THE builders of Stonehenge may have travelled with the famous bluestones from the Preseli hills to the Wiltshire site, a University of Oxford study has revealed.

While the origin of Stonehenge’s bluestones connection to Pembrokeshire is well known, very little is known about the people buried at the site.

Now, a new University of Oxford research collaboration, published in Nature Scientific Reports, suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument’s construction, sourced from the Preseli hills.

The research combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.

There has been much speculation as to how and why Stonehenge was built, and debates about how the bluestones ended up in Wiltshire; the year 2000 even seeing a bluestone being pulled from the Preselis to the coast by volunteers.

The question of ‘who’ built it has received far less attention, partly because many of the human remains were cremated.

It has now been found that cremated bone faithfully retains its strontium isotope composition.

The team analysed 25 different skull bones; remains originally excavated from a network of 56 pits in the 1920s, placed around the inner circumference and ditch of Stonehenge, known as ‘Aubrey Holes’.

Analysis of small fragments of cremated bone from an early phase of the site’s history, around 3000 BC, showed that at least 10 of the 25 people did not live near Stonehenge prior to their death.

The highest strontium isotope ratios in the remains were consistent with living in western Britain, a region that includes west Wales – the known source of Stonehenge’s bluestones.

This connection suggests west Wales as the most likely origin of at least some of these people.

While the Welsh connection was known for the stones, the study shows that people were also moving between west Wales and Wessex in the Late Neolithic, and that some of their remains were buried at Stonehenge.