The pandemic provided some unusual opportunities and for me this was especially marked in the Stonehenge landscape by the absence of hordes of visitors. This allowed a reuniting of brothers in survey, Vince and Chris Gaffney from Bradford University together with my brother, Martin from University of Trinity St Davids. We were joined in our field campaign by Eamonn Baldwin from Birmingham and my colleague Tim Kinnaird from St Andrews. The focus of our attention was a series of curious features seen on the magnetic gradiometer survey data. The features were evident as over 20 separate 10-20m diameter circles arranged in a concentric pattern around the Durrington Walls. Fieldwork and analysis revealed evidence suggesting that they were massive shafts, measuring more than 5 metres deep. The circle formed by the shafts encloses an area greater than 3 square kilometres around the Durrington Walls henge, itself one of Britain’s largest henge monuments, and the famous, smaller prehistoric circle at Woodhenge.
Figure 2 Anomaly
8A – 250MHz antenna: Ground penetrating radar time slices at 10cm depth
intervals, decreasing L–R from ground surface (top left) down to approximately
3.3m depth (bottom right).
Coring of the shafts provided radiocarbon and Optically Stimulated Luminescence dates suggesting these features are Neolithic and were excavated more than 4500 years ago, around the time that Durrington Walls was constructed. The shafts may have served as a boundary to a sacred area or precinct associated with the henge. The Neolithic period, which is associated with the first farmers in Britain, is characterised by the development of ornate, and occasionally very large, rituals structures and enclosures, including the great stone circle at Stonehenge. However, no comparative prehistoric structure in the UK encloses such a large area as the circle of shafts at Durrington, and the structure is currently unique.
Figure 3. Coring the sites with a
mini-percussion corer
Aside from the scale of the structure, the circuit of shafts has other surprising characteristics. The boundary appears to have been deliberately laid out to include an earlier prehistoric monument within the boundary - the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure. This site was built more than 1500 years before the henge at Durrington. This distance between the henge and earlier enclosure, more than 800 metres, seems to guide the placement of shafts around Durrington. The evidence for how these pits were laid out is extremely important as it implies that the early inhabitants of Britain used a tally or counting system to track pacing across long distances (Figure 4). Evidence for such careful planning, at such a scale, is unexpected at such an early period and emphasises how important the positioning of these pits was.
Figure 4. Least cost pathway analysis showing the use of pacing to mark out location of the pits. They are further distance away down slope than parallel to slope
Archaeologists believe the effort invested in
the great circle inscribed by the pits reflects an important cosmological link between these two ritual
sites, and that the large shafts were dug to record what must have been an
important, sacred boundary. The presence
of these massive pits, and perhaps an internal post line, guided people towards
the religious sites within the circle or even warned those who were not
permitted to cross the boundary marked by the shafts.
Research on the pits at Durrington was undertaken by a consortium of archaeologists led by the University of Bradford as part of the Stonehenge Hidden landscape Project, and with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, the universities of Birmingham, St Andrews, Warwick, Trinity Saint David (university of Wales), and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (University of Glasgow).
Animation illustrating the landscape setting of the Durrington pit group, major monuments and the average distance from Durrington Walls to identified features as a line.
©
Crown copyright and database rights 2013 (OS Profile DTM Scale 1:10000); EDINA Digimap
Ordnance Survey Service (100025252) http://digimap.edina.ac.uk
To read more on this project:
Gaffney, V. et al. 2020 A Massive, Late Neolithic Pit Structure associated with Durrington Walls Henge, Internet Archaeology 55
https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue55/4/index.html
Notes
The
universities undertaking field research supporting this press release included the
University of Bradford with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological
Prospection and Virtual Archaeology the universities of Birmingham, St Andrews,
Trinity Saint David (University of Wales), Warwick,, and the Scottish Universities
Environmental Research Centre. The work was undertaken a
part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project and brought together experts
in non-invasive geophysical prospection and remote sensing, and specialists in
British prehistory and landscape archaeology in order to carry out research in
one of the most important archaeological landscapes in Europe. The outstanding geophysical survey
and visualization capabilities of the team has been made possible only because
of the unique expertise and combined resources of the wider project partnership.
an international collaboration of the Ludwig
Boltzmann Gesellschaft (Austria), Amt der NiederösterreichischenLandesregierung
(Austria),the University of Vienna (Austria), the Vienna University of Technology
(Austria), ZAMG– the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics
(Austria), Airborne Technologies (Austria), 7reasons (Austria), ÖAW– Austrian
Academy of Sciences (Austria), ÖAI – Austrian Archaeological Institute
(Austria), RGZM Mainz – Römisch‐GermanischesZentralmuseum Mainz (Germany), the
University of Birmingham in collaboration with the University of Bradford (GB),
Arkeologerna of StatensHistoriskaMuseer (Sweden), NIKU – Norwegian Institute
for Cultural Heritage (Norway), and Vestfold fylkeskommune – Kulturarv
(Norway).
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