The ancient past has always been full of mysterious structures and strange sites that continue to baffle archaeologists and historians to this day. Belonging in this category is the iconic Stonehenge, which is said to have been used as a burial ground in the past, according to many scholars. But while the place might have been used in the past as a burial ground, people are still baffled at how the ancient people managed to build such a big structure. But it seems that there is now a much larger mystery to solve, and this mystery can be found just a few miles away from Stonehenge.
Now, another monumental site has been discovered in the area, and though it’s much, much bigger than Stonehenge, it’s easy to see why it’s been missed for so long. The newly found site, contemporaneous with Stonehenge, is a vast arc of pits, which archaeologists believe represents a significant development in their understanding of the inhabitants of early Britain.
“When we started the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, we started to look in between the monuments [we knew about],” says Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford and lead author of a recent study describing the newly-discovered site, published in the journal Internet Archaeology. “The Neolithic period was a time of monumentalization of ritual sites. It was happening all over the country. This dwarfs the lot of them.”
More details about this site over at Atlas Obscura.
(Image Credit: garethwiscombe/ Wikimedia Commons)
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