NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Fans of the 1984 heavy metal mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” will remember the scene in which the band commissions a stage set that’s a replica of Stonehenge, the Neolithic ruin in Wiltshire, England. Alas, a careless set of measurements results in the musicians playing alongside a model that stands an underwhelming 18 inches high rather than 18 feet tall, a failure showcased on tour and, wincingly, accentuated by the dancing dwarfs enlisted to make the prop appear larger.

Thirty-seven years later it turns out that the film’s boulder gag contains a pebble of historical truth. On Friday a team of archaeologists reported in the journal Antiquity that they had unearthed a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, part of which they believe was dismantled, hauled 175 miles to Salisbury Plain and reassembled as Stonehenge.

Mike Parker Pearson, a professor at University College London who led the study, said the stones could have been transported as part of a larger movement of people to the area. “Stonehenge is a secondhand monument,” he said sardonically. The study will be featured in a BBC documentary, “Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed.”

The geologist Herbert Thomas established in 1923 that the dolerite used to build Stonehenge came from an outcrop in the Preseli Hills of western Wales. In 2011, Parker Pearson’s team discovered two megalithic quarries in that region and began to search nearby for ritual structures.

At a site named Waun Mawn, a handful of toppled bluestones were seemingly placed in an arc. In work begun in the summer of 2017, archaeologists uncovered four distinctive socket-shaped pits from which standing monoliths had been removed.

Extrapolating from the positions of the empty sockets and the fallen bluestones, the researchers sketched out a circle some 360 feet across — the same diameter as the earthen ditch that originally enclosed Stonehenge. Waun Mawn and Stonehenge are the only two Neolithic monuments in Britain that conform to those specifications, and the entrance to both circles were aligned toward the midsummer solstice sunrise.

The team was also able to determine when the sediment inside the socket holes was last exposed to light. The study suggested that Waun Mawn is the oldest-known stone circle in Britain, dating from about 3,400 B.C., and was dismantled shortly before the construction of Stonehenge in 3,000 B.C.


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