MYSTERIES, SOLVED!

Remarkable new technology is helping to transform our understanding of Britain’s past, revealing a series of astonishing finds, reports Mary-Ann Ochota

Remarkable new technology is transforming our understanding of ancient sites, revealing astonishing finds.

As you cross the open grassland of Salisbury Plain, the low sun sends raking shadows across dozens of ancient earthworks. As you near the stones, rooks croak and wheel away in the breeze. The sense of history – and mystery – is palpable.

For hundreds of years, Stonehenge – the most famous stone circle in the world – has been a focus of wonder and speculation. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 1100s, declared that the wizard Merlin had stolen a stone circle from a mountainside in Ireland and brought it to this site with the help of giants.

In the 1600s, it was accepted that

Stonehenge must have been built by the Romans because, well, surely it was a bit too complicated for the native Brits to have come up with on their own. With a similar lack of faith in the Brits, Swiss author Erich von Däniken claimed in 1968 that the henge was built by extraterrestrials.

But with the advent of new techniques and technology, some mysteries have been laid to rest. Radiocarbon dating of bone, antler and burned wood shows that the central stone circle we can see at Stonehenge today was built around 2,500BC – some 1,700 years before the Roman Empire began.

And what of the stones themselves? New science and ingenious detective work are helping us to learn more here, too. Now we know where the stones came from. The massive sarsens were probably dragged from West Woods near Marlborough, about 19 miles away. The bluestones have been geologically ‘fingerprinted’ to rock outcrops in the Preseli Hills of West Wales, including Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin – both around 137 miles away from Salisbury Plain.

This year, research led by a team from University College London led to the latest major breakthrough in our understanding of the history of Stonehenge, backing up a theory first floated in the 1920s. It suggests the stones didn’t go directly from the quarries to Salisbury Plain; for hundreds of years, they stood in the Preseli Hills.

Using ground-penetrating radar, researchers identified the site of a dismantled stone circle on moorland at Waun Mawn, near the village of Brynberian. It bore striking similarities to the Stonehenge circle. Both were 110m in diameter. Bluestone chippings in some of the empty stone holes were an exact match to stones at Stonehenge. And 3D modelling technology shows that one surviving stone hole at Waun

Mawn has a distinctive pentagonal shape that appears to be a perfect fit for one of the surviving bluestones at Stonehenge.

Using both radiocarbon and sediment-dating techniques, the researchers built a new timeline: the bluestones were quarried, then erected at Waun Mawn sometime around 3,000BC, before being uprooted and dragged to Wiltshire a few hundred years later.

LASERS AND GENETICS

It’s not just at Stonehenge that technology is transforming the ways we can see the past. In one technique, a powerful laser beam attached to a drone or aircraft sends out pulses that build up a detailed model of the Earth’s surface. Used in archaeology, LiDAR – Light Detection And Ranging – systems help researchers identify patterns in the landscape that might be invisible to the eye, or hidden in woodland. LiDAR has traced 14,000 previously unknown archaeological features in Britain alone, including the possible routes of Roman roads and identified lost settlements on Dartmoor.

Meanwhile, DNA analysis is throwing up new evidence about our ancient ancestors, including their looks and origins. In 1903, workers improving drainage at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge – already a tourist attraction – discovered a skeleton that came to be known as Cheddar Man. Early speculation that the remains were up to 80,000 years old was debunked in the 1970s, when radiocarbon dating suggested that he lived around 10,000 years ago – but that still makes him the oldest whole human skeleton ever found in the UK.

In 2018, researchers from the Natural History Museum used DNA from a bone in Cheddar

Man’s inner ear to show that it was likely he had dark brown skin, blue or green eyes and dark hair. Previously, it had been thought that northern Europeans had developed paler skin much earlier, as an adaptation to lower levels of sunlight. Find out more here: nhm.ac.uk/ discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britainblue-eyed-boy.html

A RIDDLE IN CHALK

You might worry that these new scientific techniques might demystify the past, and destroy the romance and magic of well-loved sites in the process. But usually research findings create as many new conundrums as they solve.

The Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset is a perfect example. For a long time, experts believed the 55m-high chalk figure was made either during the Iron Age (800BC to 43AD) or the Roman occupation of Britain (43AD to 410AD). The most controversial theory was that the giant’s origins were much more recent – an insult aimed at Oliver Cromwell, puritanical Lord Protector of England from 1653 to 1658.

