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discovered that this central area was surrounded by a wide arc of impressive buildings, consisting of fenced-off houses. Later on, the entire settlement was enclosed by a huge, circular bank and ditch—the walls of the site’s name—which buried many houses around the settlement’s perimeter under deep deposits of chalk. Although thousands had lived here, this was never a town. It lasted decades and not centuries, and most of its inhabitants were probably seasonal visitors and not permanent residents.
    With the discovery of the avenue and the unique Neolithic houses, we had verified part of the original theory about Durrington Walls being a place for the living, in a landscape of complementary monuments where wood and stone, the living and the dead, all played a part. We were in a good position to apply for a large grant and by 2006 the project had been awarded nearly £500,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Although most of this was for salaries and university overheads, it gave us enough to do the unglamorous behind-the-scenes lab work and analysis that are the principal aspects of archaeology.
    For every month of digging in the field we were creating about six months of what is called “post-excavation”: the sorting and analysis offinds and samples, the processing of digital data, the production of computerized plans and records, the drawing of finds, and the writing of detailed reports by an army of specialists. We needed experts to work on flint tools, animal bones, human bones, pollen, carbonized plant remains, wood charcoal, pottery, soil chemistry and micromorphology, land snails, and chemical isotopes in animals and humans.
    The project was now on a firm financial footing and we could plan ahead. Rather than restrict our efforts to Durrington Walls, we could also investigate crucial sites at and around Stonehenge itself. We proposed another four years’ work, at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, at the Stonehenge Cursus, along the ridge along the riverside south of Woodhenge, and at the Cuckoo Stone (a fallen standing stone near Woodhenge), then Stonehenge itself, its avenue and environs, with a final season to wrap up any loose ends. Our money worries were never quite over, though. Since most of the grant was earmarked to pay for post-excavation and compulsory university overheads, there was still not enough money to fund the digging. We were going to have to apply for extra grants every year, but the project was no longer “too speculative,” and even international organizations, such as the National Geographic Society, were excited by our discoveries.
    In December 2005, we presented the project’s first results to a packed audience at the Theoretical Archaeology Conference in Sheffield. Working from old finds and records, we had a new argument about the dating of Stonehenge (about which more later) and had also taken stock of our own discoveries the previous summer. By studying photographs of the flint surface found in 1967 outside the southeast entrance to the Southern Circle, we could see that this was part of the flint-surfaced avenue that we had unearthed less than 100 meters away. The surface of broken flints had been laid at the same time as or after the Circle’s Phase 2 posts were erected. It had initially been interpreted as being a platform on which to make offerings and perform rituals, but was actually the western end of the avenue leading to the Avon.
    We were less certain about the other end of the avenue. Erosion had destroyed the avenue nearer the river and the riverbank itself has moved during the last four thousand years, as the river has cut into the solid chalk on its west bank. If there ever was a timber or stone monument atthe riverside end of the Durrington Walls Avenue, it would have been eroded away long ago.
    In 2006, we split the team into four different excavations. I stayed with the houses and avenue at Durrington Walls, Julian dug in the center of the