24/6/2020 Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near Stonehenge | Science | The Guardian

Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near

Stonehenge
Exclusive: prehistoric structure spanning 1.2 miles in diameter is
masterpiece of engineering, say archaeologists

Dalya Alberge
Mon 22 Jun 2020 06.00 BST

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

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24/6/2020 Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near Stonehenge | Science | The Guardian

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.”

The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on

Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire
Photograph: Christopher Ison/PA

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.”

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24/6/2020 Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near Stonehenge | Science | The Guardian

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 monument, 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.

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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.

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