Archaeologists say there are hundreds of pieces of rock crystal that suggest Neolithic people used the mineral to decorate graves and other structures at a ceremonial site in western England.
The rock crystals are believed to have been brought to the site from a source more than 80 miles away and may have been broken into smaller pieces during a community gathering.
Nick Overton, an archaeologist at The University of Manchester in England, said that it was a special event.
It feels like they're putting a lot of emphasis on the way the crystal is worked.
A 6,000-year-old ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in western England has been described in a study published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
The crystal fragments split white light into a rainbow spectrum, making them almost as transparent as water.
The property of the crystal, which gives off flashes of light when struck, must have made it easier to break it into smaller pieces.
The 17 key milestones in Paleolithic life are related.
There are small flashes of bluish light if you bash two of these crystals together.
There is no glass or other transparent material in this period, so the material must have been arresting.
Archaeologists think ancient structures at Dorstone Hill and Arthur's Stone were part of an early Neolithic, or New Stone Age, ceremonial landscape built up 1000 years before the construction of the world's most famous prehistoric monument.
If King Arthur ever existed, Arthur's Stone would have been thousands of years old, according to local legend.
The 'Halls of the Dead' are three timber buildings that were burned down and replaced with three earthen burial mounds in Neolithic times.
The Halls of the Dead, the remains of which were discovered in 2013, are thought to have been found at the Arthur's stone site. The mounds were aligned to the south of the structure.
The rock crystal fragments were concentrated in the burial mounds. Some of the largest fragments were placed as grave goods in the pits that held the human bones.
The first piece of crystal that the modern excavators saw was mistaken for glass and the team found many more that are still as transparent as they were when they were made.
It looked like glass, but then we realized it was not glass at all. We started to wonder if this is something else. That made us want to look for the stuff.
It's likely that the transparent mineral came from one of two sites, one in a cave in the mountains of Snowdonia in the north of Wales and the other at St David's.
It seems that the mineral was transported to Dorstone Hill in the form of large crystals up to 10 centimeters in length, possibly through a trading network that brought them from far away.
The large crystals were 'knapped' with the techniques used for flint, but the resulting fragments were not formed into tools afterwards, according to analysis.
Many of the tiny chips were deposited over the burial mounds.
He said the biggest piece was 34 millimeters in length. The researchers hope to conduct chemical tests of the fragments that could reveal a 'geological signature' of where they came from, as well as an idea of how big the original crystals must have been.
The largest collection of worked rock crystal pieces ever found in Britain and Ireland were found at Dorstone Hill.
"I think it's important to point out how wonderful this material is and how fascinating it is," he said.
It could help us think about other aspects of the Neolithic period, such as connections of trade or exchange, and the way people think about and engage with materials.
The original article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
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