Dan Snow's History Hit - A New Discovery at Stonehenge

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

I was delighted to be joined by one of the most important people in the history world at the moment: Professor Vincent Gaffney. He is the leading archaeologist behind the recent discovery of a vast neolithic circle of deep shafts in Durrington, near Stonehenge. Vince took me through the thrills and surprises of his epic discovery and how it transforms our understanding of the stones themselves. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It is one of the most famous, one of the most recognisable sites on planet Earth. It is Stonehenge, the Neolithic circles of stones erected four and a half thousand years ago. And yet, its fame, its world renown, is completely unmatched by what we in fact know about it. It's a complete mystery. We don't even know, dare I whisper, if it was finished. about it. It's a complete mystery. We don't even know, dare I whisper, if it was finished. Some archaeologists suggest that one side was never even completed. So we know so little about it. We don't know what it's for, and we don't know the order in which the stones were erected, for example, or their purpose. So fascinating. But new technology is teaching us more and more about the site all the time. And what most people don't realise is that Stonehenge sits at the heart of a Neolithic landscape that stretches for miles beyond it. It is a World

Heritage Site. It extends miles away from Stonehenge. And recently, investigation made headlines around the world. The results of it made headlines around the world. One of the leaders of that project was Professor Vincent Gaffney, and him and his team discovered another enclosure of deep pits over a mile in diameter. A circle of huge pits all around the Durrington walls, another henge structure a mile or so away from Stonehenge. This gigantic circle was discovered using cutting-edge new technology just as a reminder of all the things that we are going to learn about this wonderful site as the years go by. This story is not over yet. It's wonderful. I caught up with Professor Gaffney. I was sitting

among the stones of Stonehenge. We did the weekly live Zoom podcast, so subscribers to History Hit were able to join in, ask some questions. I was sitting among the stones filming for History Hit TV, and we recorded this interview with him. If you want to become a subscriber to History Hit TV, if you want to sit in on the Zoom calls or watch the documentaries that we're producing at places like Stonehenge and elsewhere, please do so at historyhit.tv. It's like Netflix for history. It's absolutely brilliant. You're going to love it. If you enter the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and your second month is one pound, euro, or dollar. It's the future of history, everyone. It's going to be the best history channel in the world.

We're thriving at the moment, adding more subscribers all the time, getting more ambitious in the content that we're creating. So thank you so much for all of your support. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this podcast about new discoveries in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. World Heritage Site. Vince thank you so much for coming on this podcast. My pleasure. Good to see you at Stonehenge. Now I've gone the extra yard on this podcast.

This is our weekly Zoom podcast. It's the one that DistrictTV subscribers can join in on. So I've got lots of you looking at me now. I've brought my laptop out and I'm sitting among the sarsen stones of stonehenge reaching up behind me one of the most recognized one of the most famous historical sites in the world the sarsen stones the lintels above me inside there the blue stones and then another huge sarsen stone on the far side you can just see it in the back of the shot it's a majestic place vince give me a sense of what this landscape would have looked like in the Neolithic period four and a half thousand years ago. The advice I always give to people when

they're trying to understand Stonehenge is to have their back against it like you do and look around the real point is it's not just the stones it's a landscape full of archaeological sites, monuments, features which would have been as a ritual site, only a site which ritual happens at. But the intensity of activity around the area of Stonehenge would have been so great that any contemporary person passing through it or close to it would have been affected by that and the landscape in which it sets. The stones itself of course are in parallel as they are but the stones are the peak of activity in that landscape but it's the landscape personally I think which matters. Sorry I've had to mute myself here guys because I've got the low flying Apache attack helicopter adding a little extra contemporary element to this Neolithic landscape. Famously, Vince, the army now use it for training. There's an airfield nearby. You get Chinooks, they go down the curses in order to get to the helicopter camps further over on the Avon. Tell me, what have you

added to this landscape with your recent study that made headlines all over the world? Well, I've been working at Stonehenge for quite a long time. I first arrived in 1980. It was my first job on leaving university was to work with Julian Richards on the Stonehenge environs survey and I've been coming back ever since. The bit that interests me because I am a landscape archaeologist rather than a Neolithic archaeologist or a Bronze Age archaeologist. The thing that always attracted me was the bits that we didn't know about. Stonehenge is full of wonderful monuments. There have been literally hundreds of years of antiquarian and archaeological study of these, but like everywhere, archaeologists, when they worked in the past, have tended to excavate. Excavating is essential.

