The file photo shows a cultural relic unearthed at the Houbeishan tomb complex in the city of Yongzhou, central China’s Hunan Province.
Archaeologists have found 25 tombs dating back to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in central China’s Hunan Province, according to the provincial cultural relics and archaeology research institute.
More than 60 cultural relics, including porcelain jars, porcelain bowls, copper hairpins and copper knives, were unearthed at the Houbeishan tomb complex in the city of Yongzhou.
Some of these porcelain jars, known locally as “food jars,” were found with food residue inside.
According to experts, there was a local burial custom to preserve food in tombs, and the practice continues to this day.
Archaeologists said the distribution of the tombs suggests that they belonged to a family and that the owners of two adjacent tombs were husband and wife.
“The discovery of the tombs provides new archaeological materials for understanding the funeral customs and local history and culture in southern China during the Qing Dynasty,” said Li Yiyuan, an associate research fellow with the institute.
The file photo shows a cultural relic unearthed at the Houbeishan tomb complex in the city of Yongzhou, central China’s Hunan Province.
The file photo shows a porcelain bowl unearthed at the Houbeishan tomb complex in the city of Yongzhou, central China’s Hunan Province.
Prehistoric Artifacts Discovered in a Vietnam Cave
Over 700 prehistoric artefacts have been discovered inside Tham Un cave in the northern mountainous province of Bac Kan’s Ba Be district. The discovery resulted from a fact-finding trip undertaken by the Institute of Archeology, the Vietnam Archeology Association, and the Bac Kan Museum.
Illustrative image (File photo)
Combing the entire cave, their team found traces of ancient people almost everywhere. Among the artefacts discovered were stone tools made from river pebbles.
According to Associate Professor, Dr Trinh Nang Chung, based on the overall study of the relics as well as the structure and age of the sediment, researchers believe that Tham Un was a residence of many generations of prehistoric people.
Its early inhabitants belonged to the late Bac Son Culture dating back 5,000 to 6,000 years, while the late inhabitants were from the Late Neolithic – Early Metal Ages dating back about 4,000 years.
This is a very important prehistoric relic cave, Chung stated.
Archaeologists are planning to excavate the site in the near future.
Lost cities of the Amazon featuring terraces and PYRAMIDS are discovered
A massive urban landscape that contained interconnected campsites, villages, towns and monumental centres thrived in the Amazon rainforest more than 600 years ago.
Such low-density urban sprawl from pre-Columbian times was previously unknown in the Amazon or anywhere else in South America, say archaeologist Heiko Prümers of the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn and colleagues.
Rather than constructing huge cities densely packed with people, a substantial Casarabe population spread out in a network of small to medium-sized settlements that incorporated plenty of open space for farming, the scientists conclude.
Airborne lasers peered through dense trees and ground cover to identify structures from that low-density urban network that have long eluded land-based archaeologists.
Earlier excavations indicated that Casarabe maize farmers, fishers and hunters inhabited an area of 4,500 square kilometres. For about a century, researchers have known that Casarabe people fashioned elaborate pottery and constructed large earthen mounds, causeways and ponds. But these finds were located at isolated forest sites that are difficult to excavate, leaving the reasons for mound-building and the nature of Casarabe society, which existed from about the year 500 to 1400, a mystery.
Prümers’ team opted to look through the Amazon’s lush cover from above, aiming to find relics of human activity that typically remain hidden even after careful ground surveys.
The scientists used a helicopter carrying special equipment to fire laser pulses at the Amazon forest as well as stretches of grassland. Those laser pulses reflect data from the Earth’s surface. This technique, called light detection and ranging, or lidar for short, enables researchers to map the contours of now-obscured structures.
Looking at the new lidar images, “it is obvious that the mounds are platforms and pyramids standing on artificial terraces at the centre of well-planned settlements,” Prümers says.
The Lidar images revealed the cities architecture, consisting of stepped platforms topped by U-shaped structures, rectangular platform mounds, and conical pyramids
Two images of exactly the same area of the Salvatierra site. Left: a photo mosaic from drone footage; right: Lidar image. The discovery shows Amazonia was home to an early ‘urbanism’ created and managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years
Prümers’ team conducted lidar surveys over six parts of ancient Casarabe territory. The lidar data revealed 26 sites, 11 of them previously unknown.
