Scientists find huge ring of ancient shafts near Stonehenge
Source: Associated Press
Scientists find huge ring of ancient shafts near Stonehenge
today
FILE - In this Sunday, June 21, 2015 file photo, the sun rises as thousands of revellers gather at the ancient stone circle Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, near Salisbury, England. Archaeologists said Monday June 22, 2020, they have discovered a major new prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystic stone circle that is the subject of continued scientific research and venue for modern day pagan celebrations. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland, File)
LONDON (AP) -- Archaeologists said Monday that they have discovered a major prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed new light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England.
Experts from a group of British universities led by the University of Bradford say the site consists of at least 20 huge shafts, more than 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter and 5 meters (16 feet) deep, forming a circle more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in diameter.
The new find is at Durrington Walls, the site of a Neolithic village about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from Stonehenge,
Researchers say the shafts appear to have been dug around 4,500 years ago, and could mark the boundary of a sacred area or precinct around a circular monument known as the Durrington Walls henge.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/35a731284094926325d372af2fc06cca
Archaeologists have discovered a large ring of underground shafts near Britain's famed Stonehenge. Using remote sensing and sampling, scientists found a series of pits that form a circle more than a mile in diameter and date to about 4,500 years ago.
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Even better: they did it live at Glastonbury in 2009:
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BBC News UK
Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-53132567
Excerpts:
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"It is remarkable that the application of new technology can still lead to the discovery of such a massive prehistoric structure. "When these pits were first noted, it was thought they might be natural features. Only through geophysical surveys, could we join the dots and see there was a pattern on a massive scale."
Prof Gaffney said a "proper excavation" was required to determine the exact nature of the pits but that the team believed they acted as a boundary, perhaps marking out Durrington Walls as a special place, or emphasising the difference between the Durrington and Stonehenge areas. His colleague Tim Kinnaird said sediments from the shafts had allowed archaeologists to "write detailed narratives of the Stonehenge landscape for the last 4,000 years".
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Dr Nick Snashall, National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, hailed the discovery as "astonishing". She said: "As the place where the builders of Stonehenge lived and feasted, Durrington Walls is key to unlocking the story of the wider Stonehenge landscape, and this astonishing discovery offers us new insights into the lives and beliefs of our Neolithic ancestors.
Thanks for posting and leading us to this interesting archaeological discovery......
These structures are thousands of years old and the reasons why they were built are still poorly understood.
Alexandru Micu by Alexandru Micu June 22, 2020
In archeology, sometimes you can teach an old site new tricks, it seems. New research reports the discovery of at least 20 huge shafts forming a circle at Durrington Walls, the site of a stone-age village about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from Stonehenge.
The position of the shafts in relation to Durrington Walls and the village of Durrington, UK.
Image credits Vincent Gaffney et al., (2020), intarch.
The discovery of this major, buried monument could help us better understand how the iconic stone circle in England came to be, or what its purpose was.
Ancient digs
“The size of the shafts and circuit surrounding Durrington Walls is currently unique,” says Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford and corresponding author of the paper describing the findings.
“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.”
When the shafts were first found, the team assumed they were natural structures, formed by water flowing through the chalky subsurface. However, remote sensing and sampling quickly showed that this wasn’t the case, and that the shafts were built by human hands.
More:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/durrington-walls-circle-shafts-925235235/
Exclusive: prehistoric structure spanning 1.2 miles in diameter is masterpiece of engineering, say archaeologists
Dalya Alberge
Mon 22 Jun 2020 01.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 22 Jun 2020 06.25 EDT
Durrington Walls in Wiltshire is located at the centre of the newly discovered prehistoric site known as Durrington Shafts. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty
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.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/22/vast-neolithic-circle-of-deep-shafts-found-near-stonehenge
