The presence of an extraordinary circle of yawning pits created by Neolithic people near Stonehenge has been proved thanks to a novel combination of scientific techniques, a team of archaeologists is claiming.
The architects of Stonehenge may have had the heavens in mind when they built the great stone monument in Wiltshire, but the team believes the makers of the Durrington pit circle were more interested in an underworld.
The Durrington circle is thought to be a sweep of about 20 pits more than a mile across, with the Neolithic Durrington Walls and Woodhenge sites at its centre.
Some of the pits are thought to be 10 metres wide and 5 metres deep, and digging them out of the chalky landscape would have required determination and engineering skills.
The pit circle’s apparent existence was first revealed in 2020, with some describing it as the biggest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain.
Its discovery was also heralded as possible early evidence of numerical counting, as the large size of the circle meant its makers would have needed to keep track of their position in some way – the structure is too big to be created by sight.
Samples of soil used to try to establish if the Durrington pit circle was made by humans. Photograph: Internet Archaeology
However, there was also scepticism, with some experts suggesting that the pits could have been natural features rather than having been carved out by humans more than 4,000 years ago.
A paper published in the journal Internet Archaeology called The Perils of Pits details work that has taken place since then and concludes that they were made by humans.
Prof Vincent Gaffney, of the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford, who is leading the analysis, said he believed the new research showed the pits formed an “extraordinary structure”.
Gaffney said they had used a combination of methods never before used in this way. “The exceptional size of the pits demanded a novel strategy to explore them without the need for a major, and very expensive, excavation,” he said.
“As no single technology can answer all the questions; multiple types of geophysics equipment was used to establish the size and shape of the pits.”
The Durrington pit circle is close to the more widely known Stonehenge site. Photograph: Internet Archaeology
Electrical resistance tomography assessed the depth of the pits and radar and magnetometry their shapes. But this did not prove they had been human-made, so sediment cores were extracted and an array of techniques was used on them, including optically stimulated luminescence, which dates the soil directly from the last time it was exposed to the sun, and “sedDNA”, which recovers animal and plant DNA from the soil.
The researchers found repeating patterns in the soil from different parts of the large site that they believe prove humans must have been involved. “They can’t be occurring naturally. It just can’t happen,” Gaffney said. “We think we’ve nailed it.”
The team believes the pits may have been dug in the late Neolithic period. Quite why will probably never be known, but Gaffney speculated it may have been linked to a belief in an underworld.
He said: “Now that we’re confident that the pits are a structure, we’ve got a massive monument inscribing the cosmology of the people at the time on to the land in a way we haven’t seen before. If it’s going to happen anywhere in Britain, it’s going to happen at Stonehenge.”
