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A Scottish Provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge
Mineral ages and chemical analysis of fragments of the Altar Stone from the Neolithic stone circle at Stonehenge suggest that it was transported from northeast Scotland, more than 750 km away, probably by sea.
However, such transport for the Altar Stone is difficult to reconcile with ice-sheet reconstructions that show a northwards movement of glaciers (and erratics) from the Grampian Mountains towards the Orcadian Basin during the Last Glacial Maximum and, indeed, previous Pleistocene glaciations 40, 41. Nonetheless, even with assistance from beasts of burden 51, rivers and topographical barriers, including the Grampians, Southern Uplands and the Pennines, along with the heavily forested landscape of prehistoric Britain 52, would have posed formidable obstacles for overland megalith transportation. The results from Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, using Monte Carlo resampling (and multidimensional analysis), taking uncertainty due to sample n into account, also support the interpretation that at >95% certainty, no distinction in provenance can be made between the Altar Stone zircon age dataset ( n= 56) and those from the Orcadian Basin ( n= 212), Svalbard ORS ( n= 619) and the Laurentian basement (Supplementary Information 7).
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