BREAKING NEWS - Massive Prehistoric Monument Found at Stonehenge // Ancient Britain Archaeology

Stonehenge in normal times it's one of the most popular tourist destinations in the UK a must-see site for travelers to the South of England these iconic stones some dragged here all the way from the Preseli Hills of South Wales 240 kilometers away others from the Marlborough Downs 40 kilometres to the north have odd visitors for thousands of years from Roman soldiers to 19th century antiquarians yet really the famous henge monument here is just one amongst many the entire stonehenge landscape is a sacred one the famous blue and sarsen stones here being just one example of a complex series of structures and monuments criss-crossing the Salisbury Plains some much more difficult to fathom than others either due to the construction methods used to make them often in wood or like nearby Avebury because of their immense size now in 2020 using modern archaeological techniques a new monument has been located a series of massive holes stretching for two kilometers once containing who knows what astonishingly it's being hailed by experts as the largest ever found in Britain let's take a look 10,000 years ago the Salisbury Plain like almost all of Britain was coated in a thick layer of forest even in those early days however some sort of ritual activity may have been carried out here but Mesolithic hunter-gatherers ancient postholes dating to this long bygone era having been found in the Stonehenge carpark soon however the nomadic lifestyle of these people would come to an end as an entirely new people and new way of life arrived on the island some time just after 4000 BC a great cause Wade enclosure was constructed here similar to others found all over northern Europe as well as numerous long barrows throughout the surrounding countryside a precursor to a flurry of construction activity that would follow [Music] perhaps a claim on the land by incoming people from across the sea having their genetic roots in far-off Anatolia what is now Turkey these incoming Neolithic farmers much more numerous than the Mesolithic hunters gradually spread to every corner of Britain chopping down forests to make space for farmland and animal pastures as they went [Music] by 3,500 BC a massive cursus monument was constructed on the Salisbury Plains and finally by around 3100 BC still before metallurgy first arrived in Britain the very first Stonehenge was built [Music] this early monument consisted of a circular raised bank and ditch known as a henge within the ditch a 56 pits each around 1 metre in diameter perhaps containing a timber circle or even stones long since removed at some point in the past curiously the bones of deer and oxen were strewn about the ditch themselves already ancient by the time they were deposited here maybe having been cared for down the generations since the animals died soon enough however perhaps as belief systems changed the first Stonehenge fell out of use with the area perhaps becoming a sort of crematorium for the deceased [Music] there are thousands upon thousands of boats scattered around this landscape offered within monuments perhaps as old temples were reused as tombs finally by 2600 BC the use of timber was abandoned with the famous blue stones being erected having been transported here all the way from southern Wales perhaps along the old sea roads long plied by traders then during the next couple of hundred years massive sarsen stones were brought here from the north the site completely remodeled and reshaped into the most impressive monument in all of Britain it is also during this frenzied period of activity requiring all the efforts of hundreds maybe even thousands of individuals that Arthur monuments in the surrounding landscape were reshaped and remodels - some of them perhaps forming part of a vast processional pathway Criss crossing the landscape in 2004 just three kilometers northeast of Stonehenge an ancient settlement was uncovered totaling around 1,000 houses home to as many as 4,000 people when carbon dated this settlement at Durrington walls was dated to somewhere between 2800 and 2100 BC the age of the stone circle builders and it wasn't just a settlement that was discovered just by Durrington walls a monument had been found many decades before often known today as woodhenge this large series of postholes thought to have originally been filled with wooden posts are littered with the refuse of the ancient world tellingly not just the pottery of the Neolithic farmers but large beaker parts too evidence of a new people arriving on the island the beaker folk the nearby grave known as the Ames pre Archer dated to around 2300 BC contains more artifacts than any other early Bronze Age grave in Britain and though Stonehenge was very much still in use during his lifetime soon everything was to change for the Amesbury Archer was a coppersmith who had spent his youth in the Alps one of the earliest metallurgists in britain herald of a new age of bronze and power to come one might be forgiven for assuming that Stonehenge had given up all its secrets let alone revealing the largest prehistoric monument in all of Britain in 2020 however just that was found using modern surveying techniques from the sky a vast series of massive shafts forming a circle two kilometers in diameter was pinpointed in the area immediately surrounding woodhenge with that Monument in its center each shaft is more than five metres deep and 10 in diameter bigger than the largest tryla thought of the main monument [Music] approximately 20 of these shafts have been found so far but originally more than 30 thoughts to have existed here unfortunately a third of the circle is no longer available for study as a result of modern developments [Music] over the thousands of years since they were first in use the shafts here although enormous gradually filled with earth noted and dismissed in modern times as natural sinkholes and du Pont's it was only 21st century technology including geophysical prospection ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry that revealed their true significance as geophysical anomalies in other words these were man-made initial radiocarbon dates have revealed that these shafts were built more than 4,500 years ago making them contemporary with both Stonehenge and the settlement at Durrington walls just before the time of the Ames pre Archer of course no surprise for this landscape there are traces of an even earlier monument to the boundary here appearing to have been laid out to include an earlier prehistoric monument the Lark hill cause Wade enclosure built more than 1,500 years before the henge at Durrington [Music] amazingly the discovery of the Durrington shafts offers real evidence that the early farming communities of Britain had developed a counting system building something of this size with careful painstaking positioning of each hole could only have been carried out by counting and tracking hundreds of steps theories are coming in thick and fast and it will likely be several years before the full significance of this massive site is realized initially however it seems possible that while Stonehenge has a clear link to the seasons passing of time and the summer solstice Durrington walls with its exterior of circle shafts may have cosmological significance perhaps used by ancient astronomers it's been suggested that the boundary may have either guided people towards a sacred site within its center or warned against entering carved Flint and unidentified bone fragments have been uncovered too though as of yet archaeologists can only speculate how the features were once used what remains clear is that considering the sheer size and scope of Durrington walls and the surrounding stonehenge landscape this must have been an immensely important place for the people of southern Britain the very existence of the stones here suggesting far-reaching trade networks between neighboring peoples the complexity and size of the monumental structures here remain as a testament to the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems on the landscape evidently on a scale not previously anticipated nearby similarly mysterious and massive monuments at Silbury Hill Avebury and others during the mid 3rd millennium BC suggests a last flourishing of this ancient culture before the arrival of a new world the Bronze Age and a new single grave culture taking precedence only time will tell what new discoveries are made here always holding the potential to rewrite what we know of ancient Britain entirely you've been watching archeology news don't forget to Like and subscribe let me know what you think in the comments and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Pete Kelly

Views: 387,115

Rating: 4.8786483 out of 5

Keywords: Stonehenge, neolithic, bronze age, beaker people, ancient britain

Id: Kx_fjg0CYOk

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020