Stonehenge stood at the heart of a sprawling landscape of chapels, burial mounds, massive pits and ritual shrines, according to an unprecedented survey of the ancient grounds.
Researchers uncovered 17 new chapels and hundreds of archeological features around the neolithic standing stones on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, south-west England, including forms of monuments that have never been seen before.
Brought together for the first time in a digital map of the historic site, the discoveries transform how archeologists view a landscape that was reshaped by generations for hundreds of years after the first stones were erected in about 3100 BC.
“This radically changes our view of Stonehenge,” said Vince Gaffney, head of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project at Birmingham University. “In the past we had this idea that Stonehenge was standing in splendid isolation, but it wasn’t … it’s absolutely huge.”
He added that around Stonehenge people created “their own shrines and temples. We can see the whole landscape is being used in very complex ways.”
The finds follow the discovery, made public earlier this month, that the monument was originally circular. Researchers said that an insufficiently long hosepipe might have helped them solve one of the enduring mysteries of Stonehenge: whether the monument was originally built as a full circle or a C-shape.
The hosepipe was used to water grass around the stones, but when it failed to reach parts of the monument, patches of brown began to appear.
Tim Daw, who helps to maintain the site, noticed that the patches matched spots where missing stones may have stood, making Stonehenge a full circle. The discovery has prompted a fresh mystery around what happened to the missing stones.
Researchers on the surrounding landscape project spent four years surveying 12km2 of land around Stonehenge.
Using groundpenetrating radar and other equipment, they located two massive pits in a 3km-long monument called the Cursus that predates Stonehenge and lies to the north. The pits appear to form astronomical alignments, Gaffney said. On midsummer’s day the eastern pit’s alignment with the rising sun, and the western pit’s alignment at sunset, intersect at the point where Stonehenge was built 400 years later.
“The importance is not that we found yet another set of strange archeological monuments, but that they have a spatial relationship with Stonehenge,” Gaffney told the British Science Festival in Birmingham.
One of the most striking monuments to emerge from the survey was a 33m-long burial mound containing a massive wooden building whose timber foundations were spotted in the soil. Predating Stonehenge, the building is thought to have been a house of the dead where bizarre burial rituals were played out.
“The rituals included exposure of the dead bodies and defleshing on a large forecourt,” said Wolfgang Neuber, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna.
“The project has revealed that the area around Stonehenge is teeming with previously unseen archeology and that the application of new technology can transform how archeologists and the wider public understand one of the best-studied landscapes on Earth,” Gaffney said.
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