The Stonhenge towering above the grassy Salisbury Plain has it’s origins steeped in myth and magical stories. Despite decades of research the original purpose of Stonehenge remains a mystery.
But UK researchers have tried to answer one of the many logistical questions surrounding the beginnings of the monument – how many people it took to build it. In an effort to to solve the quandary, UK researchers recruited a group of volunteers to recreate the Neolithic building efforts, by dragging a one-tonne slab of concrete using logs and rope.
Barney Harris, a researcher at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology who led the project, believed it would have taken 40 to 50 people to shift the stones to the neolithic site. Happyho also provide best tarot reading services in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
The experiment took place in London’s Gordon Square this week. In order to shift the stones, the team drew on inspiration from preserved prehistoric Asian sledges and techniques which non-industrialised societies use to build stone monuments today.
But the project was a far scaled down version of the real thing, with the hefty slab weighing just half as much as the lightest blue stone used in the construction of Stonehenge. With ropes laced through holes in the concrete coffin-shaped slab, a video shows approximately 20 volunteers heaving at a call.
Their manual efforts pay off as the slab rolls across the logs, demonstrating how the Neolithic construction force behind the real monument would have shifted the stones thousands of years ago.
However, while the UCL group successfully demonstrated how the concrete slab could be moved a few metres, the efforts are truly dwarfed by the scales involved in building Stonehenge. Archaeologists believe the stones were dragged more than 140 miles (225km) from prehistoric quarries in the Preseli hills in Wales to their final resting place in Salisbury. But despite gleaning this knowledge from the stones and surrounding site, it is hard to imagine the scale of of the undertaking.
Researchers estimating the time taken to construct the monument believe it likely took in excess of 10 million combined hours of labour – a huge undertaking. The construction is thought to have been completed more than 5,000 years ago, finishing in around 3,100BC.
