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Who Built Stonehenge? Tantalizing Clue!
There is perhaps no place on Earth as shrouded in mystery as Stonehenge. Built between 3,000 B.C. and 1,600 B.C., it is a ring of 20-ton stones on Salisbury Plain. Who built it? Archaeologists have a tantalizing clue: It may have been supervised by someone of Swiss or German descent.
Last May, the remains of a wealthy archer were found in a 4,000-year-old grave near Stonehenge, and now scientists in Great Britain think he may have been the construction boss, reports Reuters. "He would have been a very important person in the Stonehenge area, and it is fascinating to think that someone from abroad--probably modern-day Switzerland--could have played an important part in the construction of the site," said archaeologist Andrew Fitzpatrick in a statement issued to the media.
Thanks to modern technology, tests performed on the enamel of the skeleton's teeth showed that he was born and grew up in the Alps region--what would be Switzerland, Germany, or Austria today. "Different ratios of oxygen isotopes form on teeth in different parts of the world and the ratio found on these teeth prove they were from somebody from the Alps region," Tony Trueman from Wessex Archaeology told Reuters. "It is important proof that culture imported from the continent helped bring Britain out of the Stone Age."
The archer's skeletal remains, which date from 2,300 B.C., were found about three miles from Stonehenge along with 100 items buried with him, including some of the earliest gold objects ever found in Britain. This treasure trove earned the archer the much grander nickname of "King of Stonehenge."
When the grave was first found, scientists spared no exclamatory words and called it the single most important archeological find from the British Isles. The land was being prepared for a new school building, but before it could be cleared by the bulldozers, archaeologists excavated it since they knew it was the site of a Roman cemetery. And that's when they found the archer.
What fascinated them even more than the bones and teeth were the 100 items buried with the skeleton, including the largest group of archery equipment--stone arrowheads and stone wristguards--ever unearthed in a single location. They also found three copper knives, stone tools for butchering carcasses and carving arrowheads, and a pair of gold earrings that were probably worn wrapped around the ear rather than hanging from the ear lobe. The earrings are among the earliest kind of metal objects found in Britain. "They were very rare, and the metals they were made from may have been imported," Andrew Fitzpatrick, the Wessex Archaeology project manager in charge of the site at Amesbury, 75 miles southwest of London, told the Associated Press.
Who Built Stonehenge?
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