The Alter Stone
A paper published in June 2026 in Journal of Quaternary Science is a reminder that no one remembers the old dead gods, and no one mourns their passing, although they, like today’s god or gods, were real in the minds of their followers and provided their priesthoods and ruling elites with an excuse for wielding considerable unelected and unaccountable power. The paper reports on the likely origin and possible mode of transport of the so-called Altar Stone of Stonehenge — a feat which speaks of the political and social power needed to command, organise and supply a large cohort of labourers, and perhaps to exercise that power over a considerable part of the island of Great Britain.
I have written several times about the old dead gods, particularly those of Wiltshire, who inspired the building of such enduring monuments as Silbury Hill, Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. These immense civil engineering projects suggest a population large enough to support a substantial, non-productive labour force, and a ruling elite able to command and supply the workers. In turn, that suggests a unifying culture, almost certainly religious, which regarded these works as worthwhile, or even necessary, perhaps to placate or please a god or pantheon of gods and so ensure that the crops succeeded, the seasons returned in their proper order, and tomorrow was much like today, free from natural disasters, plagues and pestilence.
Of course, we do not now even know the names of these gods, let alone what their followers believed they did, but we can be fairly sure that their followers believed they needed them and worked hard to keep them ‘on side’. The extraordinary lengths to which people went, in moving stones, raising earthworks and reshaping the landscape, were probably acts of collective devotion, obligation and power, expressed in stone and soil. Given the evidence of ancient trackways converging on Salisbury Plain, the area was almost certainly one of widespread ceremonial and religious significance, perhaps known far beyond Wiltshire.
Ask those people what evidence they had for their god or gods, and they would almost certainly have given much the same ‘reasons’ as today’s theists: ‘Look at the trees!’, ‘The evidence is all around you’, ‘Who makes the sun rise?’, ‘Who sends diseases to punish us?’, and so on. The logic was the same; only the names of the gods have changed. And now even those names have gone.
One alternative explanation for the appearance of the Altar Stone at Stonehenge is that it was transported naturally by a glacier. However, analysis of its mineral grains, particularly its detrital zircon age signature, points to the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland as its most likely broad source region. The researchers reason that, although some Ice Age transport by glaciers may have been possible, especially towards the North Sea and Dogger Bank, there was no viable glacial pathway capable of carrying the stone all the way to Salisbury Plain. And even if a glacier had moved it as far as Dogger Bank, the timing creates another difficulty: by the time Stonehenge was constructed, Doggerland had already been inundated by rising post-glacial sea levels.
The researchers therefore conclude that, although glacial transport could have played some part in the stone’s earlier history, it cannot explain its final arrival at Stonehenge. Human transport remains the most likely explanation for that last, extraordinary stage of the journey. Perhaps the stone had some special cultural or religious significance, rather like the later Stone of Scone, which made it seem worth the considerable effort and manpower involved. Although the authors do not explore the motives of those who moved it, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the motive was religious or ceremonial — the same kind of motive that later drove people to build cathedrals, mosques, monasteries and temples across Europe and western Asia.
