Archaeologists say that hundreds of fragments of rock crystal suggest that 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 visible rainbow spectrum as they are almost as transparent as water.
The image is the first of three.
The Neolithic burial site in the west of England is thought to have been brought from the north or southwest of Wales, according to archaeologists. The image is copyrighted by Nick Overton.
It was a spectacular and memorable event to work the rock crystals into smaller pieces. The image is copyrighted by Nick Overton.
White light can be broken into a rainbow spectrum by the transparent fragment of rock crystal. The image is copyrighted by Nick Overton.
The property of the crystal, which gives off flashes of light when struck, must have made it easier to break it into smaller pieces.
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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 Stonehenge.
If King Arthur ever existed, Arthur's Stone would have been thousands of years old, according to local legends. The "Halls of the Dead," three timber buildings that were deliberately burned down and replaced by three earthen burial mounds, are located on Dorstone Hill. 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 first image of two.
The Halls of the Dead were built at Dorstone Hill but were burned down and replaced with mounds of dirt. The image is from the book, "Julian Thomas."
The Arthur's Stone site and Dorstone Hill were excavated and found to be part of an early Neolithic landscape. The image is from the book, "Julian Thomas."
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 in order to narrow down their origin.
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.
It was originally published on Live Science
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