No man is an island -- not even Stonehenge. While it was a common notion that Stonehenge stood in grand isolation, a new project aimed at understanding the iconic structure reveals otherwise.
Called Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, the researchers from University of Birmingham (UB), along with Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology found that a mass of previously unidentified archaeological monuments were also around the Stonehenge landscape.
“Despite Stonehenge being the most iconic of all prehistoric monuments and occupying one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the world, much of this landscape in effect remains terra incognita,” UB professor and project leader Vincent Gaffney says in a statement. He is also Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics chair at said university.
The researchers developed this digital mapping project, which is seen to change our knowledge about the historic landscape, including the extraordinary new findings on the biggest super-henge in the world dubbed as Durrington Walls.
The project involved geophysical surveys and remote-sensing techniques that helped discover new features that shaped part of what is now regarded as the most-detailed archaeological digital map of the iconic landscape ever created. The survey reveals 17 ritual monuments that dated back to the time Stonehenge reached its historic shape.
Further, survey indicates that burial mounds in dozens were charted in small detail, which included a long barrow or a burial mound that dated back before Stonehenge. The long barrow showed a huge timber building that was possibly used for ritual inhumation (burial) of the deceased, after a complex sequence of excarnation or defleshing and exposure, which was enclosed by an earthen mound.
The Stonehenge project also found new and unexpected data on monuments that were previously unidentified. For instance is the Durrington Walls, which was a short distance away from Stonehenge and found to have a circumference of over 1.5 kilometers or 0.93 miles.
The project also discovered novel monument types that include large prehistoric pits, of which some appeared to shape astronomic alignments, as well as information on Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman settlements and fields at a level never seen in the past.
The researchers say that the findings only went to show that our new technology has reshaped how our archaeologists comprehend the historical landscape and its development in over 11,000 years.
“All of this information has been placed within a single digital map, which will guide how Stonehenge and its landscape are studied in the future,” Gaffney says.
The results were made known at the British Science Festival and will be featured in Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath, a new BBC Two series to be aired on Sept. 11.
