Posted on 12/12/2021 11:55:05 AM PST by SunkenCiv
...a series of deep pits were discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge last year... Now scientific tests have proved that those gaping pits, each aligned to form a circle spanning 1.2 miles (2km) in diameter, were definitely human-made, dug into the sacred landscape almost 4,500 years ago.
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 in Wiltshire...
While part of the circle has not survived, owing to modern development, Gaffney said the latest fieldwork involved scientific analysis of nine of the pits. “We’ve now looked at nearly half of them and they’re all the same. So effectively this really does say this is one enormous structure. It may have evolved from a natural feature, but we haven’t located that. So it’s the largest prehistoric structure found in Britain.”
Each pit is about 10 metres across and 5 metres deep, and science supports the theory that the neolithic people who constructed Stonehenge also dug this monument.
The previously unknown subterranean ring is 20 times bigger than Stonehenge. It adds to the evidence that early inhabitants of Britain, mainly farming communities, had developed a way to count, tracking hundreds of paces to measure out the pits...
The cutting-edge technology includes optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), which can date the last time that sediment was exposed to daylight.
The tests were conducted by Dr Tim Kinnaird, of the school of earth and environmental sciences at the University of St Andrews, who said: “These proved beyond doubt that the pits date to around 2400BC.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
update to the story:
“Professor Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London (UCL), suggested that the discovery of captive pig bones pointed towards the site having been used as a mass hunting grounds, perhaps something akin to a ritual...This would have seen thousands of people from across ancient Britain travel to the site with animals like pigs, to perform a mass ritual within the arc’s sphere, later gathering in a procession to walk to Stonehenge for the winter — not summer — solstice.”
so, were the pits, giant bbq/roasting pits for pigs, in the style of the Hawaiians? I can’t imagine pigs herded into a depression just to be slaughered - very noisy and bloody and a waste of foodstock when there were ‘thousands’ of pilgrims to feed.
Could prove military organization.
Soldiers - (spearmen).
NCOs - file or group leaders.
Discipline - “Dig me a hole. This deep and this big around. And no more sniffing after the chief’s daughter!”
Sounds like the winter camp for hundreds of semi-nomadic clans.
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