Massive Prehistoric Monument Detected Near Stonehenge

Two miles from Stonehenge, a series of ancient shafts excavated thousands of years ago has been found. Analysis of the 20 or more shafts suggests the features are Neolithic and excavated more than 4,500 years ago – around the time the nearby ancient settlement of Durrington Walls was built.

The shafts, around more than 10 meters in diameter and five meters deep form a circle of more than 1.2 miles around the Durrington Walls and Woodhenge monuments on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury in Wiltshire.

The research was carried out by a team of researchers from St Andrews, Manchester, Warwick, Sheffield, Glasgow and Trinity Saint David University in Wales.

The pits surround the ancient settlement of Durrington Walls, two miles (3km) from Stonehenge, and were discovered using remote sensing technology and sampling.

Prof Gaffney, of the University of Bradford, said the discovery demonstrated “the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipated”.

“The area around Stonehenge is amongst the most studied archaeological landscapes on earth,” he added.

“It is remarkable that the application of new technology can still lead to the discovery of such a massive prehistoric structure.

“When these pits were first noted, it was thought they might be natural features. Only through geophysical surveys, could we join the dots and see there was a pattern on a massive scale.”

Prof Gaffney said a “proper excavation” was required to determine the exact nature of the pits but that the team believed they acted as a boundary, perhaps marking out Durrington Walls as a special place, or emphasizing the difference between the Durrington and Stonehenge areas.

He said it was difficult to speculate how long they would have taken to create, but using manual stone tools, there would have been “considerable organization of labour to produce pits on this scale”.

“The pits are massive by any estimate. As far as we can tell they are nearly vertical sided; that is we can’t see any narrowing that might imply some sort of shaft. Some of the silts suggest relatively slow filling of the pits. In other words, they were cut and left open,” added Prof Gaffney.

Dr. Richard Bates, from St Andrews’ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said it had given an insight into “an even more complex society than we could ever imagine”.

His colleague Tim Kinnaird said sediments from the shafts had allowed archaeologists to “write detailed narratives of the Stonehenge landscape for the last 4,000 years”.

Dr. Nick Snashall, National Trust archaeologist for the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, hailed the discovery as “astonishing”.

She said: “As the place where the builders of Stonehenge lived and feasted, Durrington Walls is key to unlocking the story of the wider Stonehenge landscape, and this astonishing discovery offers us new insights into the lives and beliefs of our Neolithic ancestors.

“The Hidden Landscapes team has combined cutting-edge, archaeological fieldwork with good old-fashioned detective work to reveal this extraordinary discovery and write a whole new chapter in the story of the Stonehenge landscape.”

Iron Age funeral site discovered on the Solihull HS2 site in England.

On an area of the proposed HS2 line near Solihull, the Iron Age funeral site has been discovered. The forgotten graves, at least 2,000 years old, indicate that a settlement may have existed on the riverbank site way back in history. Archaeologists revealed the exciting find as they studied the project site ahead of construction work for the 225mph rail line.

Wessex Archaeology, which is excavating on behalf of HS2, found a cluster of several dozen “cremation graves” – from those placed on funeral pyres – at Coleshill.

The site dates back to the Iron Age, the last phase of the prehistoric period, which, for most of Europe, the Roman conquest brought to an abrupt end.

It is the most recent find on the site near the banks of the cole, which regularly received briefings from the Solihull Council HS2 Implementation Advisory Group.

Revealing the discovery this month, Emma Carter, from Wessex Archaeology, said that the experts were uncovering “tantalising” evidence from the distant past and an in-depth investigation of the graves would follow.

“[It] should offer some interesting ideas of what they do with their dead,” she said.

“When I say they, it’s probably going to be Iron Age people … You have 43 cremation-related deposits.”

Cremation was a widespread ritual for ancient people, although the spread of Roman customs eventually saw the practice become more and more infrequent.

In parts of Europe, the custom was ultimately forbidden, although its use for disposing of bodies eventually resurfaced in the 19th century.

As previously reported by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), the Coleshill site has been hailed because of the layers of history clustered in a relatively small location.

Iron Age roundhouses had once stood there generations ago, with archaeologists trying to establish whether these structures would have been occupied all year round or just during certain periods.

