Chapter 28 – Stonehenge – the Master Work

We examine the great enigma that is Stonehenge – the master work. Stonehenge is magniﬁcent, sacred and sublime, the bare bones of Britain’s prehistory. People have been worshipping here, it’s thought, since 7200 BC. Stonehenge itself was built in three main phases. The ﬁrst probably dates from 3000 BC to 2920 BC, when people dug out a roughly circular enclosure about 100 metres in diameter, surrounded by a ditch or inner bank, which was built using the earth from the ditch.

The next phase introduced vast stones. For reasons we don’t fully understand, around 2500 BC these huge lumps of rock were brought to the site, probably from the Marlborough Downs 23 miles away. Known as sarsens, each stone erected in the outer ring was about 4.1 metres high and weighed around twenty-ﬁve tons. The large stones in the inner ring – ten uprights and ﬁve lintels – weigh up to ﬁfty tons each and are linked to each other using complex jointing techniques. The ﬁnal arrangement of the stones was almost certainly completed sometime between 2280 and 1930 BC.

The Minoans had arrived in Britain by 2300 BC to collect tin and their technological inﬂuence can be seen in bronze implements dated 2200–2000 BC, when the percentage of tin content in those implements leaps to 11 per cent.4 At some stage (it is hard to prove deﬁnitively when) ﬁve huge stones were repositioned at the centre of Stonehenge, in a very similar way to the central stones at Nabta. So we have builders who could transport massive stones hundreds of miles, then prepare them with bronze tools for astronomical purposes, using a similar layout to the one found at Nabta.

Could the Minoans have been behind that change?

Chapter 28 – Stonehenge – the Master Work

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