Stonehenge may have been built using pig fat

Fat residues on shards of pottery found at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge, have long been assumed to be connected with feeding the many hundreds of people that came from across Britain to help construct the ancient monument.
But, new analysis by archaeologists at Newcastle University, UK, suggests that because the fragments came from dishes that would have been the size and shape of buckets, not cooking or serving dishes, they could have been used for the collection and storage of tallow—a form of animal fat.

Dr. Lisa-Marie Shillito, Senior Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology, Newcastle University, said: "I was interested in the exceptional level of preservation and high quantities of lipids—or fatty residues—we recovered from the pottery. I wanted to know more about why we see these high quantities of pig fat in pottery, when 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

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