782 



NA rURE 



[June 17, 1922 



trilithons of large blocks of sarsen. Two only remain 

 standing" and one stone of the third. They have 

 lintels, but the lintels were not continuous and merely 

 formed a cap to the two upright stones. 



The trilithons are not arranged in a circle but take 

 the form of a crescent or horse-shoe, as also do a series 

 of fifteen small stones within them, similar to the others 

 in the second circle. The smaller stones (or foreign 

 stones) are from metamorphic rocks and have been 

 brought from a long distance, but how or when has not 

 yet been determined. Dr. Thomas of the Geological 

 Survey considers the source of two kinds to have been 

 the Prescelly Mountains in Pembrokeshire, where he 

 found identical specimens. He considered that their 

 deposition here by glacial action to be contrary to 

 sound geological reasoning, and that their assemblage 

 here pointed to human selection and conveyance. 

 One sort is a porphyritic diabase, another is a rhyolite, 

 both of which are extremely hard. Another sort is 

 an argyllite resembling hard slate, but being perishable, 

 no standing stone remains, though many pieces are 

 found in the soil below the surface. All these stones 

 appear to have been brought in a rough state and in 

 naturally long slabs, which were afterwards dressed. 



The sarsens had less far to travel, and there can be 

 little doubt that they were brought from the Marl- 

 borough Downs, where there are still many boulders 

 of them strewn over the land. 



These big blocks or boulders are composed of siliceous 

 granules, and were formed in the Bagshot sand of the 

 middle Eocene, and were left behind when the sand 

 around them was denuded in a geological change. 



Before being conveyed here they were roughly 

 squared by cleavage to lighten them, and after arriving 

 they were neatly dressed, partly by picking with 

 pointed flint tools and partly by crushing and grinding 

 with mauls made of a very hard quartzite. 



After standing here for about 4000 years they have 

 naturally become greatly weathered, some more than 

 others, depending upon where softer patches in their 

 substance occur, so that it is only on the duiable 

 parts that tooling marks can be seen, but these are 

 very cleai where the surface has not been exposed, 

 where the stones are protected below ground, and where 

 the lintels fit upon the uprights. 



For many years several of the stones were leaning 

 dangerously and had to be propped, notably the four 

 on the north-east and two on the east, all bearing 

 lintels. H.M. Office of Works has had these stones 

 set upright, and their bases are now firmly fixed in 

 beds of concrete. 



In this operation it was necessary to take down 

 the lintels, and we were much impressed by the elabor- 

 ate care that had been bestowed upon fitting them 

 to the tops of the stones. Every lintel has two cup- 

 shaped holes, which fit upon tenons projecting from 

 the upright stones, so that each lintel has two holes 

 and each upright has two tenons (except the trilithons 

 which only require one tenon on each upright). 



The fitting of the lintels to the tops of the stones 

 had been done with such accuracy as to leave little 

 doubt that they had been worked in unison and the 

 lintel frequently tried on until a perfect fit had been 

 accomplished. The same care was observable in the 

 fitting of the ends of the lintels, as each one has a 



NO. 2746, VOL. 109] 



projection which fits into a recess in the next following 

 it, locking them all together, and all this must have 

 been done when the stones were upright and to ensure 

 evenness of the tops all the way round. 



These stones were irregular in their depth below the 

 surface, the longest having 8 feet and the shortest 4 feet 

 6 inches below ground. The bases end in a blunt point, 

 to facilitate movement when getting them into position. 

 Most of them seem to have been brought to their places 

 down an inclined plane cut in the solid chalk, but two 

 cases were met with where they had been put in vertic- 

 ally. The pieces broken off the bases when pointing 

 them were used for propping them whilst adjusting their 

 position and before the soil was returned to the hole 

 around the stone. A great many other pieces of stone 

 had to be used, and these had to be sought at places a 

 few miles from Stonehenge, as there is no stone in this 

 neighbourhood. Wooden posts were used for a similar 

 purpose, their holes being found below the stones and 

 sunk about two feet in the chalk. The acquired stone 

 was of two sorts, a glauconite and a ragstone, the former 

 from Hurdcote near Wilton and the latter from Chil- 

 mark, a few miles farther west. The same quarries 

 appear to have been used ever since, as similar stone 

 is frequently met with in the British villages of the 

 Roman Period, and we found that they had supplied 

 all the stone for the building of Old Sarum. In this 

 case a freestone had been used and not the rough slabs 

 found here. The freestone occurs at a lower level, and 

 is extensively quarried at the present day. 



Finds of interesting objects have been remarkably 

 few ; indeed nothing of any special interest. The things 

 found consist chiefly of rough flints used for dressing 

 the stone and stone mauls, or hammer stones, of various 

 sizes up to 43 lbs. in weight. Immense quantities of 

 chips were knocked off by the masons. Those of 

 sarsen occur at all depths, but those of foreign stone 

 not lower than 30 inches, as they were put in last of all, 

 and the building was probably a long, continuous work. 

 The rubble below the surface, besides containing chips, 

 yielded a few pieces of Bronze Age pottery, very small 

 and foot -worn. The firm rubble had arrested the 

 descent of these and also of small pieces of Roman 

 Period pottery, and very occasionally a coin of that 

 time. These were mixed with other things that had 

 reached the rubble at every succeeding age down 

 to the present time. 



It is remarkable that the great number of people 

 employed upon the construction of the place have left 

 nothing behind them, for life in the Stone Age was 

 not incompatible with a fairly high state of culture, 

 as has been noticed in many instances. There was 

 pottery of excellent design at the Temple of Tel Harkien 

 at Malta, of Neolithic times, some of it being beautifully 

 inlaid. 



The use of this place has not yet been determined. 

 Among ancient races religious and secular matters 

 were intimately mixed, but this place could not have 

 been for secular use, as apparently it was not inhabited. 

 There are perhaps as many theories about Stonehenge as 

 the stones which compose it, yet nothing is known with 

 certainty about the nature of the place. It is trusted, 

 however, that when the present research is finished 

 some definite conclusion may be arrived at. 



The place has been surrounded by a circular 