Two sites, Cotoca and Landívar, are much larger than the rest. Both settlements feature rectangular and U-shaped platform mounds and cone-shaped earthen pyramids atop artificial terraces. Curved moats and defensive walls border each site.
Causeways radiate out from Cotoca and Landívar in all directions, connecting those primary sites to smaller sites with fewer platform mounds that then link up to what were probably small campsites or areas for specialized activities, such as butchering prey.
Lidar Image of the Cotoca site, revealing an array of elaborate and intricate structures unlike any previously discovered in the region, including 16ft-high terraces covering 54 acres – the equivalent of 30 football pitches – and 69ft-tall conical pyramids
The Casarabe society’s network of settlements joins other ancient and present-day examples of low-density urban sprawl around the world, says archaeologist Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney.
These sites raise questions about whether only places with centralized governments that ruled over people who were packed into neighbourhoods on narrow streets, such as 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian metropolises, can be defined as cities.
Some past urban settlements organized around crop growing spanned up to 1,000 square kilometres or more in tropical regions. These include locales such as Southeast Asia’s Greater Angkor roughly 700 to 800 years ago and interconnected Maya sites in Central America dating to at least 2,300 years ago. Today, extended areas outside large cities, especially in Southeast Asia, mix industrial and agricultural activities over tens of thousands of kilometres.
Tropical forests that have gone largely unexplored, such as Central Africa’s Congo Basin, probably hosted other early forms of low-density urban development, Fletcher predicts.
Only further excavations guided by lidar evidence can begin to untangle the size of the Casarabe population, Prümers says. Whether primary Casarabe sites represented seats of power in states with upper and lower classes also remains unknown, he adds.
Casarabe culture’s urban sprawl must have encompassed a considerable number of people in the centuries before the Spanish arrived and Indigenous population numbers plummeted, largely due to diseases, forced labour and slavery says archaeologist John Walker of the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
Whatever Casarabe honchos had in mind as their tropical settlement network spread, he says, “we may have to set aside some of our strongly held ideas about what the Amazon is, and what a city is, to better understand what happened.”
Vase Kept In Kitchen Turned Out To Be 250-Year-Old Relic, Auctioned For 1.5 Million Pounds
A royal blue 18th-century Chinese vase decorated with gold and silver, which sat in a U.K. kitchen for several years, just sold at auction for about $1.8 million after historians realized it had once belonged to an emperor.
The 18th-century Chinese vase was auctioned for about $1.8 million.
However, the vase’s unclear history — combined with the looting of Chinese palaces in the 19th century — raises ethical concerns, according to an expert who was not involved with the sale.
The vase is large, about 2 feet (0.6 meters) tall, and it is marked with a symbol associated with the Qianlong emperor — the sixth emperor of the Qing dynasty, the country’s last imperial dynasty — who ruled China from 1735 to 1795, according to a statement released by the auction company Dreweatts, which sold the vase on May 18.
The vase is painted with a colour called “sacrificial blue” — so named because the same shade decorates parts of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.
At this temple, the emperor of China would sacrifice animals in hopes that these sacrifices would ensure a good harvest.
This close-up photo shows a crane image on the vase. A mix of silver and gold was used in the vase’s decorations.
The decorations on the vase are made of a mix of silver and gold, and they depict clouds, cranes, fans, flutes and bats — symbols of the emperor’s Daoist beliefs that are associated with a good and long life, said Mark Newstead, a specialist consultant for Asian ceramics and works of art with Dreweatts, said in a YouTube video.
The combination of silver and gold used on this vase is “technically very difficult to achieve and that’s what makes it so special and unusual,” Newstead said, noting that a man named Tang Ying (1682-1756), who was the supervisor of an imperial porcelain factory in the eastern city of Jingdezhen, is sometimes credited with the creation of the technique used on this vase.
This vase would likely have been placed in the Forbidden Palace — where the Chinese emperor resided — or in one of the emperor’s other palaces, Newstead said.
During the Qianlong emperor’s rule, the government had to put down a number of rebellions. Despite this unrest, the arts flourished in China, wrote historian Richard Smith in the book “The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture(opens in new tab)” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015).
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the political situation worsened as China lost a number of wars against Europe and America, and foreign troops looted a number of palaces.
Uncertain origins
Much about the history of this vase is unknown. The vase was owned by a surgeon who “we believe bought it in the early 1980s,” Newstead told Live Science in an email.
