Archaeologists Believe They Have Identified the Unlikely Secret Ingredient Used to Build Stonehenge: Lard

A new study suggests that animal fat found at nearby Durrington Walls wasn't used in cooking, but in construction.

Sarah Cascone, July 15, 2019

The modern world had long marveled over the ancient site of Stonehenge, unable to figure out how prehistoric people erected the ring of monolithic standing stones. Now, archaeologists have finally solved the mystery of the Neolithic monument’s construction: the massive slabs may have been moved into place with the aid of lard.

Researchers have long known that shards of pottery found at nearby Durrington Walls have contained traces of pig fat. But now archaeologists from Newcastle University are arguing that the lard wasn’t be used in cooking, but was instead being stored in large buckets in order to create tallow, which was used as an aid for construction.

“I was interested in the exceptional level of preservation and high quantities of lipids—or fatty residues—we recovered from the pottery,” Lisa-Marie Shillito, senior lecturer in landscape archaeology at Newcastle University, told the Daily Mail. “The animal bones that have been excavated at the site show that many of the pigs were ‘spit roasted’ rather than chopped up as you would expect if they were being cooked in the pots.”
SNIP