Stonehenge: Neolithic monument found near sacred site

Apparently a ring of 'shafts; has been discovered very near Stonehenge.

Acheologists and academics from anumbe rof universities have been working together on this project which is approximately 2 miles from Stonehenge but is part of the whole Stonehenge complex.

www.bbc.co.uk...

Archaeologists have discovered a ring of prehistoric shafts, dug thousands of years ago near Stonehenge.
Fieldwork has revealed evidence of a 1.2 mile (2km) wide circle of large shafts measuring more than 10m in diameter and 5m in depth.
They surround the ancient settlement of Durrington Walls, two miles (3km) from Stonehenge.
Tests suggest the ground works are Neolithic and were excavated more than 4,500 years ago.
Experts believe the 20 or more shafts may have served as a boundary to a sacred area connected to the henge.

en.wikipedia.org...

It is thought that at one point Durrington Walls was the largest village in Northern Europe.

Dr Nick Snashall, National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, hailed the "astonishing discovery".

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.

"The Hidden Landscapes team have combined cutting-edge, archaeological fieldwork with good old-fashioned detective work to reveal this extraordinary discovery and write a whole new chapter in the story of the Stonehenge landscape."

It seems the more we uncover about the Stonehenge complex the more mysteries there are about the purpose of the structures and the culture of the people who built it, maintained it and who lived there or visited it.

a reply to: Freeborn

Huh...

That complex just keeps getting larger and larger, doesn't it??

Someday, I'd really like to get over there to see it... Seems unlikely, but maybe, someday.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: Freeborn

Huh...

That complex just keeps getting larger and larger, doesn't it??

Someday, I'd really like to get over there to see it... Seems unlikely, but maybe, someday.

I have seen it. At about age 16. I thought "OK. A bunch of piled stones. Can we go back to downtown London so i can go to Tower Records shop again?"

Now i am 38 years old. I can't believe i was like that then. Where was my respect towards history? Like i am not able to get music when i am back in Finland?

I still have my love for music though...

But yeah anyway, interesting find. S+F @ OP.

A huge part of me desperately wants to know everything about it. Who built it, why it was built, what did they really do there? I'd love to be a fly on the wall, watching and understanding everything.

The other part of me longs for mysteries to be kept mysteries. The wonder that comes with mystery fuels the imagination and I feel that's an amazing part of being a human.

a reply to: Freeborn

I've been reading about this too, it's amazing how much bigger the site keeps getting, it must have looked spectacular 4500 years ago.

a reply to: seagull

The thing that gets me is this: It's never been truly pulled down or destroyed, over thousands of years.

No one has ever said "politically incorrect, best pull it down".

All this ancient stuff, by definition obviously, sustains for generations why did no one do what the Taliban did to the huge Buddah statues, and like blow it up or destroy it to make a break with the past.

Puzzles me.

Thanks for posting something that draws some eyes. This part of the site has been lagging in the past year. I get it....probably a lot of people not coming back.

I will miss this forum the most. Lots of passion on all sides here.

As this site keep getting bigger and bigger it becomes more and more apparent that the level of organisation and co-ordination required far surpasses anything we thought possible for that time and place.

We know people came from all over Northern Europe to visit the Stonehenge complex yet we still don't know for definite exactly why.

I'd love to go down there and stop for a few days and have a good look around the area.

Here is another aarticle giving more details about the shafts and their construction etc.
www.theguardian.com...

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.”

This find makes plans for a road tunnel under Stonehenge uncertain.
Construction on the tunnel is scheduled to start in 2021 but opponents feel there may be further parts of the greater site just waiting to be found and any significant road works could hinder such discoveries.

The Stonehenge road tunnel is a planned tunnel in Wiltshire, England drawn up by Highways England to upgrade the A303 road. It would move the A303 into a tunnel under the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, completing the removal of traffic begun with the closure of the A344 road.

en.wikipedia.org...#:~:text=The%20Stonehenge%20road%20tunnel%20is,closure%20of%20the%20A344%20road.

Leading archaeologists say a £1.6bn scheme to build a road tunnel through the historic Stonehenge landscape should be scrapped altogether after the sensational discovery nearby of the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain.