The surgeon “was a buyer in the country salerooms in the [English] Midlands from the 1970s onwards and that is all we know,” Newstead said. After the surgeon died, the vase was passed on to his son. Neither the surgeon nor the son realized the true value and the vase was placed in the son’s kitchen for some time, and Newstead first saw it in the late 1990s.
The vase’s unclear origins and the history of foreign troops looting palaces in the 19th century raise some ethical concerns that the vase was plundered by foreign troops in the 19th or early 20th century, an expert told Live Science.
“It could have been a gift from the emperor to one of his officials, and that official’s family could have sold it on the open market in the 20th century when they fell on hard economic times. And from there it would have been sold many more times. Or, it could be the product of the military plunder of 1860 or 1901, which would make its auction much more morally dubious,” Justin Jacobs, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., told Live Science in an email.
Jacobs has studied and written extensively about the pillaging of Chinese art in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“We just don’t know [how the vase left China] and likely we never will,” Jacobs said.
Ancient Chinese Silk Text Could Be “Oldest Surviving Anatomical Atlas In The World”
A series of 2,200-year-old Chinese texts, written on silk and found buried in ancient tombs, contains the oldest surviving anatomical atlas, scientists say.
Ancient texts written on silk and found inside the tombs at Mawangdui, China, may represent the oldest surviving anatomical atlas.
The texts were discovered in the 1970s within tombs at the site of Mawangdui in south-central China. The tombs belonged to Marquis Dai, his wife Lady Dai and their son.
The texts are challenging to understand, and they use the term “meridian” to refer to parts of the human body. In a paper recently published Sept. 1 in the journal The Anatomical Record, a research team led by Vivien Shaw, an anatomy lecturer at Bangor University in Wales in the United Kingdom, argues that these texts “are the oldest surviving anatomical atlas in the world.”
Additionally the texts “both predate and inform the later acupuncture texts, which have been the foundation for acupuncture practice in the subsequent two millennia,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The find “challenges the widespread belief that there is no scientific foundation for the ‘anatomy of acupuncture,’ by showing that the earliest physicians writing about acupuncture were in fact writing about the physical body,” they added.
The ancient texts were discovered in the 1970s in a series of tombs at the site of Mawangdui in China. Remains of the tombs are seen in this photo.
Challenging texts
The texts, which are written in Chinese characters, are difficult to understand. “The skills necessary to interpret them are diverse, requiring the researcher firstly to read the original Chinese, and secondly to perform the anatomical investigations that allow a re-viewing of the structures that the texts refer to,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
But if the texts are read carefully, it can be seen that the “meridians” refer to parts of the human body. For example, the text says (in translation) that one meridian starts “in the centre of the palm, goes along the forearm between the two bones following straight along with the tendons, travels below the sinew into the bicep, to the armpit, and connects with the heart.” The researchers contend that this description of a “meridian” actually refers to the path of the ulnar artery, the main blood vessel of the forearm.
Another example from the ancient text describes a “meridian” in the foot that “starts at the big toe and runs along the medial surface of the leg and thigh. Connects at the ankle, knee, and thigh. It travels along with the adductors of the thigh, and covers the abdomen.” This “meridian” actually describes the “pathway of the long saphenous vein,” the conduit that carries blood from the legs back to the heart, the researchers wrote.
The team concludes that the texts “represent the earliest surviving anatomical atlas, designed to provide a concise description of the human body for students and practitioners of medicine in ancient China.”
Although the human body and ancestral remains were considered sacred in ancient China, the remains of lawbreakers were not always given this honour.
The researchers believe that ancient Chinese medical researchers dissected the corpses of prisoners to help them understand human anatomy. For instance, the Han Shu (Book of Han), a tome that covers the history of the Han Dynasty, records the dissection of the criminal Wang Sun-Qing in A.D. 16, the researchers noted in the study.
Until now, the oldest known anatomical atlas of the human body was thought to be from Greece, done by ancient Greek physicians such as Herophilus (335–280 B.C.) and Erasistratus (304-c.250 B.C.) however most of their texts have been lost and are known only from what other ancient writers wrote about them. As a result, the Chinese texts are the earliest surviving anatomical atlas, the researchers said.
