Stonehenge: what has actually been established

Stonehenge is not one monument. It is a sequence of them, built and rebuilt on the same spot over roughly fifteen hundred years, and almost every confident statement about it applies to only one phase.

The sequence

Around 3000 BC: a circular ditch and bank with a ring of pits inside it. At this stage there are no large standing stones. Cremated human remains were placed in and around the pits.

Around 2500 BC: the sarsens arrive. The great trilithons and the outer circle with its continuous lintel ring are erected. This is the monument everyone pictures.

The bluestones — the smaller stones — are moved and rearranged repeatedly across the whole span, which is one reason the site is so hard to read.

Where the stones came from

The sarsens were traced in 2020 by geochemical fingerprinting to West Woods on the Marlborough Downs, roughly twenty-five kilometres north. Fifty of the fifty-two surviving sarsens share a chemical signature, meaning they came from one place at one time.

The bluestones come from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, around 250 kilometres away, and specific outcrops have been identified. Quarrying evidence has been excavated at Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog.

And in August 2024 the Altar Stone — the large recumbent sandstone at the centre — was shown by mineral analysis to come not from Wales but from the Orcadian Basin in north-east Scotland, some 750 kilometres away.

Why the Altar Stone finding matters

Because it changes the scale of the network rather than the mechanics.

A stone moved from northern Scotland to Salisbury Plain in the third millennium BC implies contact, coordination and probably sea transport across the whole length of Britain. That is a statement about Neolithic society, and it was produced by looking at zircon grains under a microscope.

It is also a good demonstration of how this field actually moves: not by a new theory, but by a new measurement overturning something everyone had assumed for a century.

Durrington Walls

Three kilometres from Stonehenge is a henge enclosure that held one of the largest Neolithic settlements known in northern Europe.

Excavation found house floors, hearths, and enormous quantities of animal bone and pottery — evidence of feasting on a scale that implies people gathering from a wide area.

Isotope analysis of the cattle and pig bones shows animals brought from across Britain, some from hundreds of kilometres away. Tooth analysis of pigs indicates midwinter slaughter.

The picture that emerges is of a landscape rather than a monument: a place of the living in timber at Durrington, a place of the dead in stone at Stonehenge, connected by the river and by avenues, with people travelling to it in midwinter.

The astronomy, stated carefully

The solstitial axis is real and is not in dispute. The monument is aligned on the midsummer sunrise in one direction and the midwinter sunset in the other.

Evidence from nearby Durrington Walls — animal bones showing midwinter slaughter — suggests the midwinter alignment was the important one, which inverts the modern festival emphasis.