UNITED KINGDOM- The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes, a team of archaeological researchers that has been creating an underground map of the area in a five-year project, located this Monday a new Stonehenge counterpart approximately two miles from the original one.
The new site that was discovered, is on “an extraordinary scale” as research mentioned – hence the name “superhenge” – and was found three feet above the ground.
The researchers from the University of Bradford are convinced that the monument was constructed around 4,500 years ago, which is kind of ironic, considering that for all those millennia, a larger Stonehenge had been sitting there, and people thought the smaller one was also the only one in existence.
The stones were located using ground penetrating radar, remote sensing and geophysical imaging technology, on Salisbury Plain. Experts think it may have surrounded traces of springs and a dry valley leading into the River Avon.
Vince Gaffney, University of Bradford professor and also the man who led the research, tells Sky News:
“We’re looking at one of the largest stone monuments in Europe and it has been under our noses for something like 4,000 years. We don’t think there’s anything quite like this anywhere else in the world. This is completely new and the scale is extraordinary”. Mr. Vince also talked to the Guardian and supported that the newly discovered site was probably used as a “ritual arena of some sort.“.
David Jacques on the other hand, a professor at the University of Buckingham, who is Blick Mead’s project manager, described the find as “absolutely brilliant” and a “game changer“.
He then added:
“All the monuments have a relationship with each other. So rather than just ‘atomising’ them and looking at them as individual entities there are deliberate lines of sight or knowledge that things are just over the hill. When you put that together in the late Neolithic – there’s something vibrant, exciting and dynamic.”
Source: The Guardian