It's what gives us generally an insight into the function of sites and the chronology of them. But it also means we tend to know an awful lot about very small areas. And I've always been pretty interested in the fact that knowing a lot about small areas tends to mean that we know nothing about large areas of landscape which don't have barrows which don't have hinges and that archaeologists have tended to come to the conclusion that the absence of evidence is real it's evidence of absence it becomes nothing it's not in with the interpretation and I'd been increasingly concerned that we needed to know more about all the landscape and in fact where things were not in order to interpret it now that was always a difficult thing to do because you can't dig all the landscape that

was fairly obvious the English heritage and UNESCO probably wouldn't welcome it if you could, in any case. But my work within large-scale geophysics suggested that was a way forward. But even pretty much 15, 16 years ago, when this was starting to rumble away in my brain, the technology wasn't really up to it. away in my brain. The technology wasn't really up to it. I mean geophysics, you know, following time team was one or two people wandering across a field with a machine that went ping occasionally and that was never going to be good enough to see the whole of this landscape and as that became viable when you could motorize equipment when you could have multiple sensors on the back when you could have gps guidance which turned it into seamless maps

straight away guess what suddenly that empty part of the landscape started filling in with stuff wasn't just that there were odd features, there were complete new sites, old sites started to turn into something new when you looked at them and sometimes, and this is what's happened at Durrington, we've got now so much data that not only are we finding new things, we're beginning to join the dots over very large areas to produce a single structure which is absolutely massive. It's at a scale which is unprecedented. Massive pits 20 meters across on the surface almost certainly before weathering about 10 meters across and at least five meters deep. The things that started to ping up in our maps when we started to get this vast data set together and not just my own work but the work of many people means that we now have about 18 square kilometers of the landscape around

Stonehenge surveyed and that is an unprecedented archaeological map and it's starting to turn up trumps. That's a massive site. When you were surveying, did you start with one particular pit that you knew existed or was it just the geophysical survey just showed these patterns in the landscape? Absolutely. I'll be right up front with you on this one. Yes, it was a surprise and it was a cumulative surprise. We had seen a number of large pits and structures within the data, quite a lot in fact, but when we came across this particular group of features, we had seen them six years ago, but when we saw them, we'd actually surveyed them with magnetometers, flux gate radiiometers we only saw three or four of these things and they were massive they were so far away from during walls that we didn't link them and when we did

look at them we thought hmm you know they could be shallow they're large they could be shallow and we wondered whether there were dew ponds you know these shallow bowls generally created in the early modern period which are puddles in order to allow rain water to collect in them because there's not much water up on the chalk it drains away quite readily but you can give water to your sheep often during the early modern period and we just looked at these and we thought possibly they're those just possibly there's something military the British army has been traipsing all over the area around Stonehenge for a very long time the ranges have expanded contracted the bases have got larger and smaller over the years they're getting bigger again because we're bringing troops back from Germany at the moment and you know they do strange things do the military and there was just a

possibility that we were looking at something that they had done for training which was unrecorded. What made the difference was that we realised after you know only about a year and a half ago that contracting groups, particularly Wessex Archaeology, had recorded some features which looked very similar to what we'd seen far to the north of Durrington Walls. They'd stripped some of them and they'd come to the conclusion that they were probably natural sinkholes. conclusion that there were probably natural sinkholes. You do get these on the chalk, they do occur along valleys, dry valleys as well, because of the way the hydrology operates, and they'd realised that they were quite interesting. They'd realised that there was archaeological concentration of activities. They'd cored at least one of them and dug several others several meters down and you know people were aware of them but it was only when we saw that and mapped them together with our own data

that we realized that there were two massive arcs creating what looked like an interrupted circle of massive features two kilometers across and right in the middle of it is Durrington Walls one of our so-called super henges and you know that's 500 meters across massive banks and ditches and that we regarded as large after all you could drop Stonehenge into Durrington Walls quite a few times and still have space over I mean it's a big site and it's relatively well known. Beneath the banks is, of course, that village excavated by Mike Parker Pearson, which may well be associated with the communities who actually built Stonehenge. So that was quite significant. But even then, we had to go back to try and see if we could get more detailed information on these things. I mean, they were 20 metres across at the top. So we went back and rather than using magnetometry, which is a palimpsest technique,

we started applying radar, which gives you slices through the earth, which you can pile together to give a volume of data, which you can slice and dice and virtually excavate. And we realised that the radar took these things down almost vertically at a width of 10 meters down at least three meters it was clearly still going but because of the limitations of the antennae we were using we clearly couldn't resolve the bottom so we initially went back in August last year to VibraCore down the centre of these things.

