Professor Colin Richards, of the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute, is co-author of a new paper proposing that a stone circle in Wales was the source of the first megaliths erected at the site of Stonehenge.
Previously, the Stones of Stonehenge research project confirmed the Wiltshire monument’s bluestones came from quarry sites in the Preseli Hills in Wales. This prompted the reinvestigation the nearby Waun Mawn stone circle to see whether it also shared links with Stonehenge.
The results, published in the journal Antiquity today, suggest the Welsh stone circle was partially dismantled in prehistory and moved 280km (175 miles) to Salisbury Plain, where it was rebuilt to form the first of Stonehenge’s five distinct phases.
The research is also the subject of a BBC2 television documentary, Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed, tonight, Friday, at 9pm. (UK)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s5xm
Only four megaliths remain at Waun Mawn stone circle, which lies close to quarries that, in the past ten years, were identified as the source of the Stonehenge bluestones.
But finding the Waun Mawn stone circle was not easy.
As far back as 2010, the researchers suspected the remaining four stones were part of a circle. Geophysics, however, proved unproductive and the next five field seasons were spent investigating other sites without success.
In 2017, in a last throw of the dice, they carried out a trial excavation at Waun Mawn and found two empty socket-holes. Renewed geophysical and ground radar surveys failed to reveal anything other than that the ground was unsuitable for geophysics. It was clear that only digging would reveal the buried sockets.
So far, excavation has located the position of six of the missing Waun Mawn megaliths. Extrapolating from these, the complete circle likely numbered 30-50 stones. These were arranged more irregularly than at Stonehenge, although two were positioned as “gunsights” forming an entrance aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise.
The stone circle had a diameter of 110m, not only making it the third largest stone circle in Britain but matching the diameter of the ditch enclosing Stonehenge’s primary phase.
Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating, which measures the length of time since quartz was last exposed to sunlight, indicates the circle was constructed between 3600-3200BC and is therefore one of the earliest stone circles in the country.
The excavation also revealed a lack of activity after 3000BC, by which point construction had started at Stonehenge. This, together with the fact that its bluestones came from known Stonehenge quarries, led the research team to conclude that Waun Mawn was taken apart and its megaliths used for a new monument on Salisbury Plain. Some were probably incorporated into subsequent iterations of Stonehenge and a few of the Waun Mawn megaliths may still be present at the site. For instance, one of the remaining Stonehenge bluestones has an unusual cross-section which matches one of the Waun Mawn stone-sockets. Chippings in that socket are of the same rock type as the Stonehenge stone.
More at
https://archaeologyorkney.com/2021/02/12/researchers-suggest-stonehenges-first-stone-circle-was-transplanted-from-welsh-hillside/
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