4,500 years ago, people in the Durrington Walls area of southern England dug a circle of deep and wide pits into the ground, geometrically arranged with a diameter of about two kilometers, covering an area of more than three square kilometers.
What has long appeared to be a natural landscape is now revealed as a monumental project: an artificial ring of moats that redefines the Stonehenge cosmos.
Invisible ring
Durrington Walls is located near the small English town of Amesbury and about two miles from the famous Stonehenge, about half an hour’s walk. The more than 20 pits are up to ten meters wide and more than five meters deep.
At least 16 of the 20 pits discovered form a huge regular circle around the Durrington Walls henge, according to a new study. A henge is a prehistoric earthen structure encompassing a circular or oval area surrounded by an earthen rampart with an internal moat.
It served as a place of cult or ritual gathering. At the center of Durrington’s walls there once stood a circular structure made of wooden stakes driven deep into the ground, surrounded by a settlement.
The pits were discovered five years ago, but the current study provides more details about the site. Using the OSL method, the pits were dated to 2480 BC.
This relatively precise method of optically stimulated luminescence determines the age of a sediment layer by the “light signal” stored in quartz or feldspar grains, which is measurable as natural radioactivity.
The intensity of this signal allows researchers to calculate the date when the sediments were last exposed to daylight, i.e. approximately when they were covered. The method provides a precise year, but the uncertainty varies between 5% and 10% and depends largely on the quality of the sample.
The study also showed that the circular structure is not a set of discoveries that developed organically over centuries, but rather a deliberately planned large-scale project. The pits were embedded in an actively used cultural landscape, where plants, animals, and humans were intimately interconnected.
Precise mapping
None of the structures examined can be explained by natural erosion; its shape and filling clearly indicate artificial structures. The circle is uniformly drawn, the spacing of the pits is regular and their diameters and intervals follow a clear pattern.
This suggests that people measured distances, counted steps or units of measurement, and worked with a pre-established plan before they even started digging. A set of holes thus becomes proof that numbers, measurements and planning were part of your daily life long ago.
According to the authors of the study, this mathematical structure seems to have been directly linked to the understanding of the world at the time. Each pit marks both a precise point of the circle and a symbolically “deep” location, a sort of underground world where animals, offerings and objects of worship could be placed.
Archaeologists interpret the moat circle as a “sacred boundary” which marked out the area around the walls of Durrington and Stonehenge and guided movement. Today, anyone observing the plain finds no trace of it.
European network
Durrington Walls and Stonehenge are not isolated sites, but rather part of a dense network of Late Neolithic cult sites in southern England – from the stone circles and moats of Salisbury Plain to other henge structures with moats and pits.
And much more: numerous discoveries demonstrate that at the end of the 3rd millennium BC (around 2700-2200 BC), there was intense exchange between the peoples of southern England, northern Europe, central Germany and the Iberian Peninsula.
In particular, the so-called bell vessel culture, named after its characteristic bell-shaped ceramic vessels, established a supraregional network of exchange and contacts, explains archaeologist Franziska Knoll from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archeology of Saxony-Anhalt.
Knoll studies the circular sanctuary of Pömmelte, south of Magdeburg, near the Elbe, known as the “German Stonehenge”. Architectural ideas similar to those found in Durrington Walls also existed in central Germany.
Although the pits around the Pömmelte palisades are not very deep and wide, measuring only about two meters deep, cattle bones, pottery, stone axes and other objects have been discovered at the site, providing evidence that they were deposited intentionally.
For budgetary reasons, the Durrington Walls trenches will not be dug initially. However, Knoll hopes excavations will soon be conducted to determine what is inside. This would also make it possible to determine more precisely when exactly they were built.
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