“You can imagine that staying in a roundhouse during the deep, dark, wet months of winter can be quite a difficult thing, whilst being there towards the summer months is probably a more pleasant experience. It also gives you more time to tend to your crops,” Ms. Carter added.

Aside from the remains of this settlement, the teams have also been investigating a Romano-British enclosure and will also be carrying out research into where a Medieval manor house once stood.

Physical items found on site have included Roman brooches, a serpent design from the Victorian era, and a coin dating from the 1500s – during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Wessex has been liaising with the council about options for an archaeological exhibition at The Core Library, in Solihull town center – which was originally scheduled for this summer but suffered a setback when coronavirus closed the venue.

3,000 Skeletons Found During London Railway Construction

Approximately 3,000 skeletons, some dating back to the 1500s, have been discovered and are being excavated as part of the construction of a new train station being built near London.

They came from every parish of London, and from all walks of life, and ended up in a burial ground called Bedlam. Now scientists hope their centuries-old skeletons can reveal new information about how long-ago Londoners lived—and about the bubonic plague that often killed them.

Archaeologists announced that they have begun excavating the bones of some 3,000 people interred in the 16th and 17th centuries, who now lie in the path of the Crossrail transit line. They will be pored over by scientists before being reburied elsewhere.

One recent workday, just meters (yards) from teeming Liverpool Street railway station, researchers in orange overalls scraped, sifted, and gently removed skeletons embedded in the dark earth. In one corner of the site, the skeleton of an adult lay beside the fragile remains of a baby, the wooden outline of its coffin still visible. Most were less intact, a jumble of bones and skulls.

“Part of the skill of it is actually working out which bones go with which,” said Alison Telfer, a project officer with Museum of London Archaeology, which is overseeing the dig.

Due to open in 2018, the 118-kilometer (73-mile) trans-London Crossrail line is Britain’s biggest construction project and its largest archaeological dig for decades. The central 21-kilometer (13-mile) section runs underground, which has meant tunneling beneath some of the oldest and most densely populated parts of the city.

For Londoners, that has brought years of noise and disruption, but for archaeologists, it’s like Christmas. Almost every shovelful of the earth has uncovered a piece of history, or prehistory: bison and mammoth bones; Roman horseshoes; medieval ice skates; the remains of a moated Tudor manor house.

Chief archaeologist Jay Carver says the Bedlam dig could be the most revealing yet.

“It’s going to be archaeologically the most important sample we have of the population of London from the 16th and 17th centuries,” Carver said.

Bedlam cemetery opened in 1569 to take the overspill as the city’s churchyard burial grounds filled up. It is the final resting place of prosperous citizens and paupers, religious dissenters including the 17th-century revolutionary Robert Lockyer and patients from Bedlam Hospital, the world’s first asylum for the mentally ill. The hospital’s name, a corruption of Bethlehem, became a synonym for chaos.

Tests on the bones by osteologists may reveal where these Londoners came from, what they ate, and what ailed them—which in many cases was the plague. There were four outbreaks of the deadly disease over the two centuries the cemetery was in use, including the “Great Plague” that killed 100,000 people in 1665.

Carver says researchers will analyze DNA taken from the pulp in the skeletons’ teeth to help fill in the “evolutionary tree of the plague bacteria.”

The technique was used to discover the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, in 14th-century skeletons excavated at another Crossrail site, identifying them as victims of the Black Death that wiped out half the city’s population in 1348.

Scientists should be able to compare the bacterium found in Bedlam’s plague victims with the 14th-century samples, helping to understand whether the disease—which still infects several thousand people a year—has evolved over the centuries.

Sixty archaeologists working in shifts—16 hours a day, six days a week—will spend about a month removing the remains. After the scientific study, they will be reburied on Canvey Island in the Thames Estuary—the latest in a long line of Londoners to move east out of the congested city.

The old burial ground will be the site of a new train station, whose users will probably give little thought to the history beneath their feet.

But Telfer says she never forgets that these fragile bones were once living, breathing individuals.

“When you are doing something like this, you do feel a connection with them,” she said. “I think you have a responsibility to treat them with great respect. It’s quite a special process.”