The potential for technology to reveal so much more is enormous because only a tiny percentage has been explored so far, Parker Pearson said.

While Highways England has argued that its plan to improve the A303 with a tunnel will cut congestion, Parker Pearson said: “The expenses per mile are mind-boggling. It’s a tunnel that’s basically 2.9km long and it’s going to cost £1.6bn.

“Colleagues who work in that business say, ‘You might as well add 40%.’ I think they’re saying [it’ll take] five to seven years to construct, so that would be continuous traffic jams, and there’s concern that the vibrations will actually impact on archaeological deposits, causing the ground to crack.

www.theguardian.com...

A 3km tunnel costing around £2bn?

Used to think it might have been nice to be a Neolithic guy. Life was simple. Do some hunting, gathering. Make arrowheads while you sit around the fire. Pretty simple life.

These days, though, I keep imagining getting up out of bed, eating a little, then it's off to the quarries and fields to bust hump building yet another mound or pile or circle of crazy heavy rocks for some unknown reason. Then same thing next day.

Boring 9 to 5 work, 1,000 BC. Just another working stiff ruled by the Man.

Thanks for bringing this here Freeborn. Even though the stories surrounding the find has left me angry at the ignorance and arrogance of the vested interests involved.

The people who put up the Standing Stones knew a great deal about the world they lived in, aligning huge stones with stellar progressions and along comes some idiot writing in the Guardian telling us all how this is the first evidence the ancients knew how to count?

I think the sooner a multi-disciplinary team get down there the better. Needs more than archaeologists to assess the whys hows and whats of these stones and the infrastructure surrounding them. That without any form of mass communication people knew to travel to the site for specific times and (so far unknown) purposes suggests people living in the world all those thousand of years ago were a lot less bumpkin than some of the moron academics we are expected to tolerate today.

As to the tunnel, contractors twisting eco awareness narratives to suit their multi £b purposes says it all really.

a reply to: Doxanoxa

The Stones depict no deity, nothing to offend any religious sensitivities. The stones align with the beyond in ways nobody today actually understands but if you visit any of the Henges, you may experience something of their aura and immense power that is outside of our ken.

a reply to: teapot

Thing is Academia wants to control everything surrounding Stonehenge including explanations as to the who did what, when and how and why.

You are right in pointing out that an extensive multi-disciplined exercise and approach is required....perhaps this could include some people with a slightly more left field mind set than the same old Academics with their focus at least as equally on research grants, funding and getting published than it is on unearthing the truth about this fascinating complex.

Its no surprsie that developers have realised that 'green' sells nowadays.
I suspect that profit is still their prime motive, possibly even only motive.

a reply to: teapot

As I'm sure you are aware there are numerous stone circles and standing stones in south west England as there are in other parts of the UK.

Over the years many people have reported experiences in and around these monuments.

I became aware of Men-an-Tol in Cornwall when The Levellers recorded a song about the stones on their Zeitgeist album.
Story goes that two of the band members were out walking with their partners and when one of them passed through the 'Crick Stone' he immediately felt energised and started running around.



en.wikipedia.org...

Men-an-Tol is near Men Scryfa and The Boskednan stone circle.

en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: Freeborn

I doubt we know half of what Stonehenge was about.

Good to see this latest find may stop the tunnel.

On a personal level, Avebury is the one that does it for me. Just cos you can ride through it

a reply to: teapot

Oh I so agree.

I was lucky enough to visit the stones when I was about 12 and back then there was no fences or path ways and we were all free to touch them.

I didnt have a major psychic moment, but I've never forgotten the day all the same.

On thinking about it though, I do find myself going back to Avebury quite often, where I touch the stones.

I'm even more puzzled why the stones at Avebury are still standing as they are even more 'useable' than Stonehenge.

a reply to: Doxanoxa

As I said in an earlier post I'd love to go down there and spend some time at Stonehenge, Avebury and go see some of the other standing stones and circles.

I have friends who have been to Avebury and they swear it is an amazing experience to get right up to and touch the stones and go inside the circle.

Across the two sites at Stonehenge and Aveesbury there are 160 seperate Scheduled Monuments - 'nationally important archaeological sites'.

Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites is a UNESCO World Heritage site (WHS) located in Wiltshire, England. The WHS covers two large areas of land separated by nearly 30 miles (48 km), rather than a specific monument or building. The sites were inscribed as co-listings in 1986. Some of the large and well known monuments within the WHS are listed below, but the area also has an exceptionally high density of small-scale archaeological sites, particularly from the prehistoric period. More than 700 individual archaeological features have been identified. There are 160 separate Scheduled Monuments, covering 415 items or features

en.wikipedia.org...

It would literally be criminal if any further finds are jeopardised by 'progress' no matter how it is dressed up and spun.

From the looks of its geographical position, where it leads right down into a lake that might have existed at the time, it looks like a symbolic womb and birth canal. So I'm going with center of worship, specifically for what ever fertility goddess they were praying to at the time.

Do a big ritual or party in the center, parade down to the lake for some kind of symbolic birth or rebirth or whatever.

Anyway that's what the landscape suggests to me. FWIW

a reply to: Blue Shift

I think you're probably spot on.



I posted this on another thread, but we were discussing the same thing...so, I'm going to be lazy and just copy and paste from there.

originally posted by: KilgoreTrout
It's been different things to differnet people at different time. I haven't had chance to read this new paper and the findings, but the earliest structure is the 'Wood Henge'. This they believe was a more enclosed circle, with strategic openings aligned to the Sun at solstices or to the Moon - I don't think we can be certain yet, I may be wrong. If it is like other wooden circle finds, it likely had an upturned tree buried at the centre. The megalithic builders belong to a culture believed to have originated in the eastern meditteranean. They came, as they came everywhere in Europe, for metal ores. The stones orginally set, not the main Henge itself, were in some way associated with ancestor worship, it's complicated, but the stones appeared to have represented the personage of esteem who had physically passed. Stone was considered immortal and therefore, by infusing or bonding it with the spirit of the dead person, that person retained a presence in the world. As I said, it is complicated, these people messed around with their dead a lot, decay and decomposition was something they clearly took a huge interest in and understanding of. I personally think that the dead or perhaps dying was laid out on a stone and then that stone 'absorbed' the dead's essense and was subsequently erected by the society of people they were important to. Something like that.

It's a metaphorical landscape, much like the Egyptian labyrinth video that Nice Wolf posted earlier. The Egyptians squared everything, but the basis of labyrinth is like that of the temple, a metaphorical journey through the cosmology of the people that built it and their approach to life and death. Sharing information to make the journey easier. As civilization progresses, it becomes more about trying to make sense of existence by ordering and cataloguing it.

Your 'birthing' landscape would fit well with Moon worship being a factor. The Moon allows for accurate measurements of the pregnacy and therefore for effective and timely treatment for a pregnancy that doesn't go as naturally as it should. They perhaps applied the same metaphorical model when they took up farming. May be?

I'm no expert in this field but isn't there some sort of link between the phases of the moon and early fertility godesses etc?

I remember watching a video some time ago about an imagined celebration of one sort or another set in the Stonehenge site.
It involved arriving by boat and walking up a stone lined avenue through various circles and stones etc.
There were several sites away from the main stage with all sorts of celebrations going on.

It reminded me very much of a modern day music festival.

I don't know how much was based on established 'fact' and how much was dramatic licence or pure imagination.

I've tried several times to find the video again but with no success.

Did these sites develop and expand over the course of time?
Personally I think - for what little its worth - as I said in an earlier post the sophistication and complexity of these sites suggests a level of co-operation and site management that exceeds what was previously thought possible.

a reply to: Doxanoxa

Sorry I missed this post.

The thing is, many of the places where these stones and circles are found throughout the UK are in areas where puritanical Christianity never really took hold.
Even in the times of the Witchfinders etc in rural S.W. England there were still elements of the old pagan belief systems in the day to day lives of the general population, same as many of the more remote areas of the UK.

Pretty much the same today.

There wasn't the religious zeal to destroy everything that went before it in these areas.
I suspect many people simply paid lip service to Christianity and maybe even some of the local clergy adopted local beliefs into their faith, something Christianity has been particularly noted for.

As a slight aside I suspect many of the modern day pagan rituals we see bear little resemblance to the beliefs and practices of our ancestors.
Maybe someone could correct me on this?