'Largest Neolithic' Ritual Site Found Near Stonehenge?

By R. Siva Kumar - 08 Sep '15 11:57AM

Just a couple of miles away from Stonehenge, under the ground, lies an ancient stone monument with at least 90 large stones. This was part of the border of Durington Walls, or "superhenge," The Guardian reports.

This seems to be some kind of Neolithic ritual site, with its stones measuring almost 4.5 meters, and is the biggest discovered so far.

"What we are starting to see is the largest surviving stone monument, preserved underneath a bank, that has ever been discovered in Britain and possibly in Europe," Bradford University archaeologist Vince Gaffney, head of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, told The Guardian. "This is archaeology on steroids."

This row of stones was found under the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, a five-year project aiming to build up an underground map of the region. With the help of remote sensing and geophysical imaging technology, the scientiests showed the existence of the stones without excavation, BBC reports.

"Our high-resolution ground penetrating radar data has revealed an amazing row of up to 90 standing stones, a number of which have survived after being pushed over, and a massive bank placed over the stones," Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, told CNN.

Almost 4,500 years old, just 30 stones are intact, while the others are fragmentary, according to Neubauer. It raises questions about Stonehenge and its builders.

"The extraordinary scale, detail and novelty of the evidence produced by the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, which the new discoveries at Durrington Walls exemplify, is changing fundamentally our understanding of Stonehenge and the world around it," University of Birmingham archaeologist Paul Garwood told CNN. "Everything written previously about the Stonehenge landscape and the ancient monuments within it will need to be rewritten," according to hngn.