Stonehenge

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A prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, whose sarsen phase - the great trilithons and the encircling lintelled ring - is conventionally dated to around 2500 BCE. It matters structurally because it is post-and-lintel construction executed with unusual care: the lintels are held to the uprights by mortise-and-tenon joints cut in stone, and to each other by tongue-and-groove joints, so the ring is a locked circle rather than a stack. The uprights taper and the lintels are curved in plan and given a slight entasis, which is a refinement, not a necessity. Provenance work has recently become specific: Nash and colleagues reported in 2020 that fifty of the fifty-two surviving sarsens share a geochemical signature matching West Woods, about 25 km north, and Clarke, Kirkland and colleagues reported in Nature in 2024 that the recumbent Altar Stone is not Welsh at all but derives from Old Red Sandstone of the Orcadian Basin in north-east Scotland, several hundred kilometres away. The smaller bluestones come from the Preseli Hills in west Wales.