Remnants of Gigantic Wooden Henge Found Two Miles from Stonehenge

Ancient Origins

Archaeologists carrying out excavations at the Durrington Walls earthworks, just two miles from the world-famous stone circle of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, have discovered evidence of an enormous 500-meter diameter circle of timber posts. Experts have said the finding is of international significance.

In a world exclusive, The Independent has revealed that the newly-discovered wooden henge at Durrington Walls consisted of 200-300 timber posts measuring 6-7 meters in height and 60 – 70 centimeters in diameter. The posts were buried in 1.5-meter-deep holes, two of which have been fully excavated so far.

The discovery was made just two miles from the world-famous stone circle of Stonehenge (public domain)

Durrington Walls is the name given to a giant earthwork measuring around 1,640 feet (500 meters) in diameter and surrounded by a ditch of up to 54ft (16 meters) wide and a bank of more than three foot (1 meter) high.  It is built on the same summer solstice alignment as Stonehenge. The enormous structure is believed to have formed a gigantic ceremonial complex in the Stonehenge landscape.
The most intriguing aspect of the finding is that the construction of the wooden circle stopped abruptly before it was finished, around 2460 BC. The posts were removed from the holes, which were then filled in with blocks of chalk and then covered by a bank made of chalk rubble. In the bottom of one of the excavated post holes, archaeologists found a spade made from a cow’s shoulder blade.

A tool made from a bison shoulder blade, which would be similar to the spade found in the bottom of one of the post holes. (foresthistory.org)

According to The Independent, researchers believe this sudden cessation in construction is indicative of a dramatic change in religious and/or political direction, possibly due to the arrival in Britain around this time of the Beaker culture (2800 – 1800 BC). The Beaker culture is thought to have originated in either the Iberian Peninsula, the Netherlands or Central Europe and subsequently spread out across Western Europe. They are known for a particular pottery type they developed, but also a complex cultural phenomenon involving shared ideological, cultural and religious ideas.

The distinctive Bell Beaker pottery drinking vessels shaped like an inverted bell (public domain)

“It was as if the religious "revolutionaries" were trying, quite literally, to bury the past,” reports The Independent. “The question archaeologists will now seek to answer is whether it was the revolutionaries’ own past they were seeking to bury – or whether it was another group or cultural tradition’s past that was being consigned to the dustbin of prehistory.”
“The new discoveries at Durrington Walls reveal the previously unsuspected complexity of events in the area during the period when Stonehenge’s largest stones were being erected – and show just how politically and ideologically dynamic British society was at that particularly crucial stage in prehistory,” said Dr Nick Snashall, the senior National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site [via The Independent].

Top image: Main: An aerial photograph of Durrington Walls. In the North, West and South, a line of trees handily outlines the shape of the bank, a faint impression can be seen in the East, however, to the right of the road. The River Avon, and the area where the avenue connected it to Durrington Walls, can be seen in the bottom-right (pegasusarchive.org). Inset: An illustration of a similar wooden henge located at Cairnpapple Hill, Scotland.

By April Holloway

By April Holloway

Impressive Mosaic and Large Roman Villa Discovered in UK… But it is Now Re-Buried

Ancient Origins

One of the largest Romans villas ever discovered in Britain and a beautiful mosaic, which was uncovered within in it, were found on a site known as Deverill Villa near Tisbury in Wiltshire, UK. It is one of the most important Roman discoveries in more than a decade.

According to The Telegraph, the villa had 20 to 25 rooms on the ground floor and was built sometime between 175 AD and 220 AD. It was repeatedly re-modeled right up until the mid- 4th century.
Exploration of the site at Deverill Villa revealed the surviving sections of walls measuring 1.5 meters (4.92 feet) in height. A mosaic formed a part of the grand villa, which is believed to have been three-storeys high, with grounds extending over 100 meters (328.08 feet) in width and length. It was accidentally discovered by Luke Irwin, a rug designer. He was installing electric cables in a barn in 2015 when he uncovered a mosaic near the foundations. It appeared to be in remarkably good condition, so Mr. Irwin called the Wiltshire Archaeology Service.

The Roman mosaic Mr. Irwin found in his backyard. (Youtube/Luke Irwin Rugs)

The Roman villa was found under the backyard of Mr. Irwin’s 17th century house after an eight-day archaeological dig sponsored by Historic England and the local Salisbury Museum. Apart from the mosaic and ruined walls, the researchers from Salisbury discovered many precious artifacts, which may provide more information about life in the area during the 3rd century AD.

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Dr. David Roberts, an archaeologist for Historic England, said:

''This site has not been touched since its collapse 1400 years ago and, as such, is of enormous importance. Without question, this is a hugely valuable site in terms of research, with incredible potential. The discovery of such an elaborate and extraordinarily well-preserved villa, undamaged by agriculture for over 1500 years, is unparalleled in recent years. Overall, the excellent preservation, large scale and complexity of this site present a unique opportunity to understand Roman and post-Roman Britain.''

