Had there been significant contact between the Minoans and Stonehenge, one would expect that the travellers would have left evidence from the eastern Mediterranean: goods, perhaps, or traces of trade or even physical habitation.
Seen in that light the close similarity of awls, knapping tools, bracelets, armbands, scales, knives, twisted bow drills, triangulated socket points, spades, daggers, necklaces, earrings, bangles, torcs, rings, brooches, earlobe adornments, cups, plates, lance heads, chisels, spearheads, gaff hooks, weights, pins, buttons, fasteners, cleavers, hammers, saws, bradawls, drills – thirty-five separate types of artefacts – cannot be a coincidence.
Was Stonehenge a holy site for the Minoans? Perhaps even a place of pilgrimage? Had they, as part of the long-term trading agreements they held with the local Britons, begun to settle here?
Further reading:
Professor Hawkins: “… Archaeologists are traditionally conservative and ungiven to theorising, but the indications of a Mediterranean origin for Stonehenge [phase III] are so strong that they allow themselves to wonder if some master designer might not have come all the way from that pre-Homeric but eternally wine dark southern sea [the Mediterranean] . . .
Herodotus: ‘ . . . it is nevertheless certain that both our tin and our amber are brought from the extremely remote regions in the western extremes of Europe’.
