WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND—BBC News reports that a three-foot-long core removed from a sarsen stone at Stonehenge in 1958 has been handed over to researchers at English Heritage. The core was one of three removed when archaeologists found cracks in one of the vertical stones while raising a fallen trilithon, and inserted metal rods in it to stabilize the set of two upright stones topped by a third resting horizontally across them. Robert Phillips, who worked for a diamond-cutting firm at the time, was one of the team members who reinforced the cracked sarsen stone. He kept one of the cores in a plastic tube displayed in his office in England, and then, after he retired, in his home in Florida. Phillips recently decided to return the stone core to England. David Nash of Brighton University and his colleagues have been analyzing the geochemical fingerprint of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge with a hand-held portable spectrometer, a non-destructive technique. The recently returned core comes from the interior of a sarsen stone, and so offers Nash and his team an unweathered sample. Nash said it had been previously thought that all of the sarsen stones came from nearby Marlborough Downs, but initial test results indicate it is possible they came from multiple locations. To read about new insights into a standard of measurement that appears to have been used at Stonehenge, go to “Epic Proportions.”
