British Archaeology

A “lost” boulder rediscovered in a box in Salisbury Museum has provided powerful evidence that the bluestones of Stonehenge were transported from West Wales by glacier ice.

The evidence also makes it clear that the story of the transport of 80 bluestones by heroic Neolithic tribesmen, one of the great Stonehenge myths should now be dumped.

New research, published today in the International Quaternary Science Journal, describes in detail the surface characteristics of the boulder, which suggest that it has had a complex history beginning with glacial entrainment and transport in North Pembrokeshire and ending at Stonehenge with human damage in Neolithic and modern times.