Archaeologists from Wessex Research, a British archeological firm, have found a structure that may have been a prototype for Stonehenge. The company announced the find just days before June 21, when thousands of visitors will converge on the ancient stone circle to celebrate the summer solstice.
The Wessex Research team made the discovery while conducting required excavations in Bulford, three miles from Stonehenge, ahead of the British Ministry of Defense’s construction of new housing. At the heart of the find were two postholes, 400 feet apart, aligned so the now-vanished poles would point directly to the rising sun at summer solstice and the setting sun at winter solstice—exactly as Stonehenge’s altar and heel stones do today.
The excavations at Bulford, which were conducted between 2015 and 2017, also uncovered pits radiocarbon dated to around 2950 BC—contemporaneous with the earliest phase of Stonehenge’s construction—as well as fragments of pottery, animal bones, and charcoal suggesting that people gathered there in large numbers at certain times of the year.
Skyscape archaeologist Dr Fabio Silva, who confirmed the alignment of the postholes, said in a statement, “The alignment shows that communities were already engaging with both the summer and winter solstices in the Stonehenge landscape, centuries before [Stonehenge’s] sarsen stones were raised. Rather than marking the beginning of a story, Stonehenge now more clearly appears to have emerged from traditions and practices with much deeper roots in this landscape.”
“What we’re seeing here is the religion of the stone age made manifest in the ground,” said Matt Leivers, the senior research manager at Wessex Archaeology. “We don’t know what the sun meant to them. We don’t know whether they personified it as a deity. But the amount of effort directed toward marking it and its movements leaves us in no doubt at all that this is a major religious event that’s inscribed over the whole landscape over millennia.”
Team leader Phil Harding, said simply, “Opportunities like this probably only come once in a career, in a lifetime. . . . It makes me incredibly proud to be an archaeologist.”
