The new discovery, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, is the result of success in extracting strontium isotopes – which can reveal where the individuals spent the last years of their lives – from cremated bone, something which had until recently been thought impossible. Using new technology that can determine where dead people lived, scientists say that cremated human remains from the site show that some of the people there came from other parts of western Britain – most likely Wales. The people who spent their final years in West Britain may have lived their whole lives there and then either moved to the area around Stonehenge or been brought there for burial, but it’s also possible they lived in Wessex, or somewhere else entirely, earlier in life. The tests were all on tiny pieces of skulls which were buried in the “Aubrey holes” (named for the 17th-century naturalist John Aubrey who first spotted them), a circle of 56 pits outside the stone circle now showing only as marks in the turf. In tooth enamel, which is where archaeologists usually get their strontium samples, those ratios usually reflect the plants a person ate during childhood, when the teeth were forming. And that region of Wales happens to fall within the area of Western Britain that matches the strontium isotope ratios in the bones at Stonehenge. Although the team, led by scientists from the University of Oxford with colleagues in Paris and Brussels, cannot prove that the remains are of people who actually built the monument, the earliest cremation dates are described as “tantalisingly” close to the date when the bluestones were brought into the earlier ditch and bank monument to form the first stone circle. John Pouncett, a lead author of the study, said: “The earliest dates are tantalisingly close to the date we believe the bluestones arrived, and though we cannot prove they are the bones of the people who brought them, there must at least be a relationship. New chemical analysis of cremated remains unearthed at Stonehenge suggests that several of the people buried there came from farther west, possibly even from the same area of Wales as the “bluestones,” the shorter, bluish-gray stones that form the inner ring of the monument.
Tests on the 5,000-year-old burnt human bones of 25 people found at Stonehenge suggest that ten came from more than 100 miles (160 km) away in West Wales.