Archaeologists find huge Neolithic site buried near Stonehenge
Archaeologists on Monday reportedly found a huge Neolithic site buried under an area near the Stonehenge heritage site in Britain.
The Stonehenge archaeologists found up to 90 standing stones with some as tall as 15 feet and as old as 4,500 years. The giant stones may have been buried under the ground for about a thousand years, according to First Post.
The archaeologists found the buried remains of the ancient monuments less at the Durrington Walls, also called the "superhenge," which is situated less than 1.8 miles from the Stonehenge. They stones, which were found with the help of state-of-the-art sensors, may have been part of an arena or rituals, the report details.
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"Durrington Walls is an immense monument and up until this point we thought it was merely a large bank and ditched enclosure," First Post quotes Vincent Gaffney from the University of Bradford. "But underneath that massive monument is another monument."
The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, a joint effort between the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (LBI ArchPro) of Vienna, was the one that discovered the buried monuments.
The giant standing stones have not yet been dug up, but archaeologists think they may have been toppled over. The bank of the Durrington Walls henge may have been added over the site later on, The Guardian reports.
The monument is one of the largest henges ever discovered. It spans 500 meters wide and measures over 1.5 kilometers in circumference. Around it, a ditch 17.6 meters wide and a bank 1 meter high can be found.
What stumps the archaeologists most is the fact that one side of the area is straight, while the other one is curved. Based on data revealed by radars, the straight area of the site rests on top of a C-shaped monument. Researchers think the structure may have been a site for rituals or an arena of some sort, the report relays.
LBI ArchPro director Wolfgang Neubauer said the new discovery is important and the monument could have been made of around 200 stones. The missing stones might have been the ones used to form the Stonehenge, while the stones left in place were most likely broken during the moving process, Neubauer explained.
Gaffney said the most interesting part about the discovery is that the new stone row could date back as far as the stones found in the Stonehenge or even earlier.
