Study: Neolithic builders hauled Devil's Arrows stones 11 miles across Yorkshire

The provenance of the monument's stones had until now been unclear, according to a report by Ars Technica. The journal paper confirms that the material was quarried or collected at a site 18 kilometers away and then transported by human effort, ruling out the possibility that ice sheets carried the stones to their present position.

The work places the monument, which stands in Yorkshire, alongside better-known megalithic sites such as Stonehenge, Calanais, Newgrange and Avebury. "Sites in southern England and Scotland receive considerable attention but monuments like the Devil's Arrows have remained comparatively understudied despite their significance," said co-author Jim Leary of the University of York. "We have now proved that Neolithic communities moved several 25-ton stones across Yorkshire, transforming a familiar site into an epic quest to create a sacred landscape."

The finding follows a series of chemical analyses of Stonehenge that have traced the origins of every stone in that structure, showing that many came from quarries a considerable distance away. A 2019 study concluded that the 42 bluestones forming Stonehenge's inner ring were brought from western Wales. The outer layer of sarsen stones came from much closer to home, from Marlborough Downs, an area of round, grassy hills 25 to 30 kilometers (17 miles) north of Stonehenge that holds the largest concentration of sarsen in the United Kingdom.

The Devil's Arrows research, by contrast, concerns a monument that has drawn far less scientific attention than the monuments of southern England and Scotland, even though it is the tallest standing stone alignment in Britain. The paper's authors describe the transport of multiple stones weighing about 25 tons each as evidence of organized Neolithic effort across the Yorkshire landscape, rather than the incidental result of natural processes.