The source of the Altar Stone

One of the frustrations of history and archaeology is that within those disciplines there are realms of inquiry which (unless someone invents a time machine) will never be answered, because the required information simply doesn't exist.  For societies that left few or no written records -- which, unfortunately, is most of them -- we have to rely upon inference from artifacts, which can be seriously thin ice.

The shakiness of these inferences was famously lampooned in Horace Mitchell Miner's scathing satire on anthropological papers called "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," published in 1956, which looks at American culture ("Nacirema," of course, is "American" backwards) solely from our artifacts and a slim set of observations of our behaviors.  Here's a passage about what anthropologists might make of our medicine cabinets:

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live.  These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners.  The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts.  However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language.  This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm-box of the household shrine.  As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing.  The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again.  While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font.  Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.  The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

So we might well wonder why our ancestors did certain things, but Miner's essay reminds us to rein in our speculation hard.

I was reminded of this when I read a paper this week in Nature about the origin of one of the stones in Stonehenge, the so-called "Altar Stone" that is in the middle of the famous ring.  Geoscientist Anthony Clarke, of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, did a detailed chemical analysis of chips taken from the Altar Stone, trying to figure out where the builders had obtained it -- and found the nearest match was a rock formation called the Orcadian Basin, 750 kilometers away in northeastern Scotland.

While the outer ring stones match nearby rock formations, the Altar Stone is not the only one that was hauled in from a distant source.  The stones of the inner ring, for example, are dolerite bluestone, from the Preseli Hills of Wales.  

But the Altar Stone seems to have come from farther away still.

[Image credit: A. J. Clarke et. al., Nature, August 2024]

The obvious question is... why?  Why go to all the trouble to bring an enormous slab of rock a distance of 750 kilometers, when there was perfectly good building stone nearby?  While the common misapprehension ties Stonehenge to the Celtic druids, the truth is that by the time the Celts arrived, Stonehenge was already two thousand years old.  The people who built Stonehenge -- and such ring-shaped monuments all over western Europe -- belong to a Neolithic culture called the Megalith Builders, about whom we know next to nothing.  Probably not coincidentally, there are nearly a hundred such stone circles in Aberdeenshire, where the rock of the Altar Stone is thought to have originated.  

So did the builders of Stonehenge come south from Scotland, bringing the Altar Stone with them because that particular rock had some kind of ritual significance?

The truth is, we'll probably never know why they did it.  There's no doubt it's puzzling, though.  Just building Stonehenge is enough of a feat for people with no cranes and backhoes; the fact that they brought the Welsh bluestone in from 225 kilometers away, and the Altar Stone from nearly three times that, can't help but make us wonder.

But the ones who could explain it have been dead and buried for four thousand years, so this leaves us with another mystery that's unlikely ever to be answered.  We can only speculate -- while taking care not to make the same kind of mistake that we saw with the Nacireman magical charm-box.

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