UK Dig Discovers 9,000-Year-Old Remains

A collection of 400 Roman coins in 1995 was found in Oxfordshire west of Didcot, indicating the land had been lived on for centuries. As plans progressed for 3,300 new homes, schools, and shops on the 180-hectare site, archaeologists were called in to investigate. It has taken them nearly three years to excavate 30 hectares, but they now know people have been living in Didcot for about 9,000 years – since the end of the last ice age.

Timeline of finds at the site

As news has spread about the finds, local residents have begun a fight to save at least some of it.

‘Offering to gods’

The fields, west of the town, have given a near-complete timeline from when hunter-gatherers arrived in Oxfordshire in 7,000 BC, through to the present day villages surrounding the site. Those earliest remains were found by Steve Lawrence, from Oxford Archaeology, the firm which carried out the dig. He was walking around the site one day during the dig and spotted bits of flint on the ground.

On closer inspection, the flint had clearly been worked and there were hundreds of pieces, dating back to around 7,000 BC. They would have been used on spears by hunter-gatherers who camped along the ridge to stalk their prey. The most significant find of the dig was a rare Neolithic bowl from about 3,600 BC – when people began to settle down and farm the land. It was found upside down in a hole where a tree had stood,” explains archaeologist Rob Masefield, from RPS Planning and managing the project.

“It may have been an offering to the gods of the underworld.”

Ritual burials

Over time new settlements were established across the site, which meant each part excavated unveiled a glimpse of a different era. Another rare find was a pond barrow – a stone-lined 12m wide circular depression – which the archaeologists believe was used for “exposure burials”.

Mr. Masefield said the body would be put up high on a raised platform and “the bones picked clean by birds and other animals”.

“Only ever a dozen or so pond barrows have ever been excavated so this provided some great new information,” he added. Up to 50 burials, of both adults and children, were identified.

Mr. Masefield said: “It’s possible that three or so of these burials in [grain storage] pits are what we call ‘special burials’, because it’s not the usual way of doing it.

“It could be ritual or they could be social outcasts.”

He said there is evidence found at other sites – though not at Didcot – suggesting Iron Age people did practice human sacrifice and may even have “bred” individual human beings solely for this purpose.

“They are found with immaculate nails and signs of having lived a privileged life, almost like royalty,” he said.

“When the person is killed it’s been done in three different ways. It appears to be a ritual.” Archaeologist Kate Woodley, from Oxford Archaeology, said the team still had a lot of work to do analyzing the finds from the dig, which could take another two years.

“We don’t want to say too much too early and get it wrong.

“We’ll get a more precise picture with carbon 14 dating and sampling.”

‘Losing our history’

Karen Waggott, who is campaigning to preserve the site, feels the findings at Didcot were not revealed until “it’s too late to save the site” from being built on.

“We’re only just finding out about this, and you blink and more houses have gone up,” she said.

“We’re losing our history just as we’re finding out about it.”

But Mr. Masefield said although the site was the largest and “most significant” dig in recent years in Oxfordshire, there was nothing of “schedulable value” – so important that it could be legally protected.

He said it was so significant because it “allows the interpretation of a large area of the landscape through the ages”. The project was funded by developer Taylor Wimpey and had it not been for the firm’s support, it would not have happened, he explained. To save some of the archaeology, Mrs. Waggott suggested a “history trail” through the new estate, information boards to mark discovery spots, and a museum.

“They should leave a piece of land where the [Iron Age] village was.

“Maybe if they could build a little roundhouse – then our children can see what was here once.”

A spokesman for Taylor Wimpey said: “We are eager to safeguard this window to the past.

“Much of the Roman farmstead, for instance, will be preserved under sports pitches.

“Our intention is for the development to provide homes for generations to come in Didcot, just as the site has done for thousands of years.”

Possible Elizabethan Playhouse Unearthed in London

Experts believe the Red Lion outdoor theatre in London was built around 1567.

Archaeologists believe they have discovered the remains of London’s oldest playhouse that was built only three years after the birth of William Shakespeare.

