While it is not fanciful to speculate that these immigrants saw stonehenge-perhaps even helped built it

Remarkable new evidence has recently been unearthed about the dence has recently been unearthed about the community that surely used it.Since 2003 the Stonehenge Riverside Project,headed by Mike Parker Pearson of the university of Sheffield and five other team leaders and supported by the National Geographic Society,has been conducting a series of excavation of the wider Stonehenge landscape,focusing on a massive henge,some 1500 feet in diameter,known as Durrington Walls.Nearly two miles northeast of Stonehenge,Durrington was known as early as 1812 and excavated in the 1960s ahead of road construction.Erosion and land use have now blurred its once formidable outlines,made of earth banks formerly as wide as one hundred feet and at least as high as ten.

Hearth and home who used stonehenge?clues are being found in a recently unearthed Neolithic village at Durrington Walls-the largest known inBritain-tentatively dated at between 2600 and 2500 B.C. Archaeologist Mike Pearson believes the perhaps 300 wattle-and-daub houses,with wooden beds and hearth-warmed plaster,were seasonally occupied when people gathered for the winter and summer solstices.

In and around the giant henge were three circular timber structures whose footprints survive in trances of their postholes.Two-the Northern and Southern Circles-lay within the henge itself,while a later monument known as Woodhenge stood just outside.There is evidence to suggest that timber circles were secretive places,their interiors hidden by screens as well as the multiplications of posts,said Alex Gibson,an authority ib timber circles at the university of Bradford.Recently,inside the henge banks,the Riverside Project unearthes two structures,lofty and distinguished by individual ditches and palisades,perhaps residences of elite officals overssing the circle,or even cult houses.Outside the henge and under the embankment,the project excavated a cluster of seven small houses.Tentatively dated at between 2600 and 2500 B.C. ,they straddle a hundred-foot-wide flint-paved avenue to the Avon.Standing inside the foundation outline of one of the houses,Mike Parker Pearson pointed out domestic details,such as an oval hearth in the middle of the floor.These are heel,or maybe buttock,marks,he said,squatting by way of demonstration beside indentations on the plaster floor.Remains of a cooking area stood to one side.Five houses show evidence of furniture,including slot marks for the edges of wooden beds.Parker Pearson waved a hand toward the dark tree fringe in the distance.Trial excavations and geophysical surveys have detected a multitude of other possible hearths in the valley.There may be as many as 300 houses,he said,making it the largest Neolithic settlement found in Britain.




Drawing on filed experience in Madagascar,Parker Pearson advocates a bold interpretation of the site and,with it,the answer to Stonehenge.In Malagasy culture,the ancestors are revered with stone monuments,signifying the hardening of bodies to bone and the enduring commemoration of death.wood,by contrast,which decays,is associated with transient life.Stone is ancestral and male,while wood,as Parker Pearson put it,is soft and squishy,like women and babies.As he allows,no such gender distinction has yet been discerned in Britain,but it's the same principle underlying Western commemorative practive.You lay flowers on the grave,then you put up a tombstone.Guided by this model,Parker Pearson sees suggestive associations between Durrington Walls,with its defining wooden structures,and the hard monumentality of Stonehenge.Durrington has a path to the Avon that could be a ceremonial avenue,thought it is just over 550 feet long,while that at Stonehenge runs a mile and three-quarters,and its processional character is defined by flanking ditches and banks.



To Parker Pearson,the contrasts are equally suggestive.Stonehenge is aligned on both the axis of the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset, while th southern circle at Durrington walls catches the winter solstice sunrise.A profusion of pottery and animal bone debris,especially of pigs,implies that Durrington Walls saw much feasting,while very little pottery has been found at Stonehenge.Scarely any human remains have been found at Durrington,byt 52 cremations and many other burials have been uncovered at Stonehenge,which may contain as many as 240-the largest Neolithic cemetery in England,Durrington,in this new theory,represents the domain of the ancestral dead,with the two linked by seasonal processions along a route formed by the avenues and the river.The ashes of most of dead would have been entrusted to the river.Other cremated remains,possibly the society's elite,were deposited ceremonially at Stonehenge itself.