But a dating technique known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) has recently solved at least part of this giant riddle. OSL dating measures the amount of energy stored in naturally occurring grains of quartz. This can be used as a ‘clock’ to show when soil containing the quartz particles was last exposed to light.

Unexpectedly, the OSL dates for the giant, published in May this year, indicate that he was built at some time between 700AD and 1100AD; that’s nowhere close to the Iron Age, Romans or Oliver Cromwell. Instead, it appears that he was created in the medieval period, a time when Anglo-Saxon kings ruled over south and west, and Vikings were in the north and east of Britain.

Intriguingly, Cerne Abbey, just 300m from the giant, was founded in 987AD, meaning that the giant and the abbey lived side by side for centuries. The new mystery arises: once established, why would the Christian abbey have tolerated a hill-sized pagan idol with a giant phallus? It’s difficult to explain and the

“Science doesn’t solve the riddles, it simply opens up new avenues of analysis and investigation”

new dates raise as many questions as they answer. That’s the beauty of science; it doesn’t solve the riddles completely, it simply opens up new avenues of analysis and investigation.

THE SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY

Finally, rest assured that it doesn’t always take cutting-edge laboratory techniques to make new discoveries. Earlier this year, on a whim, Hamish Fenton picked up a torch and decided to explore Dunchraigaig Cairn in Argyll’s Kilmartin Glen, an early Bronze Age burial monument with stone-lined compartments. Despite the fact this site has been surveyed and studied for more than 100 years, in the torchlight Hamish spotted something entirely new: across the enormous rock roof slab of one of the compartments were carvings of deer.

This kind of figurative art is incredibly rare – only a couple of examples dating to the Neolithic or Bronze Age have ever been found in Britain. Most British prehistoric rock art is abstract – concentric circles, dots, lines and swirls – with no pictures of identifiable things. But two of the carvings at Dunchraigaig clearly show red deer stags with full-grown antlers, others show smaller animals, perhaps females or juvenile deer.

A sharp eye and a curious spirit – it’s still how some of the most remarkable discoveries are made. And it’s what unites us with our adventurous ancestors, who populated Britain and created the landscapes and ancient sites we can still explore and study today.

Ground-penetrating radar and 3D modelling technology, combined with radiocarbon dating, have uncovered fascinating new information about the sarsen stones and bluestones that make up the prehistoric stone circle of Stonehenge, seen here from above

ABOVE This year, archaeologists working at Waun Mawn in the Preseli Hills used ground-penetrating radar to discover the ‘footprint’ of a dismantled stone circle – revealed to have intriguing parallels to Stonehenge, including a summer solstice sunrise alignment. Some of the stone holes they found are circled

ABOVE Visit Gough’s Cave to see a replica of Cheddar Man’s skeleton INSET DNA analysis revealed it was likely that Cheddar Man had dark brown skin, dark hair and blue or green eyes, as this reconstruction shows

ABOVE The rocky outcrop of Carn Goedog in Wales’ Preseli Mountains where some of Stonehenge’s bluestones were quarried BELOW A remaining stone at Waun Mawn still stands tall, 5,000 years after it was erected

A new LiDAR scan of the Cerne Abbas Giant recently revealed some evidence that the line across the giant’s waist was at some point – perhaps originally – continuous. Which might mean the giant started off wearing trousers and his most prominent asset is a later addition. The faint pentagon shape you might spot surrounding the giant is the remains of a 1920s fence line. The squarish enclosure above the giant’s head is ‘The Trendle’, an enclosure that may be more than 2,000 years old

ABOVE Earlier this year, amateur archaeologist Hamish Fenton slipped inside a burial chamber on a side of Dunchraigaig Cairn and, using only a torch, discovered delicate rock carvings, thought to be between 4,000 and 5,000 years old INSET The layout of the Dunchraigaig carvings, with two red deer stags plus three smaller animals, possibly females

Mary-Ann Ochota is a BBC TV presenter and author. Her books, Secret Britain: Unearthing Our Mysterious Past and Hidden Histories: A Spotter’s Guide to the British Landscape, explore archaeological treasures across Britain. maryannochota.com @MaryAnnOchota on Twitter and Instagram