Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson Read Free Book Online

the moment of the house’s abandonment. And, as we were to discover later on, the floors held other clues to unraveling the secrets of Neolithic daily life.
    The houses were built on a slope but had level floors. This had been achieved by terracing the hillside, stripping the turf from higher up and laying it in a band lower down. Houses higher up were cut into the bare soil while those lower down the slope sat on a leveled platform of turf. This showed an element of organization and planning that went beyond that of the household. Perhaps this new settlement was larger and more organized than we’d at first expected.
    This was not the first time that people had lived here. Buried in the turf were flints, including a leaf-shaped arrowhead, indicating that early farmers had lived here at some point during the fourth millennium BC, at least 500–1000 years before the houses were built.
    At the bottom of the slope, within the valley that leads from the interior of the henge toward the river, we finally uncovered what we’d set out to find. By extending our excavation trench twenty meters upslope from the eroded area where we’d dug in the valley bottom in 2004, wediscovered that a meter-deep layer of colluvium (soil, loosened by plowing, that had washed down from higher up the valley) had settled on top of—and hence protected—the prehistoric ground surface. This surface was a thin layer of remnant turf and topsoil that covered a flat road surface of packed and broken flints. As the roadway had gone out of use, so grass and weeds had sprung up, eventually creating a thin layer of humus worked into soil over decades by earthworms. Carefully plotting the finds within the prehistoric turf layer covering the road, we discovered that this soil had accumulated over several centuries. Mixed in with the oblique arrowheads and Grooved Ware of the Neolithic were the later styles of barbed-and-tanged arrowheads, and pieces of distinctive Beaker pottery from the Early Bronze Age, indicating that there had been activity here long after the Neolithic houses had been abandoned.
    Our theory was right—there was an avenue running from Durrington Walls to the river, an avenue so wide that our trench was not big enough for us to see the full width of this Neolithic roadway. In 2005 we found its northern edge, defined by a low chalk bank about five meters wide, and in 2006 we found the parallel bank running along the south side. The flint road surface was 15 meters wide and, in its entirety, the avenue was 30 meters (100 feet) across from the outer edges of its parallel banks. It dwarfs the modern road built in 1968 through the middle of Durrington Walls: That has a roadway only 10 meters wide.
    The Neolithic road surface was constructed from hard-packed, natural, broken flint, but it also contained lots of animal bones, pieces of burned and worked flint, and even potshards that had been incorporated when the road’s matrix was laid down. These bits of rubbish mixed into the road construction meant that people were already living here before the surface was laid.
    When we stripped off part of the upper surface of the road, we found a lower layer of flints that contained no artifacts at all. Mike Allen and fellow soil specialist Charly French reckoned that this basal deposit was formed by natural agency, a geological deposit of coombe (valley) rock. Before the Neolithic, the bare valley floor had become covered with broken flint eroding out of the valley sides. This natural feature had been exploited and remade by the Neolithic inhabitants of Durrington Walls.

A plan of the main excavation at Durrington Walls showing the plaster floors of the Neolithic houses (shaded) and their central hearths (black). The other features are pits and stakeholes.

Computer-generated plots showing the relative density in the northern part of the main trench of animal bones (left), worked flints (center) and burned flints (right). The outline plans of the