Archaeology & History

Giant timber circle found next to Stonehenge

By T.K. Randall
August 15, 2016

Image: Stonehenge, Wiltshire
Credit: Udit Kapoor / CC BY-SA 4.0 (adapted) Discovered at the nearby archaeological complex of Durrington Walls, this impressive Neolithic structure would have consisted of up to 300 7-meter posts arranged in a 500-meter wide circle.

Despite the amount of time and resources that must have gone in to building it however there is strong evidence to suggest that this prehistoric monument was never actually completed.

Archaeologists excavating the site discovered that the timber posts had been deliberately removed from the ground and that someone had filled in all the holes with blocks of chalk.The answer to this mystery is believed to lie in a period of significant religious and political upheaval that occurred somewhere around 2460BC - the same time period during which Stonehenge was being transformed from a much larger structure in to the more familiar stone circle we see today.

Other well known Neolithic structures such as the Averbury standing stones and Silbury Hill - the largest artificial mound in Europe - were also thought to have been built around this time.

"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 senior National Trust archaeologist Dr Nick Snashall.

Source: Science Alert

Tags: Woodhenge, Stonehenge