Sarsen stones:
Sarsen stones are silicified sandstone blocks found in quantity in Southern England on Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire; in Kent; and in smaller quantities in Berkshire, Essex, Oxfordshire, Dorset, and Hampshire. [Wikipedia]
Funny, I’ve heard and read about Stonehenge all of my life, yet I do not recall, nor associate, the word sarsen with Stonehenge. From the same link,
The builders of Stonehenge used these stones for the Heel Stone and sarsen circle uprights. Avebury and many other megalithic monuments in southern England are also built with sarsen stones.
Noted in “Africa’s Merchant Kings,” Jason Urbanus, Archaeology (July/August 2023):
Hundreds of ancient obelisks and stelas are strewn across fields on the outskirts of Aksum, a city in the highlands of northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The largest of these monuments, which lies toppled and broken into sections, was carved with doors and windows to mimic a 13-story building, and once stood around 100 feet high. Weighing more than 570 tons, the Great Stela, as it is known, was hewn from a single block of granite-like rock cut from a quarry two and half miles away. At more than three times the height of the biggest of Easter Island’s moai statues and nearly 20 times heavier than the mightiest of Stonehenge’s sarsens, it is among the largest monolithic sculptures ever created and transported.
There’s a photo of the Great Stela, in all of its broken glory, at the link, which is typical of the lovely photography Archaeology has always employed.