Vivienne Lo, a senior lecturer and convenor of University College London’s China Centre for Health and Humanity who is not affiliated with the research, said that she is hesitant to use the word “atlas” to describe these texts, and thinks that “map” or “chart” is a more appropriate term.
Lo said that the term “atlas” was a term that was used more during the 17th and 18th centuries and doesn’t seem appropriate to apply to a 2,200-year-old text. Lo also noted that some of the finds discussed in the paper — such as that prisoners were dissected to provide anatomical information — have been published by other researchers before.
TJ Hinrichs, a history professor at Cornell University who has conducted research into ancient Chinese medicine but is not affiliated with this research, also did not think that “anatomical atlas” was an appropriate term to describe these texts. Live Science has reached out to other experts not affiliated with the research, however, most were not able to reply at the time of publication.
Ancient Chinese women faced brutal ‘yue’ punishment, had foot cut off, and a skeleton reveals
Nearly 3,000 years ago, the foot of a Chinese woman was cut off in an amputation — probably not for a medical condition, but as punishment for committing a criminal act, a new study of her bones suggests. It’s one of the few times archaeologists have discovered evidence of yue, an ancient Chinese punishment.
The rough endings on the bones of the lower right leg suggest the amputation was inflicted as a punishment and was not the result of an accident or disease.
Various clues hint that the woman’s foot was cut off as yue: her bones show no signs of any disease that could have made such an amputation necessary; and it seems the injury was roughly made, rather than with the precision of a medical amputation.
The researchers considered other possibilities for how the woman might have lost her foot, such as from an accident, a war injury or a surgical procedure, study lead author Li Nan, an archaeologist at Peking University in China, told Live Science. But “after careful observation and media discussions, our research team ruled out other possibilities and agreed that punitive amputation is the best interpretation,” she told Live Science in an email.
The yue punishment was common in ancient China for over 1,000 years, until it was abolished in the second century B.C., according to a 2019 study in the Tsinghua China Law Review. At the time the woman was living, up to 500 different offenses could result in having a foot amputated, including rebelling, cheating, stealing and even climbing over certain gates, Li said.
But nothing about the woman’s skeleton suggests what she was punished for: “We have no clue what kind of crime she committed,” she said.
Archaeologist Li Nan (centre) with other members of Peking University’s archaeological team at the Sanxingdui archaeological site in China’s Sichuan province.
Five punishments
According to historians, yue was one of the “five punishments for slaves” enforced since the second millennium B.C. by emperors of the Xia dynasty, the first dynasty of ancient China. There is extensive historical evidence of the practice, and a Chinese official in the first millennium B.C. complained of the need to find special shoes for amputees.
Minor crimes were punished with beatings, but offenders who committed severe crimes could be sentenced to one of the five punishments: mo, where the face or forehead was tattooed in indelible ink; yi, in which the offender’s nose was cut off; yue, the amputation of the feet (some of the worst offenders had both feet cut off); and gōng, a brutally complete castration.
The fifth was da pi, a death sentence that could be carried out by beheading, if you were lucky — alternatives included being boiled alive and being torn limb from limb by horses, according to a 1975 study in the Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law.
Chinese tradition records that the five punishments were in force until they were abolished in the second century B.C. by the Han dynasty’s Emperor Wen, who replaced them with a system of fines, floggings, hard labour and exile; the worst criminals were simply executed.
Historical writings and art attest to the yue punishment in ancient China, including these bronzes from the first millennium B.C. that show people who had lost a leg or a foot as punishment; they were traditionally employed as gatekeepers.
Li said the woman’s skeleton was found in a tomb at the Zhouyuan site in China’s northwestern Shaanxi province in 1999. The tomb dates from between 2,800 and 3,000 years ago when Zhouyuan was the region’s largest and most important city.
The skeleton’s missing foot was largely overlooked initially, but a new examination of the remains reveals more about the woman’s life, Li said.
Anatomical analysis revealed that the woman was between 30 and 35 years old when she died, and that — apart from her missing foot — she was in good health. She seems to have suffered no disease after the amputation, which suggests that she was cared for; and the growth of the remaining leg bones indicates the woman lived for about another five years before she died.
Only a few shells were found in her tomb, which might indicate that she lived in poverty, and she was probably buried by members of her family, Li said.
Old bones
The analysis showed that the woman was between 30 and 35 years old when she died about 3,000 years ago and that she lived for about five years after the amputation.
