countries with barriers and so forth).


I think its a shock to many because whilst we have insanely fast transport today, we also have a very sedentary mindset/lifestyle/culture that has been around for generations.

Yeah, travel was far more common in the past than people would think. Even if a person never left their "local area" in the stone age that would still have entailed a yearly migration somewhere. Especially before agriculture. You just can't stay in one area if you're not farming.

And the bronze age had trans-continental trade routes because you just can't get tin where you get copper. Most of the tin used in the middle east's big empires is believed to have originated in southern England and Brittany in France. And there were probably some bronze age empires/kingdoms in Europe, they just didn't leave any writing for us to find and the environment there is not as kind to artifacts as the middle east is.

Whilst all of that is true, transporting a 6 ton rock about 700km when there are much closer options available is both impressive and raises many questions as to why that rock in particular.

Stag-do obviously.

 Haighus wrote:
Whilst all of that is true, transporting a 6 ton rock about 700km when there are much closer options available is both impressive and raises many questions as to why that rock in particular.

We can make a lot of guesses, but chances are we might never know the actual reason itself.

It also might not have been a 700gm journey. The rock might have been used for religious or other purposes many times in different religious or similar structures. Perhaps they believed it had power or a unique specific shape that allowed a certain constellation to be read/used in the stars and such. So it made the trip in smaller steps to different sites and today only one site remains.


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 Gert wrote:
Stag-do obviously.

With archaeology there's the standing thing of if you can't work out why something was done - then it was for religious purposes.

Regarding Bronze-age trade routes, I found this podcast quite interesting

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7qY0jl9E7zqRajX0F1W1Le?si=9573060411414a17

I was just perusing this thread and the last page seemed to leave the insistence that seperation of road traffic happened because of the rise of the motorcar.
This is inaccurate.
As far back as 1671 london buildings were installing bollards to seperate the pedestrian pavement from the buggies in the middle of the road.
I.E. Even when there were no regulations, the carriages and carts used the middle and the pedestrians walked alongside the buildings.
That got formally adoped in law in 1766 in the "Paving & Lighting Act" which stipulated that all pavements had to use a raised kerb for traffic seperation.

Then in 1769 Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot made the first steam-powered car capable of carrying passengers.
The Benz patent motorwagen was created in 1886.

I worked as an archaeologist for over 10 years so I suppose I should weigh into this. I know sometimes there can be nothing worse than an "expert" harping on about something My expertise is really the later Iron Age of the UK but there's a lot to talk about in prehistory in general.

I will preface this by saying Stonehenge is a bit naff. It's not the most important or impressive stone circle in the UK or Europe, the Orcadian stones and Irish tomb complexes are much more interesting (I'll get back to this in a bit). Suffice to say it is a culmination of earlier ritual sites that started at the far north of the British and Irish isles.

Stories like this are always interesting because I also used to research public interest in archaeology and how people interacted with it. Stonehenge is world famous and so always draws public interest and this story feeds an interesting narrative about the past.

It's important to understand that this is not exactly new news, it's more a bit of proof of long well evidenced theories.

The original stones were identified as coming from Wales in the 1920s, there was evidence of upland Scottish type objects, objects from the North East and West found during very early excavations. The stone in question was clearly not the other bluestone but was assumed that it had come from somewhere in Wales. What's interesting about this is that it does highlight the movement of people, something that has happened since time began. It's important to link this to modern views on immigration. It shows that throughout human history, we have taken parts of our community with us and moved across the landscape and made our mark wherever we go. So why is that important and what does it really show us now?

Stone circle building in the Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic (a period of around 20,000+ years for reference) had a lot of similarities despite the span of time. It's difficult for people to fully process this length of time because our brains just don't like it. We see such change during our own lives and in that great span of time there will have been countless changes to people and communities that we can simply never truly see in the archaeological record.

This is a part of our history where communities of humans start to exist beyond familial ties. By the Mesolithic we see larger communities, housing complexes and serious interaction with the landscape. We have lots of evidence of trade networks and clear idealisation of the landscape or certain aspects of it. This is where stone circle building really takes off and why in essence that stone and this story does matter.

There is a mixture of transitory, pastoral and sedentary communities by the late Mesolithic and Neolithic, different people move through landscapes while others are beginning to settle and farm areas. Meeting places start to exist as communities trade and interact. Oral history, folklore and mythos start to appear. Stone circles become meeting places, ritual sites, possible religious areas but also trade centres. They are a mark on the landscape created by people wanting to live on past their fleeting lives. In this light they are really comparable with the art of cathedral building. Masters of the craft, those with knowledge helped to build cathedrals in other areas, workers came from all over to work on them. It's not too dissimilar to what happened with some of the larger stone circles.

Research done into other circles shows that often each stone was brought from a different geographic location. It's thought each community would bring a stone to add theirs to a greater whole. Often the stones are shaped and placed to reflect the landscape, mirroring hills and mountains in the distance.

As the nomadic lifestyle of the past starts to die off, it appears to become a more nostalgic time. The Age of Wandering as it were. Stone circles can be seen as an idealism of their past as the larger community centres start to appear. It's clear that identities exist and people want to proudly show them off. Other communities travel far and wide to join with the building works and add to it with their own local piece. It has almost a festival or pilgrimage nature to it.

So yes, although it seems strange that it came from so far, it was typical of the time. Most interesting to me at least is that this is a little spotlight into the past that shows a greater burgeoning humanity, how it interacts with itself and the land.

 Gert wrote:
Stag-do obviously.

With archaeology there's the standing thing of if you can't work out why something was done - then it was for religious purposes.

There was an interesting point raised on a Time Team, relating to Wooden Henges. And essentially, because wood tends to rot away entirely, leaving only post holes? We can’t say for certain such monuments weren’t further decorated.

Not necessarily painted (I think we have ways of detecting pigments applied to ancient stone, even when there’s no visible evidence?), but things like pennants and ribbons. In my head, I’m thinking Maypole type stuff, which just being in my head shouldn’t have any real weight put on it.

Further to what you were saying about links to scotland at the site already being postulated, is the stonehenge site material choice some kind of statement?
Im wondering if the wooden ones were intended to rot away, like a symbolic statement you might see in a modern art site?

I notice that the potential quarrying sites for the scottish and welsh stones could be seen as a "from the furthest point of that country" and ferrying the scottish stone from the orkneys would be one hell of a statement at that point.
I like the idea that it was a statement of British unity well ahead of their time.

In a similar vein? Construction of a new prison in Inverness has come across a prehistoric settlement of roundhouses.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gd49ygn9qo

 Easy E wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
I think I heard someone say they're walking it back already.

The Venus or the Mars story?

The Venus thing.