What may be the largest prehistoric monument in the entire United Kingdom has been uncovered, and it’s just a stone’s throw away from Stonehenge.
Live Science writes:
By using a combination of remote sensing and hands-on excavation work, the team found evidence for at least 20 giant holes dating to the Neolithic, about 4,500 years ago. Each hole is massive, measuring at least 32 feet (10 meters) in diameter and at least 16 feet (5 m) deep.
These holes form a circle larger than 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) across, which covers an area larger than 1.2 square miles (3.1 square km). At the center of this giant circle is one of the largest henges in the U.K., known as Durrington Walls — which is 1,640 feet (500 m) in diameter — as well as the smaller Woodhenge, which measures just 360 feet (110 meters) across. (A henge is a circular, prehistoric monument made with stone or wooden markers.)
“We continually get to this point of thinking that in the past they weren’t that developed or sophisticated people,” study co-researcher Richard Bates, a professor in the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, told Live Science. “And, yet again, this [finding] has proven that in the past, our ancestors were.”
Bates and his colleagues, who are part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, first realized last summer that the giant holes they were finding during their archaeological surveys were not naturally occurring dewponds (shallow, artificial ponds that provided cattle with drinking water), but rather human-dug shafts laid out in a circular pattern. “We gradually became convinced we were not looking at natural things,” Bates said. “These had to be made by humans.”
Radiocarbon dating of shell and bone fragments found in sediment cores from these holes indicate that Neolithic people dug the shafts around the same time that Durrington Walls was built, or about from 2800 B.C to 2100 B.C. This timing may not be coincidental, but a clue; perhaps these holes served as a boundary to a sacred area within the circle, archaeologists said.
One idea is that the different levels of the different enclosures marked which levels of society were allowed within, Bates said. “Whether this line of pits marks a zone, whereby only a certain [type of] people could go beyond it, that’s one of the thoughts,” he said. “If there was lots of feasting, sacrificial or otherwise, made within Durrington, maybe this represents as far as all the cattle could go before the priests.”
Moreover, the newfound henge seems to mark the boundary for an earlier prehistoric sacred area known as the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure, a site built more than 1,500 years earlier than the henge at Durrington….
