It has been an eventful year for Stonehenge. Back in May various effects of the Major Lunar Standstill on the site began to be measured which will continue till mid-next year.
Back in August Nature published a paper, the implications of which English Heritage had hinted at before, that the mineralogical source of Stonehenge’s so-called ‘altar stone’ had been the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland, rather than Wales or somewhere else as formerly believed: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07652-1
A shame the likes of Stukeley, Piggott, Thom and North aren’t around; one could imagine the look on their faces at the news.
Popular media dazzled about the altar stone journey and the gargantuan effort behind its transportation which isn’t too jaw-dropping relative to the size and collective weight of the other lifted stones. More interesting would be the high symbolic import of it being brought to the site – inconceivable as an economic tradeoff – bearing upon midwinter ritual. Though covered by a toppled trilithon, the altar stone is understood to have gathered light from the setting midwinter sun. Possibly, today’s knackered and incomplete midwinter complex of Stenness-Maeshowe in Orkney was a key source. A week after the initial Nature report, however, Orkney was ousted as the home of the altar stone on mineralogical grounds in favour of mainland Caithness and Aberdeenshire regions. But this doesn’t imply the altar stone was never used at Orkney or was unknown to its megalithic culture.
There is overlap between Stonehenge and the Orkney stone circles. Stenness comes in at about 3100 BCE with Maeshowe built about 3000-2800 BCE. The Brodgar circle, which forms part of the complex, comes in around 2500 BCE which correlates with Stonehenge’s 2nd trilithon construction phase which merged the altar stone. Ages before this activity, early 9th millennium Stonehenge saw the construction of 3 pits that, as some suggest, contained large pine totem poles which flagged the area as special and which the solar-tracking cursus monument may have grown out of. Looking back North, not quite as far as Orkney but to Aberdeenshire, is an earthwork calendar used for marking the midwinter solstice and moon phases dated to about 8000 BCE: https://phys.org/news/2013-07-world-oldest-calendar.html These earlier examples ask for how long prehistoric Briton might have been culturally connected before known monumental stone circles were built.