Read Online Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mike Parker Pearson
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology
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to investigate more houses as well as to obtain a complete cross-section of the new avenue. I’d promised Farmer Stan that this would be the last time we dug up his field but I was hopelessly wrong—it took another year to finish what we’d first started in 2004, far longer than we had expected. Stan wasn’t very pleased (the loose soil of our filled-in trenches was attracting rabbits and creeping thistle into his pasture) but he knew that what we were finding was rewriting the Stonehenge story. It was worth the inconvenience.
On the avenue leading from the henge entrance to the river, we discovered a line of pits that had been dug out and filled with animal bones before the final road surface was laid, arranged on a slightly different alignment to that of the avenue itself. On the north side of the avenue we found a group of three holes that—one after the other—had each held a standing stone. Next to them, large chunks of sarsen from a broken-up stone had been buried in a shallow pit. Smaller pieces of this shattered stone covered the area around, lying on the road surface and buried within the soil that had developed over the next few centuries. It’s unusual to find evidence for destruction of a standing stone in prehistoric times, but here it was. Maybe the stone stood as a single marker along the avenue, in the same way that the Heel Stone stands alone on the Stonehenge Avenue. 3 Alternatively, this was one of a row of stones along the avenue’s north side. In 2004 we’d found the bottom of a similar pit just seven meters away, close to the “phallus pit” within the eroded part of the avenue. Perhaps a line of stones had led to the river.
The number of Neolithic house floors we discovered and excavated rose from five to seven. Five of the houses were terraced down the slope overlooking the avenue. The other two sat opposite each other on the avenue’s low banks, like a pair of entry kiosks. These were particularly odd structures, and not exactly houses. Each had only three walls, lacking the fourth wall facing southeast down the avenue. Each had a central fireplace but there were no traces of the footings for wooden furniture of the sort found in the other houses. They look more like heated Neolithic busshelters than real houses. Yet their floors had been carefully maintained and repaired and the southern building had a large midden on its south side. Perhaps they were places where certain people could gather, protected from the rain and the cold, to watch whatever was happening along the avenue, as processions moved up from the riverside toward the Southern Circle and the blazing fire outside its entrance.
The houses on the slope beside the avenue were all slightly different but were built to a similar specification: always square, with a central hearth and a yellow chalk-plaster floor. The largest house was also the most solidly built. Deeply driven stakes had formed a wattle-and-daub wall whose outer face had been surfaced with a mixture of crushed and puddled chalk that would have looked something like pebble-dash. In technical terms, this is not exactly the traditional building material known as “cob,” which is a mix of crushed chalk and cow dung, but it’s close enough. In 2009, I stopped to look at a dilapidated old barn in the nearby village of Winterbourne Stoke. This building had cob walls much the same as those of the Durrington house built more than four thousand years earlier. It seemed extraordinary that some Victorian farmhand had used the same methods and materials as his predecessors 180 generations before.
This large house beside the Durrington avenue had its doorway facing south. Immediately inside the threshold, the plaster floor had been worn away by the comings and goings of many feet. On the left-hand side of the door, in the southwest corner, there was a square storage area, perhaps for coats, bows and arrows, antler picks, and all the things one puts down when coming
On the avenue leading from the henge entrance to the river, we discovered a line of pits that had been dug out and filled with animal bones before the final road surface was laid, arranged on a slightly different alignment to that of the avenue itself. On the north side of the avenue we found a group of three holes that—one after the other—had each held a standing stone. Next to them, large chunks of sarsen from a broken-up stone had been buried in a shallow pit. Smaller pieces of this shattered stone covered the area around, lying on the road surface and buried within the soil that had developed over the next few centuries. It’s unusual to find evidence for destruction of a standing stone in prehistoric times, but here it was. Maybe the stone stood as a single marker along the avenue, in the same way that the Heel Stone stands alone on the Stonehenge Avenue. 3 Alternatively, this was one of a row of stones along the avenue’s north side. In 2004 we’d found the bottom of a similar pit just seven meters away, close to the “phallus pit” within the eroded part of the avenue. Perhaps a line of stones had led to the river.
The number of Neolithic house floors we discovered and excavated rose from five to seven. Five of the houses were terraced down the slope overlooking the avenue. The other two sat opposite each other on the avenue’s low banks, like a pair of entry kiosks. These were particularly odd structures, and not exactly houses. Each had only three walls, lacking the fourth wall facing southeast down the avenue. Each had a central fireplace but there were no traces of the footings for wooden furniture of the sort found in the other houses. They look more like heated Neolithic busshelters than real houses. Yet their floors had been carefully maintained and repaired and the southern building had a large midden on its south side. Perhaps they were places where certain people could gather, protected from the rain and the cold, to watch whatever was happening along the avenue, as processions moved up from the riverside toward the Southern Circle and the blazing fire outside its entrance.
The houses on the slope beside the avenue were all slightly different but were built to a similar specification: always square, with a central hearth and a yellow chalk-plaster floor. The largest house was also the most solidly built. Deeply driven stakes had formed a wattle-and-daub wall whose outer face had been surfaced with a mixture of crushed and puddled chalk that would have looked something like pebble-dash. In technical terms, this is not exactly the traditional building material known as “cob,” which is a mix of crushed chalk and cow dung, but it’s close enough. In 2009, I stopped to look at a dilapidated old barn in the nearby village of Winterbourne Stoke. This building had cob walls much the same as those of the Durrington house built more than four thousand years earlier. It seemed extraordinary that some Victorian farmhand had used the same methods and materials as his predecessors 180 generations before.
This large house beside the Durrington avenue had its doorway facing south. Immediately inside the threshold, the plaster floor had been worn away by the comings and goings of many feet. On the left-hand side of the door, in the southwest corner, there was a square storage area, perhaps for coats, bows and arrows, antler picks, and all the things one puts down when coming
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