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The presence of an extraordinary circle of yawning pits created by Neolithic people near Stonehenge has been proved thanks to a novel combination of scientific techniques, a team of archaeologists is claiming.
The architects of Stonehenge may have had the heavens in mind when they built the great stone monument in Wiltshire, but the team believes the makers of the Durrington pit circle were more interested in an underworld.
The Durrington circle is thought to be a sweep of about 20 pits more than a mile across, with the Neolithic Durrington Walls and Woodhenge sites at its centre.
Some of the pits are thought to be 10 metres wide and 5 metres deep, and digging them out of the chalky landscape would have required determination and engineering skills.
The pit circle’s apparent existence was first revealed in 2020, with some describing it as the biggest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain.
Prof Vincent Gaffney, of the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford, who was leading the analysis, said: “Now that we’re confident that the pits are a structure, we’ve got a massive monument inscribing the cosmology of the people at the time on to the land in a way we haven’t seen before. If it’s going to happen anywhere in Britain, it’s going to happen at Stonehenge.”
Source: The Guardian
Image: AKP Photos/Alamy