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If archaeology is a metaphor for the excavation of the psyche, a documentary about the 5,000-year-old enigma feels timely
Connections between the great neolithic monument of Stonehenge and the hills of west Wales have been observed for centuries. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 18th century about a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, remarked that it was “very like Stone-henge in Wiltshire”. In 1923, the geologist HH Thomas established beyond doubt that the monument’s smaller, slimmer, inner stones – not to be confused with the heftier outer sarsens with their great lintels – originated in the Welsh Preseli Hills. And 70 years ago, in A Land, her tough-minded, lyrical book about the geology and archaeology of Britain, Jacquetta Hawkes speculated that the bluestones “were brought from Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain because in Wales they had already absorbed holiness from their use in some other sacred structure”.
The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, a decade of whose work on Stonehenge is the subject of a BBC documentary that was broadcast on Friday, would find nothing to argue with in that assertion. His new claim, though, is that he and his team have found the exact spot from which the bluestones originate. That is, the very quarry from which they were hewn. More than that, he thinks he has located the spot, on the hill of Waun Mawn in Wales, where the stones were once positioned in a great circle, before each boulder, weighing between two and five tonnes apiece, was transported 150 miles to Salisbury Plain, in a 5,000-year-old feat of engineering almost beyond imagining. Continue reading...