The Guardian (USA)

Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near Stonehenge

- Dalya Alberge

A circle of deep shafts has been discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge, to the astonishme­nt of archaeolog­ists, who have described it as the largest prehistori­c structure ever found in Britain.

Four thousand five hundred years ago, the Neolithic peoples who constructe­d Stonehenge, a masterpiec­e of engineerin­g, also dug a series of shafts aligned to form a circle spanning 1.2 miles (2km) in diameter. The structure appears to have been a boundary guiding people to a sacred area because Durrington Walls, one of Britain’s largest henge monuments, is located precisely at its centre. The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire.

Prof Vincent Gaffney, a leading archaeolog­ist on the project, said: “This is an unpreceden­ted find of major significan­ce within the UK. Key researcher­s on Stonehenge and its landscape have been taken aback by the scale of the structure and the fact that it hadn’t been discovered until now so close to Stonehenge.”

The Durrington Shafts discovery, announced on Monday, is all the more extraordin­ary because it offers the first evidence that the early inhabitant­s of Britain, mainly farming communitie­s, had developed a way to count. Constructi­ng something of this size with such careful positionin­g of its features could only have been done by tracking hundreds of paces.

The shafts are vast, each more than 5 metres deep and 10 metres in diameter. Approximat­ely 20 have been found and there may have been more than 30. About 40% of the circle is no longer available for study as a consequenc­e of modern developmen­t.

Gaffney said: “The size of the shafts and circuit surroundin­g Durrington Walls is currently unique. It demonstrat­es the significan­ce of Durrington Walls Henge, the complexity of the monumental structures within the Stonehenge landscape, and the capacity and desire of Neolithic communitie­s to record their cosmologic­al belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipate­d.”

He added: “I can’t emphasise enough the effort that would have gone in to digging such large shafts with tools of stone, wood and bone.”

But then these are the same people who also built Stonehenge, dragging bluestones to the site from south-west Wales about 150 miles away.

While Stonehenge was positioned in relation to the solstices, or the extreme limits of the sun’s movement, Gaffney said the newly discovered circular shape suggests a “huge cosmologic­al statement and the need to inscribe it into the earth itself”.

He added: “Stonehenge has a clear link to the seasons and the passage of time, through the summer solstice. But with the Durrington Shafts, it’s not the passing of time, but the bounding by a circle of shafts which has cosmologic­al significan­ce.”

The boundary may have guided people towards a sacred site within its centre or warned against entering it.

As the area around Stonehenge is among the world’s most-studied archaeolog­ical landscapes, the discovery is all the more unexpected. Having filled naturally over millennia, the shafts – although enormous – had been dismissed as natural sinkholes and dew ponds. The latest technology – including geophysica­l prospectio­n, ground-penetratin­g radar and magnetomet­ry – showed them as geophysica­l anomalies and revealed their true significan­ce. Gaffney said: “We are starting to see things we could never see through standard archaeolog­y, things we could not imagine.”

Based at the University of Bradford, he is the co-principal investigat­or of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project, which has been surveying tens of kilometres of landscape across Salisbury Plain. Archaeolog­ists are now joining the dots and seeing this massive pattern, he said.

Coring of the shafts has provided crucial radiocarbo­n dates to more than 4,500 years ago, making the boundary contempora­ry with both Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. The boundary also appears to have been laid out to include an earlier prehistori­c monu

ment, the Larkhill causewayed enclosure, built more than 1,500 years before the henge at Durrington.

Struck flint and unidentifi­ed bone fragments were recovered from the shafts, but archaeolog­ists can only speculate how those features were once used.

Gaffney said: “What we’re seeing is two massive monuments with their territorie­s. Other archaeolog­ists, including Michael Parker Pearson at University College London, have suggested that, while Stonehenge, with its standing stones, was an area for the dead, Durrington, with its wooden structures, was for the living.”

He added that, while numerous ancient civilisati­ons had counting systems, the evidence lies primarily in texts in various forms that they left behind. The planning involved in contractin­g a prehistori­c structure of this size must have involved a tally or counting system, he believes. Positionin­g each shaft would have involved pacing more than 800 metres from the henge outwards.

The research has involved a consortium of archaeolog­ists, led by the University of Bradford and including the universiti­es of Birmingham and St Andrews, in an internatio­nal collaborat­ion with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeolog­ical Prospectio­n and Virtual Archaeolog­y at the University of Vienna.

Henry Chapman, professor of archaeolog­y at Birmingham University, described it as “an incredible new monument”, and Richard Bates, a geoscienti­st at St Andrews University, said it offered “an insight to the past that shows an even more complex society than we could ever imagine”.

The consortium is publishing a scientific open-access paper in Internet Archaeolog­y.

The discovery makes up for the cancellati­on of this year’s summer solstice celebratio­ns at Stonehenge – on 20 June – due to the ban on mass gatherings prompted by Covid-19. Archaeolog­ists have another reason to rejoice after the discovery nearby of a giant Neolithic structure.

 ?? Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty ?? Durrington Walls in Wiltshire is located at the centre of the newly discovered prehistori­c site known as Durrington Shafts.
Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Durrington Walls in Wiltshire is located at the centre of the newly discovered prehistori­c site known as Durrington Shafts.
 ?? Photograph: Christophe­r Ison/PA ?? The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire
Photograph: Christophe­r Ison/PA The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire

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