In a surprising development, researchers have announced that the so-called "Altar Stone in the center of Stonehenge came not from Wales, as many of the other stones did, but from Scotland.
That’s actually pretty impressive. It was impressive enough that the builders of Stonehenge were known to have brought most of the massive stones from Wales, which is already pretty far away for people of limited technical means. But to have a key stone brought from even further away in Scotland is pretty mind boggling. These prehistoric perfectionists just knew that Welsh stones wouldn’t do for the center of their creation, and they just had to get it from a prim source even further away.
I was once at a talk given by Sir Fred Hoyle on his interpretation of Stonehenge (as an eclipse predictor) and mentioned that it was likely they brought from Wales mostly by water, but that it had been shown that it was possible to move them overland on log rafts where you have a raft on logs, move it forward and when it exits a log on the back end you move it to the front. He added that this had been shown possible using graduate students. And, so help me, someone in the audience shouted at this point, “As logs”.
Well, that shows the expected respect for grad students.
I’ve read quite a bit about Stonehenge, both fact and fiction, starting with Gerald Hawkins’ books. The log roller theory (I’ve encountered it before) seems plausible, and a lot easier than just dragging the stones along the ground.
Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain said that Merlin brought the “Giant’s Dance” over from Ireland (which would’ve required boats or rafts), and they he used not magic, but Ingenious Devices. A raft on rollers is ingenious enough for me, especially if I was providing some of the muscle power.
There have been a number of attempts at moving large stones using methods that would have been possible in ancient times. Here’s one that has a Youtube clip:
The impression I got from Hoyle was that a couple of the students simply picked up the log left out and carried it forward. If a log weighed, say 100 lb, this would be no problem.
That’s certainly what I’ve seen in any re-enactments.
But …
In the real world they probably had to roll stones over less than ideal rolled-flat mown turf as found on college campuses and public parks. The larger the diameter of a “wheel” the better it handles variable terrain. Hence the large wheels on 1800s stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons.
I could imagine in poorer terrain they’d be using rollers too hefty for a 2-person carry.
OTOH, the weight of a roller goes up at the square of the radius. If you want to use a big roller for bad or soft terrain you gotta push the weight of one. That tradeoff might well go negative not far past 5" radius.
At least on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), they did, as well as another technique that included “walking” the moai (not unlike shifting a refrigerator) at times. There’s still a traditional “walking moai” dance that mimics the pivoting motion.
There’s a guy in Michigan who was single-handedly creating a replica of Stonehenge in his backyard, using that technique (among others). I haven’t looked him up lately-- He might be finished by now.
He also calculated that, using his techniques, it would take 30,000 man-years to build the Great Pyramid. 1000 men working for three decades (or some other equivalent combination) seems entirely reasonable for the resources of a Pharaoh.
There have been TV documentaries over here experimenting with methods to move and set up massive stones, and also one that identified henges as having been set up on Orkney some time before Stonehenge and other more southerly henges and stone alignments.
So it didn’t strike me as that surprising that a large stone might have come from the north, or might even have been an early focal point for further development of the site.
The ancient world seems to have been more interconnected, mostly by seas and rivers, than we usually imagine.
It is important to bear in mind that the stones brought from very long distances away were some of the smaller ones. The big sarsen stones were from the Marlborough Downs, not Wales or Scotland. The ‘Altar Stone’ is about twice the size of the bluestones from Wales, but, even so, it is still significantly smaller than the sarsen stones.
The best recent discussion of the practical issues involved in moving the stones is Mike Pitts’s How to Built Stonehenge. He is sceptical of both the rollers theory and the boat theory. His 2023 Gresham lecture about Stonehenge discusses the origins of the rollers theory and why it is was based on a misconception (starting at about 25 minutes). He thinks that they probably instead used a laid timber track. His blog has a detailed post about the latest news.
One point all the media coverage has missed is that the academic arguments over cultural ties between Stonehenge and Scotland (particularly between Gordon Barclay and Richard Madgwick) had already been very bad-tempered. Even to the point of lawyers being consulted. A flavour of that controversy, from one side, can be found here. Part of that debate has been about how the media (but sometimes with the collusion of archaeologists) consistently oversimplifies archaeological stories about Stonehenge, usually by trying to find some supposed contemporary angle.
