Stonehenge has huge 'stone religious sibling' two miles away
Archaeologists have discovered that Stonehenge had a huge stone
sibling just two miles to the north-east.
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Scientists say they had no idea massive henge of 50 stones was
just two miles away |
Using powerful ground-penetrating radar, which can 'X-ray'
archaeological sites to a depth of up to four metres, investigators from
Birmingham and Bradford universities and from the Ludwig Boltzmann
Institute in Vienna have discovered a 330-metre long line of more than
50 massive stones, buried under part of the bank of Britain's largest
pre-historic henge.
"Up till now, we had absolutely no idea that the stones were there,"
said the co-director of the investigation Prof Vince Gaffney of
Birmingham University.
The geophysical evidence suggests that each buried stone is roughly
three metres long and 1.5 metres wide and is positioned horizontally,
not vertically, in its earthen matrix.
However, it's conceivable that they originally stood vertically in
the ground like other standing stones in Britain. It is thought that
they were probably brought to the site shortly before 2500BC.
They seem to have formed the southern arm of a c-shaped ritual
'enclosure', the rest of which was made up of an artificially scarped
natural elevation in the ground.
The c-shaped enclosure - more than 330 metres wide and over 400
metres long - faced directly towards the River Avon. The monument was
later converted from a c-shaped to a roughly circular enclosure, now
known as Durrington Walls - Britain's largest pre-historic henge,
roughly 12 times the size of Stonehenge itself.
As a religious complex, it would almost certainly have had a deeply
spiritual and ritual connection with the river. But precisely why is a
complete mystery, although it is possible that that particular stretch
of water was regarded as a deity.
In total, some 4.5 square miles of buried landscape has been surveyed
by the joint Birmingham/Vienna team in an exercise that has taken four
years to complete.
Now the archaeologists plan to analyse the new data - in order to
work out how all the newly discovered prehistoric monuments related to
each other. Using avatar-based computer models, they are hoping to tease
out exactly how Neolithic and Bronze Age people used Stonehenge's
landscape. Initial results suggest that some of the newly discovered
shrines and other monuments grew up along processional ways or
pilgrimage routes in Stonehenge's sacred landscape.
- The Independent
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