A circle of deep shafts has been discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge, to the astonishment of archeologists, who have described it as the largest prehistoric structure ever found in the UK.
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 2km in diameter.
The structure appears to have been a boundary guiding people to a sacred area, because Durrington Walls, one of the UK’s largest henge monuments, is located precisely at its center.
Photo: Reuters
The site is 3km northeast of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire.
“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,” said Vincent Gaffney, a leading archeologist on the project.
The Durrington Shafts discovery, announced yesterday, 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 5m deep and 10m in diameter. About 20 have been found and there might have been more than 30. About 40 percent of the circle is no longer available for study as a consequence of modern development.
“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,” Gaffney said.
“I can’t emphasize enough the effort that would have gone in to digging such large shafts with tools of stone, wood and bone,” he added.
However, then these are the same people who also built Stonehenge, dragging bluestones to the site from southwest Wales about 241km away.
While Stonehenge was positioned in relation to the solstices, Gaffney said the newly discovered circular shape suggests a “huge cosmological statement and the need to inscribe it into the earth itself.”
“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,” he added.
The boundary might have guided people toward a sacred site within its center or warned against entering it.
As the area around Stonehenge is among the world’s most-studied archeological 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.
“We are starting to see things we could never see through standard archeology, things we could not imagine,” Gaffney said.
Based at the University of Bradford, he is the co-principal investigator of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project, which has been surveying tens of kilometers of landscape across Salisbury Plain.
Archeologists 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 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 archeologists can only speculate how those features were once used.
“What we’re seeing is two massive monuments with their territories. Other archeologists, 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,” Gaffney said.
While numerous ancient civilizations had counting systems, the evidence lies primarily in texts in various forms that they left behind, he added.
The planning involved in contracting a prehistoric structure of this size must have involved a tally or counting system, he said.
Positioning each shaft would have involved pacing more than 800m from the henge outward.
The research has involved a consortium of archeologists, 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 archeology 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.”
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in