Helen Hotson - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only - pictured above is King Arthur's Hall on Bodmin Moor
A historic site in southwest England associated with King Arthur is not from the medieval period, as experts had long thought. It actually dates back 4,000 years earlier to the Neolithic, also known as the New Stone Age.
The new finding challenges the idea that the structure was related to King Arthur, who would have lived in the 5th or 6th centuries A.D., as it was created thousands of years before the mythical king was said to have existed.
A team of researchers carried out a survey of the rectangular structure on the Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, which has been referred to as King Arthur's Hall.
The structure is made of earth and rock, consisting of 56 standing stones. Some of the stones are leaning, lying flat on the ground, or partially buried. It measures about 69 by 160 feet.
It is a protected site, and Historic England, a government agency, listed it as an early medieval animal pen from around 1000 A.D. However, the standing stones caused experts to question if the structure was actually much older.
"Given that the monument is now 4,000 years older than most people thought, we now need to consider the monument within the context of Bodmin Moor's prehistoric landscape," said Tim Kinnaird, a geochronologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
The research team used a technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to date the structure to the Neolithic period, meaning that it is around 5,500 years old, which is 4,000 years earlier than previously thought. It's even older than the most ancient parts of Stonehenge.
OSL can determine when certain minerals in the sediment were last exposed to sunlight. The OSL results were combined with other dating techniques, like radiocarbon dating of buried pollen and insect eggs.
The researchers found that the buried soil at the monument was disturbed at the time of construction, which provided the opportunity to date it.
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