The woman’s bones didn’t show signs of any diseases that might have made a foot amputation necessary, such as diabetes, leprosy or cancer; and there was no evidence of frostbite or burns.
In addition, there seem to be few good explanations of how it could have happened by accident. “If she was attacked or fell from a high place, it didn’t make sense that she only lost her right foot without other injuries,” Li said.
A critical clue was that the amputation seems to have been the result of an inexpert or perhaps remorseless action — something that can be seen in the bones that remain, including what’s left of the tibia, or shinbone.
“The cutting surface of her right tibia was not smooth and marked malunion [a badly-healed fracture] was observed,” Li said. “A surgical amputation could do much better at that time.”
The Zhouyuan amputation is the earliest evidence of yue yet found. But researchers have reported seeing mutilated skeletons with similar injuries in ancient graves, and it’s possible that older examples will be identified, Li said: “The point is not finding, but identifying.”
NEW research by Historic England and the Cornwall Archaeology Unit (CAU) has revealed a previously unknown stone circle inside Castilly Henge, near Bodmin.
Volunteers marked out the position of the newly discovered stone circle within the banks of Castilly Henge.
The first modern archaeological surveys of Castilly Henge, which is located close to the A30 near the turn-off for Lanivet, have been carried out as part of a project to conserve and better understand the site.
Although many people will associate the term with the Stonehenge stone circle in Wiltshire, the word henge actually refers to a particular type of earthwork of the Neolithic period, typically consisting of a roughly circular or oval-shaped bank with an internal ditch surrounding a central flat area of more than 20 m (66 ft) in diameter. There is typically little if any evidence of occupation in a henge, although they may contain ritual structures such as stone circles, timber circles and coves.
Castilly Henge is believed to have been built during the late Neolithic period (c. 3,000 – 2,500 BC). Defined by an external bank and an internal ditch, it would have formed an amphitheatre-like setting for gatherings and ritual activities.
Previous researchers have suggested that the site was used as a theatre (‘Playing Place’ or plen-an-guary in the Cornish language) in the Middle Ages, and then as a battery during the English Civil War.
The opportunity to apply modern survey methods to this intriguing monument arose in 2021, when it was included in a Monument Management Scheme (MMS), a partnership between Historic England and the CAU to conserve and repair monuments on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register.
Volunteers coordinated by the CAU cleared the site of vegetation which threatened below-ground archaeological deposits. This work enabled teams from Historic England to carry out the first detailed topographic and geophysical surveys of Castilly Henge.
The surveys, which will be detailed in a Historic England report released later this year, revealed:
1.Traces of a long-buried stone circle in the centre of the henge, making this only the second henge with a stone circle in Cornwall.
2. Detailed information about the henge’s original form and its modification over time.
Ann Preston-Jones, Heritage at Risk Project Officer at Historic England, said: “The research at Castilly Henge has given us a deeper understanding of the complexity of this site and its importance to Cornish history over thousands of years. It will help us make decisions about the way the monument is managed and presented, so that it can be enjoyed by generations to come.”
Peter Dudley, Senior Archaeologist at Cornwall Archaeological Unit, said: “The help of the local volunteers has been invaluable in removing the bracken and scrub obscuring the henge.
Over the winter, thirteen people gave 111 hours of their time and now the monument is looking so much better. The project has also re-fenced the field and the farmer is happy to start grazing again, improving the long term management of this amazing archaeological site.”
Castilly Henge is on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register because its location makes it difficult to look after, and as a result the earthworks and part of the interior were heavily overgrown with bracken.
As part of the MMS, volunteers have removed the bracken and other damaging vegetation from the monument, making it visible in the landscape again. The site has now been fenced, allowing it to be grazed.
Castilly Henge is protected as a scheduled monument. This late Neolithic henge monument is located at the centre of Cornwall, overlooking a major junction on the A30 trunk road with the A391 to St Austell and A389 to Bodmin.
It has well-preserved earthworks and survives as an oval enclosure measuring 68m long by 62m wide, with a level interior measuring 48m long by 28m wide. The surrounding ditch is 7.6m wide and 1.8m deep, with an outer bank up to 1.6m high.
Prehistoric “Poop” Found At Stonehenge Gives Insight Into Ancient Humans
A study of ancient faeces uncovered at a settlement thought to have housed builders of the famous stone monument suggests that parasites got consumed via badly-cooked cow offal during epic winter feasts.