Dozens of timbers were found at the site in east London that experts believe could have been part of the outdoor stage and seating of the Red Lion, the earliest purpose-built playhouse, dating from about 1567.

It was thought to have been built by John Brayne, an entrepreneur who went on to build another larger theatre that staged plays by a young Shakespeare at the end of the 16th century.

Little is known about the playhouse but it features two lawsuits from the 1560s when Brayne sued the carpenters because of shoddy work.

No physical evidence of the playhouse had been discovered until excavations in January 2019 started to uncover the timbers at the site of a planned housing development.

The playhouse is thought to have been a prototype that was used as a venue for companies of travelling actors, said Stephen White, who directed the excavation of the site.

“I thought we were on a hiding to nothing,” Mr White said. “There was a chance that something might be there – but it was a surprise.”

The theatre pre-dates by more than three decades the more famous Globe Theatre, which became closely associated with Shakespeare and the company of actors he wrote for during his career.

The Globe was re-created as a theatre and opened in 1997 on the banks of the River Thames and is one of London’s most popular tourist attractions.

Archaeologists believe the playhouse was part of a sprawling complex that developed from a farm, an inn, and an animal-baiting venue, according to the archaeologists from University College London.

They also found bottles, tankards, and a mug bearing the symbol of King Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685.

“This is one of the most extraordinary sites I’ve worked on,” said Mr. White. “After nearly 500 years, the remains of the Red Lion playhouse …. may have finally been found.”

Drought Led To Discovery Of Ancient Roman Forts And Roads In Wales

The draught in Wales led in 2018 to the discovery of old Roman fortresses, roads, and military cantonments in a village in the United Kingdom. The aerial view of the area revealed 200 such places which suggested the ruins of ancient Roman times could be made possible.

“Britannia,” a researcher from the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, quoted a science magazine and reported that the Roman legions had entered the rural areas of Wales.

Experts also revealed the ruins of the marching camps at Monmouthshire in the vicinity of Caerwent.

“The camps are truly interesting, used to stay overnight Romans had built on the maneuvers in hostile territory.” Researcher Toby Driver said the discoveries “turn on the heads everything we know about the Romans.”

The aerial investigator for the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales said the new research published in the journal Britannia showed the “Roman military machine coming to rural Wales”.

In Monmouthshire, the researchers have identified a new “marching camp” at a site near Caerwent.

“The marching camps are really, really interesting. They are the temporary overnight stops that the Romans build on manoeuvres in hostile territory.”

The site would have provided defensive positions, camping and kitchens for bread ovens.

“This is when Wales is still a very dangerous place to be for the troops, they are still under attack,” added Dr Driver. The entire area heading into south-east Wales through Usk to Caerleon would have been peppered with similar sites, believe the experts, as the Roman armies fought a 20-year battle to crush resistance amongst Celtic tribes, notably the Silures in southern Wales.

But these sites were “ploughed away pretty quickly” when the fighting was over.

“This is only the third marching camp in south-east Wales that we have discovered. We know there should be more of these around to show how the army was moving in Wales – it shows the big routes they are pushing through to control different parts of Wales,” added Dr Driver.

With conquest came reinforcements, and that meant forts. The aerial photographs confirmed the locations of at least three new fort sites, including the first found in the Vale of Gwent at Carrow Hill, west of the Roman town of Caerwent and the Roman legionary fortress at Caerleon.

The crop images show it had inner and outer defensive structure and a “killing zone” in between, perfectly ranged for a javelin throw.

The photographs found a long suspected fort site at Aberllynfi near Hay-on-Wye is indeed Roman, even though part of it has long since been built over by housing.

While further investigations at Pen y Gaer in Powys, near Tretower and Crickhowell, have revealed new detailed structures previously undiscovered – despite digs and surveys on the ground. The researchers, who included Roman experts Jeffrey Davies and Barry Burnham, have also been able to identify details of new villas – including at St Arvans, north of Chepstow in Monmouthshire.

The location had previously been considered a temple site, after part of a bronze statue of Mars was unearthed. But the heatwave images make it clear this was a Roman villa of some note, with its room structure clearly visible. Perhaps the most startling discoveries have been pieces of unknown Roman road.

