Most know Stonehenge for its circle of towering, seemingly immovable monoliths, but perhaps lesser known is that during the site’s early days, it mainly functioned as a cemetery. Thousands of years after the first interments at Stonehenge, the dead are finally revealing their secrets—and, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports, the biggest revelation is that many of those buried at the site originally came from some 140 miles away in western Wales.
The researchers, led by Christophe Snoeck, a post-doctoral researcher at Brussels’ Vrije University, found that 10 of the 25 individuals tested could not have lived exclusively in Stonehenge for the last ten years of their lives. Instead, the team suggests, the deceased originated in Wales, a neighboring region believed to have provided the site’s bluestones—smaller, non-native rocks nicknamed for the blue hue evident when they are wet or broken.
The Washington Post’s Ben Guarino writes that Snoeck and his colleagues cannot definitively prove that the Welsh individuals buried at Stonehenge were the ones responsible for the bluestones’ delivery and subsequent construction. However, the remains, which date to about 3000 through 2500 B.C.E, appear to coincide with the estimated time period of the monument’s early construction.
“The earliest dates are tantalizingly close to the date we believe the bluestones arrived, and though we cannot prove they are the bones of the people who brought them, there must at least be a relationship,” co-author John Pouncett tells Kennedy. “The range of dates raises the possibility that for centuries people could have been brought to Stonehenge for burial with the stones.”
By Meilan Solly
In 1860, a concerned tourist wrote to the London Times decrying the “foolish, vulgar and ruthless practice of the majority of visitors” to Stonehenge “of breaking off portions of it as keepsakes.” Today, taking a hammer and chisel to a Neolithic monument seems like obvious vandalism, but during the Victorian era, such behavior was not only common but expected.
English antiquarian tourists, who were mostly upper class, had developed the habit of taking makeshift relics from the historical sites they visited during the 18th century. By 1830, the practice was so widespread that the English painter Benjamin Robert Haydon dubbed it “the English disease,” writing, “On every English chimney piece, you will see a bit of the real Pyramids, a bit of Stonehenge! […] You can’t admit the English into your gardens but they will strip your trees, cut their names on your statues, eat your fruit, & stuff their pockets with bits for their musaeums.”
For centuries, both locals and visitors had taken pieces of Stonehenge for use in folk remedies. As early as the 12th century, rumors of the stones’ healing properties appear in the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in 1707, Reverend James Brome wrote that their scrapings were still thought to “heal any green Wound, or old Sore.” In the 1660s, the English antiquarian John Aubrey reported a local superstition that “pieces or powder of these stones, putt into their wells, doe drive away the Toades.”
Eventually, tourists were not just taking from Stonehenge, but also leaving their mark, too. By the middle of the 17th century, tourist graffiti was appearing on the stones. The name of Johannes Ludovicus de Ferre—abbreviated “IOH : LVD : DEFERRE”—is etched, and so is the engraving “I WREN,” which may refer to Christopher Wren, the famed architect who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As early as 1740, the archaeologist William Stukeley was decrying “the unaccountable folly of mankind in breaking pieces off [the stones] with great hammers,” and by the end of the 19th century, according an 1886 commenter, “Almost every day takes some fragment from the ruins, or adds something to the network of scrawling with which the surface of the stone is defaced.”
by Joselin Sears
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