The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project used
ground-penetrating radars and GPS-guided magnetometers to produce a 3D
map of a four-square-mile area. Credit: Henrik Knudsen, with thanks to
National Trust.
The Stonehenge Hidden Landscaped Project is a four-year collaboration
with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and
Virtual Archaeology in Austria. The team has conducted the first
detailed underground survey of the area surrounding Stonehenge, covering
around four square miles (six kilometres). What they discovered was
startling.Using the latest in high-tech equipment, the team of experts detected evidence of ancient digging and buildings, including other henges, barrows, pits, and ditches, which are believed to harbour valuable information about the prehistoric site.
“This is among the most important landscapes, and probably the most studied landscape, in the world,” archaeologist Vince Gaffney of the University of Birmingham told the Smithsonian Magazine. “And the area has been absolutely transformed by this survey. It won’t be the same again.”
A full map of the The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes
Project’s findings is to be presented September 9 at the British
Science Festival in Birmingham, England. Credit: David Preiss
One of the findings was the identification of a large gap in the
Cursus monument, which is a 3 kilometre long and 100 metre wide ditch
and earthworks in the near vicinity of Stonehenge. Dating back to around
3,500 BC, the Cursus barrier is roughly aligned east-west and is
orientated toward the sunrise on the spring and autumn equinoxes. The
discovery of a large break in the monument, suggests an area used by
people to enter and exit the monument. While scientists are still unsure
of the true purposes of the Stonehenge Cursus, Professor Gaffney
believes it acted as a gateway for worshipers as well as a marker for
the passage of the sun.Another significant discovery was two pits at either end of the Cursus strip, located around 1 metre underground and measuring 4.5 metres in diameter. Professor Gaffney told Smithsonian that on the longest day of the year, the pits form a triangle with Stonehenge, marking sunrise and sunset. Gaffney speculates that the pits may have been used for ritual fires or as markers of some kind. Since the pits have only been identified using scanning technology, it is hoped that they will eventually be excavated, which will provide further clues as to their use and purpose.
Vince Gaffney (in a special effects scene in the
film Stonehenge Empire) stands above the mysterious pit at the western
end of the Cursus. Credit: October Films for Smithsonian Channel.
Previous studies of the Stonehenge environs have revealed that the landscape has been inhabited for some 10,000 years,
meaning either the area was of considerable significance for thousands
of years before Stonehenge and other monuments in the region were built,
or Stonehenge is much older that currently believed.Humans have marvelled at the majesty of Stonehenge for thousands of years, and archeologists, geologists, and astronomers have been studying it for decades, but the original purpose of the enigmatic stone circle has remained a mystery. It is known that the area was used for burials, that the stones are aligned in astronomically important ways, and that people travelled great distances to be there, but no one knows with certainty why.
As Ed Caesar from Smithsonian writes:
Those vast stones, standing in concentric rings in the middle of a basin on Salisbury Plain, carefully placed by who-knows-who thousands of years ago, must mean something. But nobody can tell us what. Not exactly. The clues that remain will always prove insufficient to our curiosity. Each archaeological advance yields more questions, and more theories to be tested. Our ignorance shrinks by fractions. What we know is always dwarfed by what we can never know.However, as this latest research project has shown, Stonehenge has not yet given up all its secrets, and the development of technology in the field of archaeology may one day help to finally solve the mystery.
Featured image: An illustration of how Stonehenge and the surrounding landscape would have once looked by W. Robinson (1922). Image source.
By April Holloway
