WHEN Professor Richard Bevins received an email titled, For Fame or Fortune in 2009, he could have never foreseen that 15 years later he would make the groundbreaking discovery that Stonehenge’s Altar Stone came from Scotland.
For more than 100 years the Altar Stone’s origins had been believed to be the same as the bluestones at Stonehenge, and that it had come from Wales.
This was until Professor Bevins and a small group of researchers decided to challenge its long-believed origins in 2020.
The academic for Aberystwyth University spent four decades at Amgueddfa Cymru - Museum Wales in Cardiff and was the keeper of Natural Sciences before he retired from the museum in 2020.
His initial research was done in Pembrokeshire looking at volcanic sequences and trying to work out how ancient volcanoes erupt underwater, and it wasn’t until he was contacted by a colleague that his field of research switched to Stonehenge.
“About 15 years ago Rob Ixer contacted me and said, look I've got this Stonehenge material here, it's bluestone material, it's almost certainly from your patch down in Pembrokeshire,” Bevins told The National.
“I said, yeah, yeah, fine.
“Send the samples down with the thin sections and I'll take a look.
“Then it was one of these really kind of bizarre things,” Bevins explained.
“I looked at the material, I could identify the rock types, but I said to Rob, there's one very, very particular rock type that I've never seen in Pembrokeshire.”
Bevins and his team decided to turn their attention away from dolerites and rhyolites, which are types of volcanic rocks that form the inner circle of the formation and focus their investigation on the petrology and geochemistry of the Altar Stone instead.
The team's investigations focused on Wales, firstly in the Milford Haven area and then eastwards along the outcrop of the Old Red Sandstone (ORS) but by late 2021 researchers had drawn a blank, nothing matched.
In 2022 Bevins concluded that the Altar Stone might not have come from Wales after all and that one of Stonehenge’s oldest rocks was in fact an outlier.
He said: “So, there we were, sort of metaphorically standing on the Wales-England border going, oh right, okay, where do we go now?”
Bevins had a “hunch” that the Altar Stone did come from Scotland due to the “rich Neolithic culture” with a large number of standing stones and circles created by people from that period.
Further research was conducted, and the team discovered the Altar Stone had a distinctive mineralogy, and in late 2023 a PhD student from Curtin University in Western Australia, Anthony Clarke was sent two thin rock fragments to help obtain the ages from minerals.
What came back from the mineral age research of the Altar Stone fragments was “quite remarkable” as it showed they best matched those found in ORS sandstones deposited in an area known as the Orcadian Basin.
The Orcadian Basin, which existed around 380 million years ago, covered an area which is now Shetland, Orkney, parts of Caithness and Sutherland, Inverness and Aberdeenshire.
“When it came back [mineral age results] suddenly it was like, ah, right, okay. This is quite exciting,” said Bevins.
One of the hardest parts for the team was keeping their monumental discovery under wraps until the findings were peer-reviewed and published.
It took almost 12 months for the findings to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, but in the meantime, Bevins and his six-person team thought “we can't sit and just wait” so they continued their investigation.
Because of Orkney’s “hotbed” of Neolithic heritage, in June 2023, Bevins and his team made their way to the island and analysed selected stones at the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness.
They took field samples from across the island using a portable x-ray machine, which is the size of a hairdryer, and is a quick way to determine at an outcrop whether the stones have high levels of barium, an element which the Altar Stone has high traces of.
“We got no match at all,” Bevins said.
“So, it was quite surprising and a bit disappointing, because that would have been, wow, it's the link to Orkney.”
Despite the disappointment that the Alter Stone’s origin was ruled out to be Orkney, Bevins recalled the “rewarding” experience of the impact the discovery has had on the UK’s archaeology and geology sectors.
It has challenged the way researchers now look at Stonehenge and the Altar Stone as it has historically been “lumped in” with the bluestones.
He said: “It's a real sort of, wow, step back, take a breath, it's not a bluestone and then you suddenly go, wow, okay, where do we look?”
“That is a really interesting and gratifying part of the research and developing your hypothesis.
“It is a fundamental breakthrough, I think.”
