Who built this stone circle and how was this ancient feat of engineering pulled off?

WORDS DR MATTHEW SYMONDS

Over 4,500 years ago, people gathered at a cemetery in what is now Wiltshire in southwest England. Ringed by a circular bank, cremated bones had first been interred here 400 years earlier. But they were not congregating to administer burial rites.

Instead, they were embarking on a project to transform the site into an architectural marvel. Today their work is celebrated as Britain’s most famous – and most mysterious – archaeological monument: Stonehenge. Working long before the dawn of writing in Britain, their motives have been lost for millennia – as have some of the techniques they used.

Over the centuries, the absence of hard facts has made Stonehenge a magnet for mythology. The earliest surviving legend, dating back to around 1136 CE, claims that the legendary figure Merlin shipped an Irish stone circle erected by giants back to Britain. Since then, Romans, Phoenicians, druids and even aliens have been cast as the masterminds behind this grand design.

It was only after the ‘radiocarbon revolution’ in the 1960s that the true architects of Stonehenge were unmasked. By measuring the levels of decay of radioactive carbon in organic material dumped when the stones were erected and then calibrating them against a set of dates derived from tree rings, the monument’s origins finally emerged. Rather than having been moved by Merlin or created by Romans, Stonehenge proved to be much older. A date of around 2600 BCE for the first stone circle placed it firmly in the British Neolithic period, towards the end of the Stone Age.