Stonehenge’s buried treasure

5,000-year-old remains are not from around there

The mysterious assemblage of 23-tonne rocks at Stonehenge usually steals the show.

But the ground beneath the stones holds secrets, too — 5,000 years ago, this patch of land in Wiltshire, in southern England, was a burial place.

And some of the ancient human remains found at Stonehenge have unusually distant origins, according to a new archeological study of cremated bones published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The remains offer another line of evidence connecting Stonehenge to Wales, 225 km away. A quarry in Wales is probably the source of Stonehenge’s bluestones, so called because of their blue hue revealed when they’re damp or broken.

Christophe Snoeck, a researcher at Vrije University in Belgium who specializes in archeology and chemistry, helped lead the study of 25 people buried at Stonehenge and found that they were from distant lands.

“Forty per cent of the people who we analyzed could not have lived in Stonehenge for the last decade or so of their life,” Snoeck said.

A chemical analysis of their bones indicates that 10 of the 25 people weren’t locals.

The beginnings of this study can be traced back to the 1920s, when archeologists first excavated pits at Stonehenge called Aubrey holes, named after 17th century natural philosopher John Aubrey.

The archeologists identified 58 Neolithic individuals in 56 Aubrey holes. But those archeologists reburied bone fragments in a single hole, creating a jumble that Snoeck likened to a mess of ribs charred together in a post-barbecue fire.

After a team re-excavated the remains in 2008, Snoeck’s co-author, Christie Willis at the University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, began the difficult work of identifying individuals from the jumble. She was successful in 25 cases.