Durrington Shafts

[Soul]

Vast neolithic circle of deep shafts found near Stonehenge

Exclusive: prehistoric structure spanning 1.2 miles in diameter is masterpiece of engineering, say archaeologists

www.theguardian.com

Calling my @Underscore! I love this stuff - can you tell us more about it? I visited Woodhenge a couple of years ago, and it blew me away, because we could walk amid it instead of just admiring it from a distance. So this news gets me all excited like I *need* to lie down in one of these shafts and daydream about what they were for. x

 

[Deleted member 1465]

I only just found out today myself. It's a series of massive shafts concentric to the Durrington Walls henge near Amesbury, which has Stonehenge and Woodhenge nearby.
They used geophysics and ground penetrating radar to uncover 20 to 30 pits that were previously thought to be mill ponds or sink holes. Each 5m deep and 10m in diameter.
I think it was prof Vince Gafneys team.
A henge is a Neolithic bank and ditch monument, with the ditch on the inside, so it defines an internal space, rather than on the outside, which would be defensive.
Durrington Walls is a massive henge, thought by Mike Parker Pearson's studies and excavations to be a monument of the living, whilst Stonehenge was a monument of the dead.
It's fitting that the shafts are huge, as the Walls are huge too. No one knows the function of the shafts. Archaeologists will call them 'ritual' and say they are boundary markers of some sort. No one really knows though it will be very interesting to excavate one.
Its worth remembering that the Stonehenge aread developedover many hundreds of years and is part of a much larger and carefully designed ancient ritualised landscape. None of these things sit in isolation, they are all a small part of something much larger, possibly associated with the relationship between life and death.
Here's a plan of the area. I wouldn't be surprised if the river had played a part in how the landscape was used...possibly progressing the dead from the land of the living to the land of the ancestors.
Rivers are funny like that.

https://d36tnp772eyphs.cloudfront.net/blogs/1/2020/06/Durrington-shafts.jpg