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Druids despair as Seahenge set for dry berth November 19 2001 at 04:16PM London - A Bronze Age timber circle dug up on a beach two years ago should not be returned to its original site, where it would be vulnerable to the forces of the North Sea, English Heritage said on Monday. The 4 000-year-old structure, which became known as Seahenge, was found off the coast of Norfolk, north-east England, and removed despite prolonged protests by locals and Druid groups, who said the circle was a religious monument. English Heritage, the preservation group that oversaw and financed the ...

They had stumbled upon an archaeologist's gold mine. Dated to 1365-967 BC and now known as Flag Fen, excavations and research uncovered a monumental site which included a causeway composed of thousands of timber posts arranged in five 1-meter-long rows, and a small timber platform partway across the structure. Between the posts of the causeway, timbers had been built up horizontally in ancient times, providing a "bridge" or dry surface for transportation across the wet lowland upon which the timber structures were built, connecting a higher level land area on its east with a higher level area on its west....

Today we travel to southern Illinois, where just across the Mississippi River is located the Cahokia Archaeological Zone. Cahokia was the largest known Native American city north of Mexico. At its peak population around 1250 AD, it was larger that London, England. Of course, Cahokia was not its real name. No one knows its real name. Unlike the ancient towns in the Southeast, where direct descendants of the original occupants still live, no one even knows yet what happened to the population of Cahokia, after it was abandoned. There was an indigenous village in the vicinity of Cahokia as early...

New wooden henge, a circular ditch that aligns with world-famous monument, deemed site's most exciting find in a lifetime -- Without a sod of earth being dug up, a new henge, a circular ditch which probably enclosed a ring of timber posts and may have been used for feasting, has been discovered...only 900 metres away and apparently contemporary to the 5,000-year-old stone circle, as the most exciting find at Stonehenge in a lifetime... The henge was revealed within a fortnight of an international team beginning fieldwork on the three-year Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project, which aims to survey and map 14...

Just northeast of Cincinnati, Ohio, a sort of wooden Stonehenge is slowly emerging as archaeologists unearth increasing evidence of a 2,000-year-old ceremonial site... Like Stonehenge, the Ohio timber circles were likely used to mark astronomical events such as the summer solstice. Formally called Moorehead Circle but nicknamed "Woodhenge" by non-archaeologists, the site was once a leafless forest of wooden posts. Laid out in a peculiar pattern of concentric, but incomplete, rings, the site is about 200 feet (57 meters) wide. Today only rock-filled postholes remain, surrounded by the enigmatic earthworks of Fort Ancient State Memorial (map). Some are thousands of...

A team of 100 archaeologists, from various universities around Britain, along with Wessex Archaeology, has been carrying out excavations as part of the seven-year Riverside Project at Woodhenge, Durrington Walls and Stonehenge Cursus to find out more about the sites and their links with Stonehenge in the 26th Century BC... Professor of archaeology at Sheffield University Mike Parker- Pearson is leading the dig: "I think our most exciting discovery is the ceremonial avenue which leads from Durrington Walls to the river." ...The road, which formed an avenue aligned on the Midsummer Solstice sunset, suggested that Durrington Walls and Woodhenge were...

Much still to be learned about Cahokia Mounds By ELIZABETH DONALD, AP COLLINSVILLE, Ill. (Map, News) - It's so much a part of the landscape that metro-east residents often don't even notice it, except when a visiting relative notices: "Look, there's the mound." Rising from what once was an endless grass sea parted by the Mississippi River, Monks Mound isn't even named after the Native American Indians who built it centuries ago, but the Trappist monks who lived there for only five years in the 19th century. No one knows what the long-vanished people who built the mounds called themselves,...