Stonehenge is the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world, its origins rooted in prehistory when a group of people dragged the stones from Wales to the plains of Salisbury.
It isn’t exactly known what purpose the stone circle may have served, with many different theories having been floated, from a way to watch the night sky to being at the centre of an ancient city.
Numerous relics and remains have turned up around Stonehenge, each revealing key clues about it and the people who once called it home.
Coins, pins, jewellery, and fragments of pottery are just some of the objects found over the years, some items of which are believed to have been left by those using Stonehenge as a shrine.
More recently, the discovery of “rare” metal beneath the stones piqued the interest of researchers, offering yet more information about a people long gone.
The find was explored by a Discovery UK documentary, in which Dr Jackie McKinley, an Osteoarchaeologist, examined the metal pieces.
Stonehenge is famous for being a celestial temple, but archaeologists like Dr McKinley believe that because of its size, the site must have been used for something else, too.
Perhaps it was used as a burial ground given that remains have been found scattered around the site, often buried in tiny mounds, with around 300 to 400 such burials in the region.
Traditionally, the site has been linked with the summer and winter solstices, but Dr McKinley believes that many people travelled to the site for more than just two days a year.
The bones, she says, are proof of this, analysing the way in which their owners were buried, the nutrients inside, as well as the bone density.
One of the skeletons she examined had been completely decapitated. Another had fatal arrow wounds with the arrowheads still lodged in their bones.
The first victim was a 20-year-old male, buried with a pair of gold metal ornaments rolled together and tucked inside his lower jaw bone, either played in his mouth before his death or at the time of burial.
“These certainly are rare — there are only around eight pairs in the country,” said Dr McKinley, proposing that the pieces of metal hinted at the man’s occupation.
Neolithic people often buried their dead with things related to their profession, so the man may have been a trader in fine jewellery and metalwork, or himself some sort of metalworker.
At the time, humans were in the very early stages of such professions, as Dr McKinley noted: “These are very finely worked items, and to be able to have not just the technology but the skill to have learned how to change something that was essentially a rock into something that delicate and that beautifully worked would really have been seen as something quite magical.”
She believes that the “magic” may have been worked by the man buried next to him, a grave three metres away, which contained an older man with a similar rare gold piece in his grave.
“I think he was the person who worked the magic, I think was the person who could make those changes from pieces of rock to items of beauty and items of utility,” she said
Both men, she said, were likely workers who had travelled to Stonehenge to sell forge and sell their goods, proving that the stone circles were once a bustling centre of trade and commerce.
Certain chemical signatures that gave further details away about the men were later found, their dental enamel revealing that the older man had come from Central Europe, perhaps Germany, while the younger man had been born at Stonehenge but spent his teenage years in Central Europe, too.
“The fact that we’ve been able to demonstrate that people might have moved several times in their lifetime between long distances is absolutely fascinating,” said Dr McKinley.
“What you’ve got is a connection between people over a large geographic area.
“And, whether they kept that connection because of trade, or because of family, or a combination of the two — that is just so modern in many ways, similar to what we would be doing now.”
