Stonehenge is a massive stone monument located on Salisbury Plain in southern England. It was built roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago and was part of a larger sacred landscape.
The bigger stones at Stonehenge, known as sarsens, weigh 25 tons (22.6 metric tons) on average and are widely believed to have been brought from Marlborough Downs, 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the north, according to English Heritage, an organization that oversees Stonehenge.
The monument’s smaller stones, referred to as “bluestones” (they have a bluish tinge when wet or freshly broken), come from quarries in the Preseli Hills in western Wales, about 140 miles (225 km) away from Stonehenge, a U.K. research team announced in a 2015 study in the journal Antiquity. The bluestones weigh between 2 and 5 tons (1.8 and 4.5 metric tons) each, according to English Heritage. Scientists are still unsure exactly how prehistoric people moved the stones over such long distances.
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