One shows how the Roman armies pushed their way south from Carmarthen to Kidwelly, reinforcing speculation the town was home to a Roman fort – even if it may now be covered by Kidwelly Castle.

“It’s the scale of the control of Wales which is exciting to see,” said Dr Driver.

“These big Roman roads striking through the landscape – straight as arrows through the landscape.”

After the driest May on record, Dr Driver hopes he will be able to get back in the air as soon as coronavirus lockdown measures allow, to see if he and his teams can find more pieces of the Roman puzzle in Wales.

“There are still huge gaps. We’re still missing a Roman fort at Bangor, we’ve got the roads, we’ve got the milestones – but no Roman fort. We’re still missing a Roman fort near St Asaph, and near Lampeter, in west Wales, we should have one as well,” he said.

“Although we had loads come out in 2018, we’ve got this big gaps in Roman Wales that we know should have military installations – but you’ve got to get out in dry weather to find them.”

A prehistoric Atlantis in the north sea may have been abandoned after being hit by a 5mt tsunami 8200 years ago

A huge landfall occurred on the Norwegian coast, known as the Storegga Slide just over 8,000 years ago. The event created a catastrophic tsunami, with waves almost half as high as the Statue of Liberty, that battered Britain, and other landmasses. And now the most accurate computer model ever made of the tsunami suggests that it wiped out the remaining inhabitants of a set of the low-lying landmass known as Doggerland off the coast of the UK.

The new study of scientists from Imperial College London will be discussed at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. They explain how devastating the tsunami would have been, using sophisticated computer modelling and paleobathymetry – a background study of underwater depths.

And they conclude it would have spelled disaster for the remaining inhabitants of Doggerland.

Dr. Jon Hill, one of the study’s authors, says to BBC, “the research we did is use advanced computer modelLing to look in the Storegga slide.

‘We’re the first to discover dissymmetry at the time, which no model has done before.

‘So we’re able to quantify what the tsunami looked like at Doggerland – no other study has predicted what the wave would have looked like.’

The huge wave that was created in the Storegga Slide occurred when a large chunk of coastal shelf 180 miles (290 km) long fell into the sea. The slide was a single event 8,200 years ago, creating a wave that travelled across the Norwegian Sea in a few hours.

Fifteen hours later, the wave would have reached Belgium and Holland. Dr Hill said it would have been equivalent to the 2011 Japanese tsunami in its scale.

Waves at Doggerland would have been five metres high, as opposed to 10 metres in the Japanese tsunami, as the land was so low-lying just a few metres above sea level.

‘It would have been completely inundated by a 5-metre wave,’ Dr Hill explains.

‘If you put a 5-metre wave towards Doggerland it would have been devastated.’ Archaeological evidence for this area is relatively sparse at the moment. So far, we are relying mostly on finds made by fishermen.

But the evidence heavily suggests it was inhabited and, according to Dr Vince Gaffney of  the University of Birmingham who authored the book Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland, they would have ‘suffered dramatically.’

‘If we look at what the study tells us they’re talking about waves that are, in Scotland, as much as 40 metres high,’ he says. 

‘The inhabitants of any low-lying areas like Doggerland would have suffered dramatically if hit by something of that size.’ Dr. Gaffney continues, however, that it is hard to know exactly the extent of habitation on Doggerland because it is very inaccessible.

Described as ‘Britain’s Atlantis’ it is now located under busy sea lanes in murky water. Thus, according to Dr. Gaffney, ‘we know little about the people who inhabited these areas.’ Dr. Hill says that modelling tsunamis of this type are important for understanding our history.

But they can also provide us with data on what we can expect from similar events in the future. Although he stresses no such event is likely to occur any time soon, the UK is susceptible to such dangers.

‘Part of the research is to find out what would happen as the oceans warm,’ he says.

‘Rising sea levels are an indicator but there’s no correlation between rising sea levels and tsunamis.’ The chances of another event on the scale of the Storegga Slide happening soon is, he says, ‘not likely to happen at all.’ Dr Gaffney adds, though, that these events are known to have occurred throughout history.

‘We sometimes think we’re a safe place to live in the UK,’ he says.

‘But sometimes there are risks even in Britain and that’s worth noting.’