There are even trenches on the site, built to train soldiers preparing to travel to the front in France. Photograph by George Steinmetz When we got off. The survey clearly reveals the foundations of a first World War RAF base just under the rolling fields. ApStonehenge appears to be isolated, but it is situated amid one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric structures in the world. The legacy of human use continues to this day, Prof Gaffney said. It was 33m long and 7m wide and probably used for ritual burial after removal of limbs, exposure of the body and defleshing. Archaeologists excavating at Stonehenge have uncovered prehistoric human remains and ancient artefacts during a recent investigation at the iconic site. Prof Neubauer talked about a long burial mound built 6,000 years ago, now revealed to have been a massive timber structure being described as the “house of the dead” by the research team. Archaeologists knew little about it “because we never looked inside”, but this has changed with the survey. “The landscape is a totality, not just dots on a map,” Prof Gaffney said.Īn example is the “Cursus” at Stonehenge a 3km-long, 100m- to 150m-wide excavation dug 5,500 years ago before the standing stones themselves were raised, he said. Stand almost anywhere on the site and you will see ploughed fields and occasional ring-shaped depressions, but the view just under the surface is very different and reveals the complexity of the structures and their placement. It covered 12sq km of land surrounding Stonehenge, equivalent to 1,250 football pitches, he said. This was the largest geophysical survey of its kind ever undertaken, said Prof Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Boltzmann Institute. Most are familiar with 4,000- to 5,000-year-old Stonehenge but this is the most visible element of a much bigger site of human rituals dating back 11,000 years, said Prof Gaffney, who is based at the university. Stonehenge stood at the heart of a sprawling landscape of chapels, burial mounds, massive pits and ritual shrines, according to an unprecedented survey of the ancient grounds. It was partnered in the four-year survey by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna. Though the stones were moved by manpower not magic, and taken from Wales not stolen from Ireland, our new research has revealed that Stonehenge may actually have first stood on a windswept. Prof Gaffney provided a sample of what was discovered yesterday at the British Science Association Festival of Science at the University of Birmingham. "There is so much going on in there, it is immense," said Prof Vince Gaffney, leader of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes project. Laser-based topography was used to map the site to an unprecedented accuracy, but this survey also used radar and magnetometers to see metres down below the surface. More information about a house of the dead where bodies were dismembered and defleshed was uncovered as well as 17 previously unknown ritual monuments. The most comprehensive analysis yet undertaken of the Stonehenge neolithic site has revealed hundreds of new discoveries.
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