“Rocks in my path? I keep them all, one day I will build one of the most epic structures in history. Oh! And, in between, I still have friends together.”
Located on Salisbury Plain in southern England, it is thought to have Stonehenge was built, in phases, between 3.100 e 1.600 a.C..
According to a study this Thursday in Archaeology Internationalit is now theorized that Stonehenge may have been built to symbolize a unification in Stone Age Britain.
This idea could explain the fact that many of the stones that make up the monument were brought from great distances.
In 2015, researchers led by Mike Parker Pearson of University College London located the blue stones in the Preseli Hills, in Walesfrom where they were transported to Salisbury Plain.
A 2020 study found that most sarsens came from West Woods in Wiltshire, Englandabout 25 kilometers away.
Finally, in August, it was verified that the recumbent came from the northeast of Scotland.
Parker Pearson and his colleagues now want to place these discoveries in the archaeological context of Neolithic Britain – which, according to the researcher, was remarkably unified.
“We know that at this point they shared a material culture,” Parker Pearson told . “There is a common material culture stretching from the Scottish islands [como] Orkney to the south coast of England,” he added.
The new theory is that Stonehenge represents a deliberate fusion of styles of monuments: the standing megaliths of southern Britain mixed with the recumbent stones of the far northeast.
To reinforce this argument, Parker Pearson highlights other common points. For example, a type of pottery called appears to have been invented in Orkney and then quickly spread throughout Britain.
“There is a sharing of a style of pottery across the island in a way that has never happened before. These communities are also much more mobile than we ever imagined,” said Parker Pearson.
