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"In our view, the bones at Stonehenge were the result

May 21, 2019 by Carolyn Mueller

"In our view, the bones at Stonehenge were the result of an environmental process that is not well understood," writes Steven Smith, a senior researcher at the Institute for Archaeology and a former assistant professor in the University of Liverpool's Department of Natural History and Archaeology.

"They were cremated in a place that was much warmer than the soil, and they were in such a way that they were very cold, suggesting that their cremation was carried out in a very cold, high-temperature place."

Smith, who received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 1981, said that the bones of these people probably were burned to make way for the pit's construction, which would have been made up of a mixture of ash and dirt, and then rolled up to build the monument.

After the cremation, the bones were placed in a large mound of stones, then ground to the bedrock, and then crushed to make way for the construction.

"The idea is that people buried there were working hard to survive, and were able to raise the building into a high-temperature area and build a large pit within it," he says.

"To put it in context, we believe that the pits were used to make an early version of the stone wall of Stonehenge, which has a very high surface area, and are connected with other stone structures of the time, such as the Roman temple, the wall of the Roman capital, and the Roman Palace of Venice. We were able to build a whole complex of these pits that were connected to the main site by a series of high-temperature pits."

The pit of Stonehenge in the early medieval period. (Photo courtesy of Steven Smith)

Smith and his colleagues reconstructed these pits using a combination of isotope spectroscopy (tandem mass spectrometry) and electron microscopy. The results show that the pits in the stone wall, which is believed to have been constructed in a similar way to the Roman and Roman Palace pits, were probably created in a very cold, high temperature place, which was where the people were buried.

"A few of the pits were used to make a large pit of iron, which is the oldest metal in Europe," explains Smith. "It was also used in the construction of the Roman palace pit in which the bronze statue of Cleopatra lay over it. These pits were used in the building of the Roman and Roman Palace, and were therefore used as early as the fifth century C.E