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

belonging to the first phase of construction. They were surrounded by two concentric rings of timbers, and approached from the southeast through a screen of posts.
    The timbers of this first phase of the Southern Circle had been left to decay in their holes. When the circle was excavated, the outlines of the rotted timbers survived as “post-pipes,” voids left by the rotted-out wood into which soil had slowly trickled. These posts were around 20 centimeters in diameter, slightly thinner than a telegraph pole. Archaeologists can tell from the soil layers if a pit or posthole has been dug into at some point after its first construction. At the center of the Southern Circle, one of the postholes in the rectangular setting showed that the post had been replaced twice; two others had been replaced just once. On the basis of the likely lifespan of these timber uprights, Geoff estimated that the first phase of use of the Southern Circle lasted a minimum of sixty years.
    This first phase was replaced by six concentric circles of posts whose uprights ranged in size from around 20 centimeters to over a meter in diameter; the outermost ring of posts measured almost 39 meters across. Among the largest posts were the two marking the southeast entrance. These posts too had decayed in their holes. Geoff reckoned that these huge posts probably survived for the best part of two hundred years.
    All of the Southern Circle’s Phase 2 posts were so large and tall that the builders had to cut ramps into the chalk to feed the end of each post into its hole before heaving it to a vertical position. In 2006, Time Team built a replica of the Southern Circle, borrowing twenty soldiers from the Larkhill army barracks to try to raise just one of the smaller-sized posts by muscle power. To everyone’s surprise it was too difficult—they had to resort to twenty-first-century mechanical means to erect it.
    In and around the Southern Circle, Geoff found some traces on the surviving Neolithic ground surface of what took place here. A small fireplace was positioned in the center of the circle, and an enormous fire-pit (five meters long) outside the southeast entrance was set into a 15-meter-wide surface of broken flint, adjacent to a platform of chalk blocks. Part of the interior of the circle was surfaced with rammed chalk but otherwise it had no proper floor. On the northeast perimeter of the circle was a post-lined hollow whose shallow filling of pottery, bones, and other rubbish led Geoff to interpret it as a midden. 4

Model of Phase 1 of the Southern Circle as a square-shaped arrangement of posts surrounded by two concentric timber circles, with the D-shaped house to the northeast.

    Forty years before Geoff Wainwright went to Durrington Walls, Maud Cunnington had excavated a similar timber circle at Woodhenge, situated on the high ground just south of Durrington Walls, overlooking both the River Avon and the small valley in which the large henge lies. 5 Sitting on top of a ridge and plowed in recent times, Woodhenge’s original ground surface had disappeared long before Cunnington’s excavations. This circular timber monument had also consisted of six concentric arrangements of posts, except these were laid out as ovals rather than true circles. The posts, of similar diameters to those of the Southern Circle, had been left in position to decay. The whole structure was enclosed within a ditch and external bank. Cunnington noticed that the long axis of the ovals was oriented on both the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, as is also seen at Stonehenge itself. At the center of the timber circles was a cairn of flint nodules, beneath which was the skeleton of a child.

Model of Phase 1/2 of the Southern Circle. In this phase the builders added a timber portal facing the midwinter sunrise.

    Cunnington thought that the child had been sacrificed. She noted that its skull was split in two, perhaps by a stone ax. Curiously, there is no mention of