Archaeologists have discovered what could well be the UK’s largest prehistoric monument, and it’s a stone’s throw from Stonehenge, according to a new study.
Using a set of remote sensors and hands-on excavation work, the team discovered evidence of no fewer than 20 giant hollows dating back to the Neolithic period, approximately 4,500 years ago. Each gap is massive, measuring no less than 32 feet (10 meters) in diameter and not less than 16 feet (five m) deep.
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These holes form a circle more than 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) in diameter, covering an arean easier than 1.2 square miles (3.1 square kilometers). At the center of this giant circle, the UK’s largest hens, known as Durrington Walls, which measures 500 m in diameter, and the smaller Woodhenge, only 110 meters in diameter. . (A henge is a circular prehistoric monument made of stone or wooden markers).
“We are our best friend to the point where we think they weren’t evolved or don’t confuse people,” says co-researcher Richard Bates, a professor at the Faculty of Earth Sciences – Environment at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, known as Live Sciences. “And, again, this [discovery] proved that our ancestors were.”
Bates and his colleagues, which are components of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, first learned last summer that the giant holes they discovered in their archaeological excavations were not herbal dew ponds (artificial ponds that provided drinking water to livestock). rather artificial wells arranged in a circular pattern. “The best graduate friends have convinced us that we weren’t looking for herbal things,” Bates said. “They had to be done through humans.”
Radiocarbon dating of shell and bone fragments discovered in the sediment nuclei of those holes indicates that other American Neolithics dug the wells around the same time that the Durrington walls were built, from about 2800 BC to 2,00 A.C. This moment is a coincidence, but a clue; For example, these holes served as a limit to a sacred deception in relation to the circle, archaeologists said.
One concept is that the other degrees of the other speakers marked the degrees of society allowed inside, Bates said. “That this line of wells marks an area, through which only one [type of] other Americans can also go beyond that, those thoughts,” he said. “If there were large apple, sacrifice or other parties, made in Durrington, by game season represents that all farm animals can also pass to priests.”
In addition, the hot henge seems to mark the boundary of an ancient prehistoric sacred deception known as the Larkhill Road Enclosure, a dressage built more than 1,500 years beyond the Durrington Henge. According to archaeologists, this enclosure, in the appearance of the resolved holes, is about 86 feet (283 feet) from the walls of Durrington. According to the researchers, those holes meant a cosmological link between those wells and the walls of Durrington.
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Neolithic men could have intentionally designed these wells to hang water during the raibig apple season, however, additional studies had to be conducted to incorporate this idea, Bates noted.
Aleven, although the well circle in Durrington is unique, there are no comparable prehistoric structures like this anywhere else, it is never very unforeseen for other Neolithic Americans to invest time and effort in digging them, the researchers said. In the Neolithic, Britain saw its first farmers, who developed detailed and giant structures, such as Stonehenge, whose stones were erected approximately 2500 years ago, to deceive their ritual ceremonies.
It is never very transparent how the Neolithic other Americans decided where to dig the holes, however, they could have used a counting or counting formula to count their appearance over long distances, as the holes are somewhat evenly spaced, the researchers said.
In addition, “a well could possibly generate evidence of [having been dug again], suggesting that the characteristics may also have been maintained until the Bronze Ages,” the researchers wrote in the study, published online June 21 in the Internet journal Archeology. .
“As a place where Stonehenge developers lived and celebrated, Durrington Walls is quite critical in locating Stonehenge’s larger landscape,” Nick Snashall, an archaeologist at the National Trust for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, said in a statement. , “This fantastic discovery gives us new perspectives on the life and ideology of our Neolithic ancestors.”
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