Hundreds of fragments of a rare transparent type of quartz called 'rock crystal' suggest Neolithic people used the mineral to decorate graves and other structures at a ceremonial site in western England, archaeologists say.
The rock crystals were likely brought to the site from a source more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) away, over mountainous terrain, and the crystals appear to have been carefully broken into much smaller pieces, possibly during a community gathering to watch the working of what must have seemed like a magical material.
"You can think of it as a really special event," Nick Overton, an archaeologist at The University of Manchester in England, told Live Science.
"It feels like they're putting a lot of emphasis on the practice of working [the crystal] … people would have remembered it as being distinctive and different."
Overton is the lead author of a study published in July in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal that describes the discovery of more than 300 of these quartz crystal fragments at a 6,000-year-old ceremonial site at Dorstone Hill in western England, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) south of the monument known as Arthur's Stone.
As well as being almost as transparent as water, several of the crystal fragments are prismatic, splitting white light into a visible rainbow spectrum. READ MORE...
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