Scientists Finally Opened This Shaft Under Stonehenge — And Hid Was Chilling

Everybody asks the same questions at Stonehenge and they are all about the stones. Where they came from, how they were moved, why they line up. The stones are not the oldest thing there. Before a single sarsen went up, somebody dug fifty six pits in a precise circle and filled them with cremated human remains, and the total across the site may run as high as two hundred and forty people. It is one of the largest Neolithic cemeteries known in Britain, and the monument the world photographs was built on top of it. In this one I go through how that got proved. Colonel Hawley, digging in the twenties with no way to study fragile burnt bone, gathered the remains from multiple pits and reburied them together in Aubrey Hole 7, which accidentally created an archive. Eighty years later Mike Parker Pearson's team reopened it. And the technique that cracked it works because of something I find genuinely striking. Everyone assumed cremation destroyed strontium signatures. It does the opposite. The heat recrystallises the bone and locks the isotopes into a matrix more stable than unburnt bone, so the fire that erased everything else about these people permanently sealed the record of where they had lived. Ten of twenty five individuals did not match Salisbury Plain at all. They matched the Preseli Mountains in west Wales, two hundred miles away, the same place the bluestones came from. And some appear to have been cremated elsewhere entirely and carried here as ash.
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