NEW FINDINGS AT STONEHENGE TRIAL

“It’s difficult to say what it was, but we know how old it is because we found a near-complete bronze age pot in one of the ditches. “It is a strange pattern of ditches,” said Leivers. Usually Beaker pots are ornate but this one is plain, probably to reflect the age of the person who diedĪ little farther south, the C-shaped enclosure was found. More detailed work will be carried out to find out what it is, but one theory is that it could be the tip of a ceremonial wooden staff or mace.Īlso found in the same area was a pit dating to the age of the Beaker people containing the tiny ear bones of a child and a very simple pot – a sign that this too was a grave. Also in the grave was a copper awl or fragment of a pin or needle and a small shale cylindrical object, of a type that is not believed to have been found before. One was an adult, buried in a crouched position with a pot or beaker. Near the planned eastern portal of the tunnel, the archaeologists discovered large amounts of debitage – waste material from the manufacture of flint tools – and ditches that may date to the iron age and could be associated with Vespasian’s Camp, a hillfort to the south.Ĭlose to the western end, two burials of Beaker people, who arrived in Britain in about 2,500BC, were found. Construction work on the tunnel is due to start in 2023. The next phase of archaeological excavations will begin later this year, lasting approximately 18 months and involving up to 150 archaeologists.

NEW FINDINGS AT STONEHENGE TRIAL

Highways England and Wessex Archaeology, which is leading the exploration of the tunnel corridor, said they were working on the project systematically and sensitively.ĭuring this preliminary phase, Wessex experts have hand dug and sieved almost 1,800 test pits and excavated and recorded more than 400 trial trenches. A legal challenge was launched against the £1.7bn plan late last year. The first recorded excavation was conducted by antiquarian John Aubrey in the 17th century. The plan to drop the A303, which passes close to the stones, into a two-mile tunnel is hugely controversial, with many experts having said that carrying out such intrusive construction work would cause disastrous harm to one of the world’s most precious ancient landscapes and lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of artefacts. History The Secrets Of Stonehenge: Archaeologists Reveal New Clues About The Monument’s Construction And Use Archaeologists have excavated Stonehenge numerous times since the monument’s initial construction. Every piece brings that picture into a little more focus.”

“Every detail lets us work out what was happening in that landscape before during and after the building of Stonehenge.

“We’ve found a lot – evidence about the people who lived in this landscape over millennia, traces of people’s everyday lives and deaths, intimate things,” said Matt Leivers, A303 Stonehenge consultant archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology. Just south of the site of the Stonehenge visitor centre, archaeologists came upon neolithic grooved ware pottery possibly left there by the people who built the stone circle or visited it. Ditches that flank the C-shaped enclosure contain burnt flint, suggesting a process such as metal or leatherworking was carried out there thousands of years ago.

New findings at stonehenge