Revealed: Early Bronze Age carvings suggest Stonehenge was a huge prehistoric art gallery

[icymist]

For part of its existence as an ancient temple, Stonehenge doubled as a substantial prehistoric art gallery, according to new evidence revealed yesterday.

A detailed laser-scan survey of the entire monument has discovered 72 previously unknown Early Bronze Age carvings chipped into five of the giant stones.

All of the newly discovered prehistoric art works are invisible to the naked eye – and have only come to light following a laser-scan survey which recorded literally billions of points micro-topographically on the surfaces of the monument’s 83 surviving stones. In total, some 850 gigabytes of information was collected.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/revealed-early-bronze-age-carvings-suggest-stonehenge-was-a-huge-prehistoric-art-gallery-8202812.html

[aquart]

1. And that gives a tenuous link to the much older site in Turkey.

[icymist]

2. Hmmmm. Interesting.

Of course I assume you mean the ancient site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=14968

There's still a lot we don't know about Stonehedge and it wasn't as well preserved as Göbekli Tepe since it wasn't buried in the ground, being exposed to the harsh British weather for all those years. Time will tell.

[aquart]

3. Yep. That's the one I meant.

What they've detected at Stonehenge doesn't come close to the Turkish carvings but IIRC they said the later part of the site was more primitive than the early part. That would be a tradition of carving, ornamenting, decorating ridiculously large stones passed down and fanned out over at least six thousand years.

Humans are weird.