Stonehenge, England’s pride, is a Welsh wonder

Analysis of 5,000-year-old cremated skull fragments buried at site reveals their true place of origin

STANDING tall in the Wiltshire countryside for centuries, Stonehenge is perhaps the most English of monuments. But a new study suggests that it was actually built by the Welsh.

Although it was known that the bluestones of the megalithic monument had been brought from the Preseli Hills in Wales, it was generally thought the builders travelled there from modern-day Wiltshire.

However, isotope analysis by Oxford University and University College London (UCL) of the skulls of people buried at the 5,000-year-old Neolithic monument show unmistakable Welsh origins.

Isotopes of elements occur everywhere in the environment, and those that are in the food we eat or the water we drink become incorporated into our tissue and bones. By looking at the different ratios, it is possible to work out where and when a person lived based on their isotope make-up.

Prof Mike Parker Pearson, of UCL, who believes that the whole monument may have once stood in Wales, said: “This is a really exciting discovery because it shows how far some of the Stonehenge people travelled.

“What’s really fascinating is that this date of around 3000 BC coincides with our radiocarbon dates for quarrying at the bluestone outcrops in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire.

“Some of the people buried at Stonehenge might have even been involved in moving the stones – a journey of more than 180 miles.”

Archaeological analysis has largely focused on what the megalithic monument was used for, rather than who built it. One of the problems is that many of the human remains were cremated, so it was thought isotope analysis would be impossible.

However, new developments in analysis, pioneered by Christophe Snoeck during his doctoral research at Oxford, showed cremated bone does still hold crucial information. Dr Snoeck, a lead author of the research, which is published in the journal Nature Scientific

Reports, said: ‘The recent discovery that some biological information survives the high temperatures reached during cremation [up to 1,832F, or 1,000C] offered us the exciting possibility to finally study the origin of those [people] buried at Stonehenge.”

The team analysed skull fragments from 25 individuals which were originally excavated in the Twenties. Analysis of the fragments, which dated to around 3000BC, around the time the monument was built, showed that at least 10 of the 25 had not spent most of their life near Stonehenge.

Instead, they found the isotope ratios in the remains were consistent with living in western Britain, a region that includes west Wales – the known source of Stonehenge’s bluestones.

John Pouncett, of Oxford’s School of Archaeology and a lead author on the paper, said: “[This] suggests that people from the Preseli Mountains not only supplied the bluestones used to build the circle, but moved with the stones and were buried there, too.”