Other intriguing discoveries include the remnants of an MG car that was found partially dismantled in an abandoned Second World War artillery position. ‘It will rewrite what we think about this landscape,’ says Alistair Barclay, Senior Research Manager at Wessex Archaeology. This unexpected early Neolithic monument has major implications for understanding the Stonehenge landscape. It looks like they started off as fairly deep, oval pits, and then they were extended again and again. In order to accommodate this influx of service personnel and their families, hundreds of new homes are being constructed.
Some of it came from a pit outside the enclosure, and this is different from the sherds from the ditches, being more similar to material from Windmill Hill. The remainder of the ditches run up the hillside and pass the group of people. This pottery is all roughly contemporary, but the styles are very different. Aside from the scale of the structure, the circuit of shafts has other surprising characteristics. Radiocarbon evidence proves the dirt in the shafts are contemporary with Stonehenge and Durrington Walls.
In fact, pretty much the final scrape of the trowel as we were emptying the last ditch produced a leaf-shaped arrowhead. They point downhill, in the direction of a long and round barrow and Barrow Clump. “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.”Now dubbed the Durrington Shafts, scientists say the discovery proves that Britain’s first inhabitants may have been more advanced than previously thought — evidenced by their clear use of numbers and mathematics to build the henge network.In fact, the construction of Stonehenge itself was initiated only after ancient peoples dragged giant bluestones for 150 miles, from southwest Wales to the site in Amesbury, Wiltshire. ‘So, by then it was pretty clear that we were dealing with a segmented ditch! Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure Larkhill’s enclosure pre-dated the Durrington Walls pits by almost 1000 years yet it is included in their circuit. The boundary appears to have been deliberately laid out to include an earlier prehistoric monument within the boundary - the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure. Built more than 1,000 years before the … Each hole is more than 5 yards (5 meters) deep and almost 11 yards (10 meters) in diameter. In places, they sliced directly through the Neolithic archaeology, but in some respects the uniformity of these trenches is just as remarkable as the handiwork of their prehistoric predecessors. To be fair, though, they weren’t being shot at while they worked.The finds that came out of the ditches soon confirmed Steve’s hunch. The Larkhill excavations were initiated by plans to base an extra 4,000 soldiers around Salisbury Plain by 2019.
‘The individual ditches are so sinuous that they don’t create a clear arc,’ says Steve. The shaft’s perimeter also includes the Larkhill causewayed enclosure, which was built another 1,500 years prior. Instead, it looks like they were making it up as they went along, or working to their own plan. Although the shafts had re-filled over a millennia, tools such as geophysical prospection, ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry showed scientists that what they had been presumed to be naturally occurring sinkholes were actually formed in a clear pattern.Would you like to receive desktop browser notifications about breaking news and other major stories?Stonehenge has long been one of history’s great mysteries — and the world heritage site has just revealed yet another layer to its story.Thanks for contacting us. The…‘When we started stripping off the topsoil, we saw a ditch terminus. Evaluation of 4% of the site had revealed a big ditch towards the top of the slope; the question was, what did it belong to?Pottery found during the excavations could help shed light on how the monument was used.