The discovery also contained a perfectly preserved Roman well, underfloor heating pipes, and the stone coffin of a Roman child. The coffin had long been used by the inhabitants of the house as a flower pot. Oyster shells were also unearthed - which were transported over 45 miles (72.42 km) from the coast. This discovery confirms that the villa was a home of an important and wealthy family.

The child’s stone coffin. (News.com.au)

The recently discovered villa is very similar to another one that was found in 1864 at Chedworth, in Gloucestershire. That one was fully excavated, put on display and acquired by the National Trust in 1924. The Chedworth villa was built as a dwelling around the three sides of a country yard. It had a beautiful mosaic floor, and two separate bathing suites. Like the Deverill Villa, it also belonged to a wealthy and important family.

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The researchers from Salisbury believe that it is possible the villa could have been a private property of at least one of the Roman Emperors. As Simon Sebag Montefiore, one of Britain’s leading historians said: "This remarkable Roman villa, with its baths and mosaics uncovered by chance, is a large, important and very exciting discovery that reveals so much about the luxurious lifestyle of a rich Romano British family at the height of the empire.''

Screenshot showting the Roman villa as rendered by a video artist, based on the discoveries made at the site. (Youtube/Luke Irwin Rugs)

Unfortunately, the excavations could not be completed, because the cost of a full excavation and preservation of such a place would be too high. The researchers would like to go back and carry out more grids, but it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. The Salisbury Museum decided that until they find more money, the villa and its mosaic had to be re-buried and grassed over to protect them from the elements.
However, even if it became financially possible to complete the dig, Mr. Irwin does not want his garden turned into a museum.
Well preserved Roman villas have been found in many of the former domains of the Roman Empire. In southern Europe, a number of them are now open-air museums. One of the most spectacular is located in Rabaçal, Portugal, 12 kilometers (7.46 miles) away from Conimbriga. The Roman housing complex was excavated in 1984. It was inhabited until around the 6th century AD, and currently it is used as a museum, which protects the remarkable set of mosaics that decorated the villa. The designs have African and Oriental influences, something unique in the art of this period in Portugal. They present seasons, quadriga mosaics, female figures, and vegetable and geometric compositions.
Featured Image: Excavations at the site of the Roman villa. Source: Youtube/Luke Irwin Rugs
By Natalia Klimczak

Researchers Say Stonehenge had More Gender Equality than Commonly Believed

Ancient Origins

Analysis of remains from the famous megalithic site of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England, have revealed the relics of 14 wmen. According to researchers, the women were very important to the society of their time and their burials suggest that Stonehenge was a site with more gender equality than most people believe.

During the latest excavation, more remains of women than men were discovered at Stonehenge. In 2008, archaeologists discovered remains of about 200 cremated adults. According to the researchers in the latest study, it was surprising to find hints at gender equality in the burials.
Their results go against the common portrayal of prehistoric man as the one in charge of the site with barely a woman in sight. The newest discovery also confirms the importance of women in the societies which were buried there.

A group of people performing Neo-Druid (Druid) rituals at Stonehenge in 2007. ( CC BY SA 2.0 ) Results of a current study suggest that Stonehenge was a site with high gender equality.

The most recent excavation was focused on the place known as Aubrey Hole 7, one of 56 chalk pits dug outside of the stone circle. It is dated to the earliest times of Stonehenge, in the late 4th or early 3rd millennium BC.

The ring of Aubrey Holes that were excavated in the 1920s are marked with red circles. ( Credit: Adam Stanford )

Mike Pitts, archaeologist, editor of British Archaeology , and author of Hengeworld explained to the press that cemeteries of this period are rare, but Stonehenge seems to be an exception. All the people buried in Stonehenge were likely to have been special in their societies. They could have had a high status, possessed special skills or knowledge, or perhaps they were ritual or political leaders. The discovery was also connected with several other finds supporting the theory that Stonehenge functioned as a cremation cemetery for leaders and other important individuals.
As Mike Pitts told Discovery News :

“In almost every depiction of Stonehenge by artists and TV re-enactors we see lots of men, a man in charge, and few or no women. The archeology now shows that as far as the burials go, women were as prominent there as men. This contrasts with the earlier burial mounds, where men seem to be more prominent.”

A drawing of Stonehenge from 1645. ( Public Domain )

The BBC reports that at least 14 females and nine males were discovered in Aubrey Hole seven, and some of the males were young adults. It is uncertain if the men were linked with the women in some way, but archaeologists have suggested that they could have been relatives.
Radiocarbon dating of all known burials at Stonehenge reveals that they took place in several episodes from about 3100 BC to at least 2140 BC. Christie Willis of the University College London Institute of Archaeology reported that long bone pins, hair pins, and a mace head made out of gneiss were also found with the cremated remains.