Human coprolite (preserved human faeces) from Durrington Walls.
A new analysis of ancient faeces found at the site of a prehistoric village near Stonehenge has uncovered evidence of the eggs of parasitic worms, suggesting the inhabitants feasted on the internal organs of cattle and fed leftovers to their dogs.
Durrington Walls was a Neolithic settlement situated just 2.8km from Stonehenge, dating from around 2500 BC when much of the famous stone monument was constructed. It is believed that the site housed the people who built Stonehenge.
A reconstruction of one of the Neolithic houses discovered at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge.
A team of archaeologists led by the University of Cambridge investigated nineteen pieces of ancient faeces, or ‘coprolite’, found at Durrington Walls and preserved for over 4,500 years. Five of the coprolites (26%) – one human and four dogs – were found to contain the eggs of parasitic worms.
Researchers say it is the earliest evidence for intestinal parasites in the UK where the host species that produced the faeces has also been identified. The findings are published today in the journal Parasitology.
“This is the first time intestinal parasites have been recovered from Neolithic Britain, and to find them in the environment of Stonehenge is really something,” said study lead author Dr Piers Mitchell from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.
“The type of parasites we find are compatible with previous evidence for winter feasting on animals during the building of Stonehenge,” he said.
Four of the coprolites, including the human one, contained the eggs of capillariid worms, identified in part by their lemon shape. While the many types of capillariid around the world infect a wide range of animals, on the rare occasion that a European species infects humans the eggs get lodged in the liver and don’t appear in the stool.
The evidence of capillariid eggs in human faeces indicates that the person had eaten the raw or undercooked lungs or liver from an already infected animal, resulting in the parasite’s eggs passing straight through the body.
Microscopic egg of capillariid worm from Durrington Walls. Black scale bar represents 20 micrometres.
During excavations of the main ‘midden’ – or dung and refuse heap – at Durrington Walls, archaeologists uncovered pottery and stone tools along with over 38,000 animal bones. Some 90% of the bones were from pigs, with less than 10% from cows. This is also where the partially mineralised faeces used in the study were found.
“As capillariid worms can infect cattle and other ruminants, it seems that cows may have been the most likely source of the parasite eggs,” said Mitchell.
Previous isotopic analyses of cow teeth from Durrington Walls suggest that some cattle were herded almost 100km from Devon or Wales to the site for large-scale feasting. Patterns of butchery previously identified on cattle bones from the site suggest beef was primarily chopped for stewing, and bone marrow was extracted.
“Finding the eggs of capillariid worms in both human and dog coprolites indicates that the people had been eating the internal organs of infected animals, and also fed the leftovers to their dogs,” said co-author Dr Evilena Anastasiou, who assisted with the research while at Cambridge.
To determine whether the coprolites excavated from the midden were from human or animal faeces, they were analysed for sterols and bile acids at the National Environment Isotope Facility at the University of Bristol.
One of the coprolites belonging to a dog contained the eggs of fish tapeworm, indicating it had previously eaten raw freshwater fish to become infected. However, no other evidence of fish consumption, such as bones, has been found at the site.
Microscopic egg of fish tapeworm found in dog coprolite.
“Durrington Walls was occupied on a largely seasonal basis, mainly in winter periods. The dog probably arrived already infected with the parasite,” said Mitchell.
“Isotopic studies of cow bones at the site suggests they came from regions across southern Britain, which was likely also true of the people who lived and worked there”
Dr Piers Mitchell
The dates for Durrington Walls match those for stage two of the construction of Stonehenge, when the world-famous ‘trilithons’ – two massive vertical stones supporting a third horizontal stone – were erected, most likely by the seasonal residents of this nearby settlement.
While Durrington Walls was a place of feasting and habitation, as evidenced by the pottery and a vast number of animal bones, Stonehenge itself was not, with little found to suggest people lived or ate there en masse.
Prof Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, who excavated Durrington Walls between 2005 and 2007, added: “This new evidence tells us something new about the people who came here for winter feasts during the construction of Stonehenge.”
“Pork and beef were spit-roasted or boiled in clay pots but it looks as if the offal wasn’t always so well cooked. The population weren’t eating freshwater fish at Durrington Walls, so they must have picked up the tapeworms at their home settlements.”
