Durrington Walls

[MaryP]

I never heard of this before, but two miles from Stonehenge is a much older and larger henge, called Durrington Walls, and several smaller sites around it.
It seems Stonehenge was just one part of a large complex built over many hundreds of years.



Durrington Walls was built over the site of a short lived neolithic village that they think may have housed the builders of Stonehenge. The village was quickly abandoned and later the the area was made into the henge, consisting of a circular enclosure with earthen and chalk walls surrounded by a ditch. However, in 2015, they discovered that beneath the henge and the prior village is buried a C-shaped super henge which was made of massive timbers, discovered by ground-penetrating radar. That henge was aligned with a local hill of some significance, not the solstices, as is Stonehenge. They believe the C-shaped super henge is older, and then their theology shifted to the sun, hence the new site at Stonehenge.

In 2015, another discovery was made at Durrington Walls: a ring of 20 giant pits, each over 60 ft wide and fifteen feet deep, all the same dimensions, evenly spaced in a circle over a mile wide around Durrington Walls. (Some is missing due to modern development, but the formation is clear.) When a couple of these pits were excavated they found some animal bones but nothing enlightening. It looks like the pits gradually filled with silt over time and became overgrown.



Those interest me. It seems a strange barrier to keep people out--why not just dig a ditch? People could just walk in between them if they wanted. The pits are too big to be post holes. There must have been some significance or purpose to them. They don't seem to know.

 

[bluesmoke]

I never heard of this before, but two miles from Stonehenge is a much older and larger henge, called Durrington Walls, and several smaller sites around it.
It seems Stonehenge was just one part of a large complex built over many hundreds of years.

View attachment 67386801

Durrington Walls was built over the site of a short lived neolithic village that they think may have housed the builders of Stonehenge. The village was quickly abandoned and later the the area was made into the henge, consisting of a circular enclosure with earthen and chalk walls surrounded by a ditch. However, in 2015, they discovered that beneath the henge and the prior village is buried a C-shaped super henge which was made of massive timbers, discovered by ground-penetrating radar. That henge was aligned with a local hill of some significance, not the solstices, as is Stonehenge. They believe the C-shaped super henge is older, and then their theology shifted to the sun, hence the new site at Stonehenge.

In 2015, another discovery was made at Durrington Walls: a ring of 20 giant pits, each over 60 ft wide and fifteen feet deep, all the same dimensions, evenly spaced in a circle over a mile wide around Durrington Walls. (Some is missing due to modern development, but the formation is clear.) When a couple of these pits were excavated they found some animal bones but nothing enlightening. It looks like the pits gradually filled with silt over time and became overgrown.

View attachment 67386798

Those interest me. It seems a strange barrier to keep people out--why not just dig a ditch? People could just walk in between them if they wanted. The pits are too big to be post holes. There must have been some significance or purpose to them. They don't seem to know.

I think Stonehenge was constructed beginning around 3000 BCE and Durrington around 2800 BCE. Durrington was considered complimentary to Stonehenge. Quite fascinating.

 

[MaryP]

I think Stonehenge was constructed beginning around 3000 BCE and Durrington around 2800 BCE. Durrington was considered complimentary to Stonehenge. Quite fascinating.

The part above ground is newer, yes. They're doing some rethinking about the entire area.

It sounds (to me) like a neolithic group of peoples found the area on the River Avon special, sacred, for hundreds and hundreds of years, congregating to feast and worship and bury their dead (often their cremated ashes). People came from all around, maybe returning to this ancestral area where they first settled. As time went on, they had expanded, groups split off and moved on, but they returned annually for the essential rites that honored the Spirits. Many Native American tribes did the same.

The people of Amesbury built their henges with timbers, but those don't last for millenia. With improved underground radar, they have found the post holes, though. The super henge of tree trunks under Durrington Walls with an alignment to a local hill was only in existence for about 50 years when it was carefully dismantled. It coincided with the time Stonehenge was built--a henge with stone uprights from Wales that had a new alignment--to the Sun. Times were a'changing. Maybe their people had come into contact with the folks from Wales through natural migration and trade, or maybe it was a more forceful encounter, but their 'temples' had a new focus. It indicates a change in their theology, and possibly a melding of two cultures.

Still scratching my head over those pits.

 

[MaryP]

Rethinking Durrington Walls: a long-lost monument revealed - Current Archaeology

Durrington Walls, two miles from Stonehenge, is named after the Neolithic henge that calls the location home. But with ongoing research revealing a massive and previously unknown monument hidden beneath its banks, the site’s history is set to be rewritten. Carly Hilts spoke to Vince Gaffney...

archaeology.co.uk

 

[HK.227]

I'm curious about the pits.

I recall reading about a similar site in Scnadinavia a long time ago. Large settlement (by neolithical standards), large amount of holes, some of which had wood in them, some which were empty. At the time it was thought to be some kind of fortification, but the layout made no sense.

One thing that is for certain is that buildings in ancient times were not just buildings. There was always some mystical/cosmological significance, much of which has survived into modern times, where we simply consider it "styles".

 

[MaryP]

I'm curious about the pits.

I recall reading about a similar site in Scnadinavia a long time ago. Large settlement (by neolithical standards), large amount of holes, some of which had wood in them, some which were empty. At the time it was thought to be some kind of fortification, but the layout made no sense.

One thing that is for certain is that buildings in ancient times were not just buildings. There was always some mystical/cosmological significance, much of which has survived into modern times, where we simply consider it "styles".

Me, too.
The first thing I thought of with pits that size were kill pits, where herd animals like the aurox, elk, whatever, might be stampeded into the pits where they would die. But they wouldn't have been placed where they were, right?, and you sure wouldn't need that many? Besides, by the time those pits were dug, people were herding their domesticated cattle and pigs to the festivities.

It would have been really cool looking to have fires burning in all of them, at night, on special occassions, but you'd think the archeologists would have found evidence of that and it's not mentioned.

Just guesses. I'm no expert. Thx for the tip on other pits in Scandanavia. I'm going to try to hunt them up.

 

[MaryP]

In the past 20 years, there has been a lot discovered around Stonehenge that predates it.

The Coneybury Anomaly, a giant pit full of dump from a huge feast around 4,000 BC, hosting both farmers and hunter gatherers, is less than a mile away. And a mile in the other direction is the mesolithic site of Blick Mead, site of an ancient spring and a settlement which also included visitors from far and wide for aurochs feasts, long before Stonehenge or Durrington Walls. There are ancient barrows only a couple miles away.

Maybe it was the spring and its "magical" bright pink rocks, or a place where their ancestors were buried, or just the fact that the area was a good hunting ground of open woods and fields and is on a river. It seems people had been traveling to that area to come together and celebrate one thing or another for thousands of years. Even though genetic studies show that the waves of people who used the site completely changed over time, the site remained a constant, a traditional meeting place.

Cool beans.

Blick Mead - Current Archaeology

Exploring the ‘first place’ in the stonehenge landscape Ongoing excavations at Blick Mead, an ancient spring on Salisbury Plain, have revealed an unprecedented array of evidence for large Mesolithic gatherings and extravagant feasts taking place just over a mile from where Stonehenge would be...

archaeology.co.uk

A Meeting in the Forest: Hunters and Farmers at the Coneybury ‘Anomaly’, Wiltshire | Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society | Cambridge Core

A Meeting in the Forest: Hunters and Farmers at the Coneybury ‘Anomaly’, Wiltshire - Volume 84

www.cambridge.org

Before Stonehenge: Whispers of sanctity from 9,000 years ago

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www.haaretz.com