Excavating in 2008. ( Credit: Mike Pitts )

Willis told Discovery News that the role of women in society in the area "probably declined again towards the 3rd millennium BC, both archaeological and historical evidence has shown that women’s status has gone up and down quite noticeably at different times in the past."

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Willis and Pitts agree that a lack of corpses of children means that their remains were treated differently. They suggest that the children were cremated, but their ashes were scattered in the nearby river Avon. Finally, they claim that there is a common association between the sources of the upper reaches of significant rivers and late Neolithic religious centers like Stonehenge.

Some of the areas of Stonehenge that have been excavated. Located cremation burials are shown with a red dot. ( Credit: Mike Pitts )

In 2003, researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada announced that a study by Anthony Perks shows that Stonehenge is it is a giant fertility symbol, constructed in the shape of the female sexual organ. According to The Guardian , Stonehenge could have represented the opening by which Mother Earth gave birth to the plants and animals on which ancient people so depended. There were no proven burials in Stonehenge at the time of this research.
A few years later, in 2008, Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and part of the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project, announced the role of Stonehenge in death as well. As he said to National Geographic :

''Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid third millennium B.C. The cremation burial dating to Stonehenge’s sarsen stones phase is likely just one of many from this later period of the monument’s use and demonstrates that it was still very much a ‘domain of the dead.''  

 Featured image: Stonehenge, located near Salisbury in the English county of Wiltshire. ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 )

By Natalia Klimczak 

Startling New Evidence Suggests Stonehenge was First Built in Wales then Transported and Reconstructed 500 Years Later in England

Ancient Origins

Archaeologists have found the exact holes in a rocky outcrop in Wales from where the bluestones found at Stonehenge originated, revealing that they were quarried 500 years before they were assembled into the famous stone circle that still stands today in Wiltshire, England. The dramatic discovery suggests that the ancient monument was first erected in Wales and later dismantled, transported, and reassembled over 140 miles away in Salisbury Plain.
The Guardian reports that the finding was made during a project run by the University College London (UCL), in cooperation with the universities of Manchester, Bournemouth and Southampton, among others, to investigate quarries in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
It has long been known that the bluestones – a term used in a loose sense to cover all of the ‘foreign’ stones which are not native to Salisbury Plain – originated in southwest Wales.  Their name actually refers to the spotted dolerite, an igneous rock that looks blue when broken and is spotted with small pellets of feldspar and other minerals that got into the molten matrix when the rocks were forming geological ages ago. Nearly a century ago, in 1923, the eminent petrographer, Herbert Thomas, was able to identify their source as the Preseli hills.
Now archaeologists have been able to identify a series of holes in rocky outcrops that exactly match the size, shape, and consistency of Stonehenge’s bluestones at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, to the north of Preseli hills.

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Bluestones at Carn Menyn in Wales (public domain)

The holes have been radiocarbon dated – from nut shells and charcoal from the quarry workers’ campfires – to 3,400 BC at Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3,200 BC at Carn Goedeg. However, the bluestones were not assembled at Stonehenge until 2,900 BC, which raises the question as to why they were quarried centuries before their use in the famous stone monument in Wiltshire, England.
“It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that’s pretty improbable in my view,” Prof Mike Parker Pearson, director of the project, told The Guardian. “It’s more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire.”
One hypothesis is that the current dating of Stonehenge is wrong and it is actually much older. However, Professor Pearson believes “it’s more likely that they were building their own monument [in Wales], that somewhere near the quarries there is the first Stonehenge and that what we’re seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument.” [via The Guardian]

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Reconstruction drawing of Stonehenge as it might have appeared in 1000BC by Alan Sorrell

Much archaeological debate has been expended on how the bluestones arrived at Stonehenge – whether by human effort, floating the stones (each weighing several tonnes apiece) across water and dragging them across land, or whether they were deposited on Salisbury Plain naturally by glacial action. Although a small number of archaeologists still belief in the latter theory, most now believe the bluestones were brought by human transportation because glacial movement in the region does not support the transport of glacial erratics in the required manner.  The latest discovery certainly suggests that the stones were intentionally transported to England.

