onnections between the great neolithic monument of Stonehenge and the hills of west Wales have been observed for centuries. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 18th century about a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, remarked that it was “very like Stone-henge in Wiltshire”. In 1923, the geologist HH Thomas established beyond doubt that the monument’s smaller, slimmer, inner stones – not to be confused with the heftier outer sarsens with their great lintels – originated in the Welsh Preseli Hills. And 70 years ago, in A Land, her tough-minded, lyrical book about the geology and archaeology of Britain, Jacquetta Hawkes speculated that the bluestones “were brought from Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain because in Wales they had already absorbed holiness from their use in some other sacred structure”. The archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, a decade of whose work on Stonehenge is the subject of a BBC documentary that was broadcast on Friday, would find nothing to argue with in that assertion. His new claim, though, is that he and his team have found the exact spot from which the bluestones originate. That is, the very quarry from which they were hewn. More than that, he thinks he has located the spot, on the hill of Waun Mawn in Wales, where the stones were once positioned in a great circle, before each boulder, weighing between two and five tonnes apiece, was transported 150 miles to Salisbury Plain, in a 5,000-year-old feat of engineering almost beyond imagining. News of Parker Pearson’s work has made for joyful headlines. As archaeology tends to do: discoveries about the lost world buried beneath our feet made for gripping copy even before the Times signed a deal with Howard Carter to reveal the sensational contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb, 99 years ago. In fiction, too, archaeology provides narrative with the pleasures of adventure, the thrill of lost treasure. In novels from JL Carr’s A Month in the Country to Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, in films from Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy to this year’s The Dig, archaeology may also serve as a metaphor for a more delicate excavation of the psyche, a confrontation with deep time, with human fragility and mortality. The story of Parker Pearson’s discoveries, as told in the BBC’s Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed, followed a recognisable and satisfying three-act narrative structure. Act one: the archaeologists – the hero being Parker Pearson himself, a hirsute figure straight from central casting – set off in hope and with an ambitious plan. Act two: an important new discovery is made, pinning down the stones to a particular pair of quarries. But then the stakes get higher: the archaeologists set out to find the place where the bluestones were once erected before being moved to Salisbury Plain. In short, a stone circle that isn’t there any more, hasn’t been there for 5,000 years. They investigate one spot, then another – in vain. And then, act three: the last throw of the dice, the last site to be considered. No one holds out much hope. But still, digging commences, in unpropitious circumstances. A hillside is pummelled by horizontal rain. Water is baled out of trenches. The student volunteers are becoming rebellious. All seems lost. Until: a discovery. A trace of a hole in the ground is so similar in shape to a bluestone erected at Stonehenge that the two would fit together “like a key in a lock”. From here, the resolution rolls out satisfyingly – the dating turns out to fit. A little bit of the mystery of the circle has been chipped away at. The impossible quest has been fulfilled. One suspects that a decade of setbacks and hard graft felt, in reality, less like a perfect film script. Hawkes also wrote: “Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires.” What she meant is that Stonehenge, because of its sheer fame, its scale, its sense of mystery, even its physical prominence beside one of the major routes between the south-west and south-east of England, has always acted as a magnet for British desires and fantasies. It sits deep in the national consciousness, infecting myth and storytelling and even street planning (it inspired the original Circus in Bath, and so is the ancestor of Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus and even, arguably, that most banal detail of road-traffic management, the roundabout). In its time, its construction has been confidently attributed to giants, Phoenicians, Mycenaeans, Romans, Saxons, the wizard Merlin, and aliens. It has been called fertility symbol, star chart, temple and scene of human sacrifice. It is the only British monument to have spawned its own religion, that of modern druidism; in the later 20th century it was the rallying-place of the counterculture. What is the Stonehenge that Parker Pearson brings us? It is a Stonehenge of a people who were competent and able. A Stonehenge of migrants, of people who travelled great distances, who gathered together in large numbers to erect remarkable structures, who cooperated. This is a speculative picture and tentative, as Parker Pearson would surely be the first to admit. But it is, in its way, a hopeful and a humane one. Perhaps not so much the Stonehenge that we deserve, but the Stonehenge that we need. Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer