Older people may have used pork fat to build Stonehenge | Science

The 30-ton megaliths that make up Stonehenge in Wiltshire, UK, may have been moved with more than just elbow grease. A new analysis suggests that residues of pork fat on nearby potteries might support the idea that builders grease sleds with lard or tallow to transport the stones.

In the past, archaeologists had interpreted the high concentrations of pork fat in pottery, found in the nearby prehistoric village of Durrington Walls, to mean that bucket-sized ceramic vases were used to prepare meal of hundreds of hungry Stonehenge builders. If prehistoric men used the ships to cook pork, they should have cut them into small pieces so they could be stored in the pots. But the pork carcasses found on the site were whole and burned at the ends of the bones of the paws, which means that they were probably roasted on the spit, say researchers today. antiquity. Instead, the team suggests that the ceramic containers may have been used to collect carcass fat during cooking, which was then stored as lard or tallow.

Stonehenge is composed of megaliths weighing up to 30 tons transported from a site located about 30 kilometers to the north and smaller blue stones of about 140 kilometers in the hills of Preseli, in the country of Modern Wales. To move these stones over such long distances, the builders probably handled them on wooden sledges and rolled them on logs. The study supports the hypothesis of "greased sled" according to which the use of animal fat as a lubricant to reduce friction between sled and logs could have facilitated the transport of megaliths to several kilometers away. .