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England. 2014. Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 3.0

According to The Guardian, the research team will now be carrying out geophysical surveys, trial excavations and aerial photographic analyses in the area between the two quarries in Wales to identify the area where a Stonehenge-like stone circle was originally assembled. The researchers have hinted at the fact that they may already have found a promising location and that a big discovery may follow in 2016.
Featured Image:  The famous Stonehenge monument in Wiltshire, England.  Howard Ignatius/Flickr
By April Holloway

Archaeologists Search for Neolithic Home of Avebury Stone Circle Builders Between the Monuments

Ancient Origins



Archaeologists from the National Trust, Southampton and Leicester Universities, and Allen Environmental Archaeology are trying to find out where the people who built the world-famous Avebury Stone Circle in Wiltshire actually lived.
The stone circle at Avebury surrounds the center of the village and two smaller circles stand within the main ring of sarsen stones, one to the North, alongside the road to Swindon and the other to the south, next to the road to Devizes.
The monument, along with its famous neighbor, Stonehenge, is a World Heritage Site. It was constructed over many centuries, from around 2850 BC to 2200 BC with a huge bank and ditch surrounding the stone circle.
The archaeologists are currently exploring a site that was first investigated by Alexander Keiller in 1934. There are many Neolithic stone tools and pottery found just below the surface and experts are now engaged in a three-week dig, having first thoroughly explored the area over the course of the last three years.

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“Avebury's prehistoric monuments are justly world famous but one of the questions I'm most often asked is where the people who built and used them lived” said Nick Snashall, speaking to The Western Daily Press. Mr. Snashall is The National Trust's archaeologist for Stonehenge and Avebury. “This landscape has been studied by antiquaries and archaeologists for almost 400 years, which makes it all the more astonishing that we had no idea where its Neolithic and Bronze Age residents lived or what they did in their daily lives. So a few years ago a group of us decided it was about time we changed that and teamed up to form the Between the Monuments Project.”
Snashall said that the team is trying to “put the people back into Avebury”. However, one of the main problems with this kind of work is that it is incredibly difficult to locate the houses the first farmers in the area built, whereas finding stone circles and burial mounds is comparably easy.
The team started by investigating the records assembled by Alexander Keiller and currently held at the Avebury Museum. This led them to a site near West Kennet, where a well-known ‘long barrow’ chambered tomb stands on a small hill – a regular stopping-off point for visitors to Avebury. Close to the barrow stands Europe’s largest man-made hill, a huge earthen mound called Silbury Hill and there is another long barrow at East Kennet.

West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury, Wiltshire, England (Wikimedia Commons)

A double row of sarsen stones called the West Kennet Avenue connects West Kennet long barrow with the stone circle and the spot where the team are digging is located part of the way along this avenue, hence the name of the project - ‘Between The Monuments’.
When the archaeologists stripped back the turf, they found plenty of arrowheads, clusters of flint scrapers used to work animal hide and plant materials, miniature flint saws and pottery. Mr Snashall said that the finds were appearing three or four at a time, in clusters, and that its amazing to think about the millions of people who have visited the site yet had no idea what they were standing on.

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The team has also discovered a structure which they think may have been an ancient house.
Scottish archaeologist and businessman Alexander Keiller was heir to his family’s marmalade business, James Keiller & Son, and so he became a very wealthy man. He used part of his inheritance to buy land totaling 950 acres (3.8 square kilometers) in Avebury where he then began to conduct excavations, including re-erecting some of the stones which had fallen over time or had become buried.
After investigating the West Kennet avenue site in 1934, he then moved on to Avebury itself in 1937. It was Keiller who discovered the famous ‘barber surgeon’ skeleton in the stone circle’s south west quadrant. In 1938 Keiller opened a museum at Avebury to display his discoveries, including artifacts he had uncovered at another site at nearby Windmill Hill. Keiller sold all his holdings in Avebury to The National Trust in 1943. The museum is still open to visitors to this day.

'Barber Surgeon' skeleton, Avebury, Wiltshire, England (Wikimedia Commons)

Featured Image: Avebury Stone Circle, Wiltshire, England (Wikimedia Commons)
By Robin Whitlock

Discovery Of Neolithic Gift Shop Suggests Stonehenge Always Meant As Tourist Attraction

The Onion

WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND—In a significant finding that sheds new light on the mysterious monument’s past, a team of archaeologists working near Stonehenge this week unearthed the remnants of a primitive gift shop, suggesting that the site had always served as a tourist attraction. “After uncovering piles of Stone Age goblets, deer-hide tunics, and animal-bone bracelets all etched with images of Stonehenge, we realized that this was not an ancient Celtic ritual site or Druidic pilgrimage destination as previously thought, but instead a popular attraction for Neolithic vacationers,” said lead researcher Amelia Stroud of Oxford University, who explained that preserved footprints found at the site indicated that ancient visitors had to walk through the gift area on their way out of the circular stone structure. “We also found a wide array of ancient coins at the site, clear evidence that large bands of Romans and Anglo-Saxon tribesmen came from far away to visit the attraction and were charged exorbitant prices while there.” Stroud went on to speculate that numerous small rocks found scattered around the site were most likely the remains of prehistoric “Make Your Own Stonehenge” kits