Nobody knows where Stonehenge's giant stones came from
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtThe source of Stonehenge's huge upright sarsen stones is a mystery. We know the smaller bluestones came from Wales, but where the builders quarried the big ones has been debated for four centuries.
NowIn July 2020 a geochemical study matched 50 of the 52 sarsens to West Woods, a spot about 15 miles (25 km) north of the monument on the Marlborough Downs. A core drilled from Stone 58 in the 1950s, returned to England in 2018, gave researchers the chemical fingerprint to make the match.
What actually happened
The sarsens are the ones that make Stonehenge look like Stonehenge: the 20-plus-tonne uprights and lintels of the outer circle and the great inner trilithons. Their origin had been argued since at least the seventeenth century, with guesses ranging from the immediate vicinity to distant downs, and no one could prove any of them.
The break came from an unlikely artifact. During 1950s repairs, a metal core was drilled out of Stone 58 and kept as a souvenir by a man named Robert Phillips, who emigrated to America. He returned it in 2018, and it gave the team a pristine interior sample to analyze without damaging the monument. Portable X-ray fluorescence on all the standing sarsens plus mass spectrometry on the core pinned 50 of 52 to a single source area.
The result rewrote a line every guidebook had carried. It does not solve everything, the two odd stones out still need a home, and how Neolithic people moved 20-tonne blocks 15 miles remains open, but the central mystery of where the sarsens came from was, after 400 years, answered in 2020.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2020, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2020 learned the earlier version.