Rätselhaftes Stonehenge - Die Spur der Steine

In 1901 in a restoration which caused outrage at the time but which is rarely referred to in official guidebooks. For it means that Stonehenge, jewel in the crown of Britain's heritage industry, is not all it seems. Much of what the ancient site's millions of visitors see in fact dates back less than 65 years.

From 1901 to 1964, the majority of the stone circle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archaeologist, as 'a product of the 20th century heritage industry'. But the information is markedly absent from documentaries like this one, the guidebooks and info-phones used by tourists at the site.

This is a truly appalling documentary packed with speculation and based on the flimsiest of evidence. Alice Roberts, in spite of her academic background, proves to be the most gullible of presenters. Almost every assumption in the documentary involved vast "interpretative inflation", as was pointed out by some of us while the digs at Waun Mawn were going on. Sadly, since this programme has been shown several times, many thousands of viewers have simply been carried away on a wild goose chase.

The so-called bluestone quarries do not make any sense at all, and there are NO monoliths at Stonehenge made of rhyolite from Rhosyfelin. The evidence of quarrying is hotly disputed, and earth scientists are quite convinced that all of the so-called quarrying traces are natural features. Not a single stone at Stonehenge has been precisely provenanced, in spite of the claims made in this programme. The assumptions about sockets and missing stones made by Prof Parker Pearson were so dodgy that they have been criticised and questioned by all sorts of people including fellow archaeologists Darvill and Pitts. The "alignment" speculations were wildly inaccurate. Stone 62 at Stonehenge came from the far east of Preseli and has nothing to do with Waun Mawn. The monoliths and other scattered rocks at Waun Mawn are all locally derived and have no known matches with Stonehenge. The radiocarbon and other dates tell us nothing about stone circles or Stonehenge. There were no control digs. The presumed circumference of a "giant circle" was never adequately supported by evidence. There is nothing at all at Waun Mawn to demonstrate any link with Stonehenge, and the proto-Stonehenge and "lost circle" propositions are shown to be fantasies. Two recently-published research papers (June 2022) have shown that "proto-Stonehenge" and the "lost circle" are simply fantasies. This documentary, selling dross as if it was gold, should never have been made or transmitted.

This is an exceptional documentary covering a series of archaeological excavations between 2014 and 2018 that aimed to trace the quarry of the Stonehenge bluestones. While the stones' origin in the Wels Preseli Hills was suspected for a century, pinpointing the precise location seemed a long shot. The actual discovery and dating of the Neolithic quarry was an exceptional achievement, but it further led to the revelation that the stones were extracted four centuries earlier than their arrival at Stonehenge and thus could have been set up in a separate monument in the intervening period. Further excavations in the region were undertaken to find the location of this lost site and the evidence for its connection with the Stonehenge bluestones.

The way this journey was presented is a great example of the high standard of quality characteristic for BBC documentaries. It collects footage from multiple video diaries recorded over the many excavation seasons and builds a consistent narrative, documenting the progress of the search, the highs and lows and the methods applied. Many of these are cutting edge like photogrammetry, stimulated optical luminescence or magnetometry. Others are more familiar like radiocarbon dating of organic remains or uranium-lead dating of zircon crystals. Combining the video of these lab based techniques with the dig site diaries of the excavation work under the unforgiving weather creates a good cross-section of modern archaeology.

And finally this multi-year campaign is woven into an engaging narrative by the presenter Alice Roberts lending the show her irresistible enthusiasm for the subject. All in all this documentary is a great overview of a major recent discovery together with a snapshot of how archaeology is done today.