**The Colossal Task of Building Stonehenge**
The air rang with the shouts of laborers, the groan of ropes, and the rhythmic thud of wooden mallets. Before you stood a scene of **monumental ambition**—a project so immense it would baffle engineers for millennia.
### **The Stones: Giants from Another Age**
- **Sarsen Stones:** The towering uprights of the outer circle, each **7 meters (23 ft) tall and weighing up to 30 tons**—equivalent to **six adult elephants**. Their surfaces were knapped smooth with stone tools, then fitted with **mortise-and-tenon joints** like a colossal wooden puzzle.
- **Bluestones:** The smaller, mystical inner stones, **2-4 tons each**, hauled **250 kilometers (150 miles)** from the Preseli Hills in Wales. Their blue-gray hue seemed to **glow in dawn light**, sparking legends of healing power.
### **The Impossible Transport**
1. **The Sarsen March**
- The sandstone giants came from **Marlborough Downs, 32 km (20 miles) north**. To move them:
- Workers likely **carved wooden sledges** from oak, dragging stones over log rollers.
- They may have used **greased tracks of animal fat** to reduce friction.
- Estimates suggest **1,000 people** were needed to pull just **one stone**.
2. **The Bluestone Odyssey**
- Theories rage about how Neolithic builders transported 80 bluestones across **rivers, swamps, and mountains**:
- **Land Route:** Dragged on sledges, requiring **200 people per stone for 6 months**.
- **Water Route:** Rafted along rivers and the Welsh coast—a perilous journey with **no surviving prehistoric boats large enough**.
### **Engineering the Impossible**
- **The Trilithons:** The iconic **horseshoe of three 50-ton stone arches** demanded terrifying precision. To lift the lintels:
- Builders dug **ramps of chalk and earth**, hauling stones upright with ropes.
- They then **levered the lintels upward** using log scaffolding, fitting them into carved grooves **with less than 2 cm of error**.
- **The Mystery of the Foundations**
- Each upright was anchored in a **meter-deep pit** with crushed chalk packing, angled **to withstand 5,000 years of storms**.
### **The Scale of the Labor**
- **Time:** Construction spanned **1,500 years**—longer than Christianity has existed.
- **Workforce:** Required **millions of man-hours**—equivalent to **10,000 people working for a decade**.
- **Tools:** Only **stone hammers, antler picks, and bone wedges** were used. No wheels. No metal.
### **Why It Still Astounds**
Standing before Stonehenge today, the mind reels:
- **How did they align it perfectly to solstices without writing or compasses?**
- **Why risk lives to move Welsh stones when local rock was available?**
- **What force drove them to build something so vast—with no modern tools?**
The stones do not answer. They simply **stand**, silent witnesses to a willpower beyond reckoning.