Archaeologists have found a huge ring of ancient graves that could shed new light on the origins of the Siege of Durrington Walls, one of the UK’s largest megalithic monuments.
The graves from a ring of more than 2 kilometres in diameter that encloses an area of more than three square kilometres around the Durrington Walls fence, located within the Stonehenge complex and located 3.2 km northeast of the homonymous monument.
The archaeologists who carried out the investigation revealed that at the site there are at least 20 axes each with more than 10 meters in diameter and 5 meters deep. Furthermore, these graves could have been excavated some 4,500 years ago with the aim of highlighting a sacred area around the Siege of Durrington Walls, one of the largest monuments in the United Kingdom.
“Seeing what is unseen! Yet again, the use of a multidisciplinary effort with remote sensing and careful sampling is giving us an insight to the past that shows an even more complex society than we could ever imagine. Clearly sophisticated practices demonstrate that the people were so in tune with natural events to an extent that we can barely conceive in the modern world we live in today,” said Dr. Richard Bates from the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the University of St. Andrews.
According to archaeologists, the graves reflect an important cosmological link between these two sites, which mark the sacred limits with these axes.