[imagesource: David Goddard/Getty]

Stonehenge is impressive for a number of reasons.

It was built over 4 500 years ago and is still standing, it’s an incredible feat of engineering especially for its time, and it’s at the centre of some fantastic conspiracy theories.

Some of my favourites include that it was constructed by aliens as a spacecraft landing area and that it’s a giant fertility symbol in the shape of female genitalia.

Whoever came up with that last one has clearly never seen female genitalia.

Theories aside, it’s on my bucket list of places to visit, and even more so now that archaeologists have uncovered another fascinating piece of history relative to it.

Over to The Guardian:

A circle of deep shafts has been discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge, to the astonishment of archaeologists, who have described it as the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain.

Image: Guardian/ Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project

Four thousand five hundred years ago, the Neolithic peoples who constructed Stonehenge, a masterpiece of engineering, also dug a series of shafts aligned to form a circle spanning 1.2 miles (2km) in diameter.

The structure appears to have been a boundary guiding people to a sacred area because Durrington Walls, one of Britain’s largest henge monuments, is located precisely at its centre. The site is 1.9 miles north-east of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire.

Prof Vincent Gaffney, a leading archaeologist on the project, says that researchers on Stonehenge have been “taken aback” by the sheer scale of the structure.

It’s also bizarre that it has remained undiscovered until now.

The Durrington Shafts discovery, announced on Monday, is all the more extraordinary because it offers the first evidence that the early inhabitants of Britain, mainly farming communities, had developed a way to count. Constructing something of this size with such careful positioning of its features could only have been done by tracking hundreds of paces.

Each shaft is about five metres deep and 10 metres in diameter. They’ve found roughly 20 of them, and there are probably more, but can’t be studied due to modern development.

So, they paved a Neolithic site and put up a parking lot. Great.

The Neolithic people must have put an extraordinary amount of work into making these structures using primitive tools. Then again, they’re the same people who built Stonehenge by dragging bluestones from about 150 miles away.

While Stonehenge was positioned in relation to the solstices, or the extreme limits of the sun’s movement, Gaffney said the newly discovered circular shape suggests a “huge cosmological statement and the need to inscribe it into the earth itself”.

He added: “Stonehenge has a clear link to the seasons and the passage of time, through the summer solstice. But with the Durrington Shafts, it’s not the passing of time, but the bounding by a circle of shafts which has cosmological significance.”

For more on how the scientists dated their discovery, head here.

You can also read all about it in this open access academic journal.

There may be no mass gathering for the solstice this year due to the pandemic, but at least we have more valuable insight into our history.

Or you can hang onto your alien theories.

You do you.

[source:guardian]