But August 2019 was simply one of the driest periods I'd ever seen at Stonehenge. The VibraCore never made it below 30 centimetres. It was like concrete. I'd never seen anything quite like it. So we came back with a heavier rig and we slammed through a core down to between five and seven meters deep across three of these things and we realized these things are vertically sided they appear to go down to at least five meters deep

and they all look the same all the way around so these appear to be a massive ring of pits around Durrington walls and you know it's sometimes difficult to appreciate what a 10 by 5 meter pit looks like and you know you could drop one of those trilithons you're standing behind into it. They'd poke above the top. That's true. But it is a massive hole in the ground, one of these things. You know, my room I'm sitting in, it would fit in one of these holes and you'd have to go for another story above. So these things were massive. The likelihood of finding new sites within the Stonehenge landscape on the base of

what we were doing was very high. The likelihood of finding a single alignment structure which was over two kilometers across and contained an area of three square kilometres was surprising. Do you have any idea what these pits might have been used for? Are there any comparative structures anywhere else in Britain or in Western Europe? No, as far as I'm aware, there's nothing quite like these. The size of these things, the scale of them is unparalleled, but that doesn't mean we can't say something about them. I said to you one of the great things about the work that people are doing around Stonehenge and particularly the extent of the geophysical surveys is that we

begin to know where things are but also where they're not. That gives a better basis for interpretation than you know previous just spotty excavations. Important as they are, don't get me wrong, I love to dig a site, but we can say something about it in parallel. Clearly this ring of very large pits does appear to have some other associated features. It appears where we see them to have an internal ring of posts. It looks like some sort of small fence, a palisade running site. You can compare that perhaps to some of the other great palisaded sites at Avebury. The largest is Hindwell 2 in Wales but they don't look quite the same. This looks to be a deliberate boundary space around Durrington itself. Now that has a parallel and the parallel

actually is with Stonehenge itself. Stonehenge does have a territory. People don't tend to recognise it when they visit Stonehenge but it is there. Stonehenge doesn't sit on a plane. It actually sits in a bit of a bowl. It has a visual territory, so-called Stonehenge doesn't sit on a plane, it largely actually sits in a bit of a bowl. It has a visual territory, so-called Stonehenge envelope. When you look from Stonehenge, the near horizons are actually bounded by later Bronze Age barrows. There's a very large alignment all the way around and it certainly gives the impression that Stonehenge has a bounded space which people have said is not readily visited by people perhaps taboo area

people only certain people were allowed into the area within the so-called Stonehenge envelope. So these two areas, these two major sites, now appear to have a boundary themselves. At Stonehenge it's clearly circumscribed by these later burials. At Durrington it appears to be surrounded by these massive pits. Now that gives a very strong impression of two binary nearby monuments. Now Mike Parker Pearson of course has made the point that Stonehenge is a monument more intrinsically associated with the dead. I mean it does begin as a small enclosure with a cremation cemetery within it at about 3000 BC. And Durrington, of course, he is associated with the living, not associated with stone architecture, but with wooden architecture, with the remains of the village beneath it, which is perhaps monumentalized by Durrington.

But I think the sequence is a bit more complex than that of Durrington itself however there are these two very binary monuments with large territories around them now and that gives us a different viewpoint on the things and also how they operate it is massively interesting and there is nothing quite like that arrangement at that scale anywhere that I know in Britain. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence.

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listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Vince, we've got History Hits subscriber Mark Venn here asking a question. He wants to know how these pits were dug because it bears repeating doesn't it Vincent this was the Stone Age there were no metal tools at all it's entirely done with antler picks scapular shovels or whatever stone and the most important thing blood sweat and tears and belief I mean the thing that drives people to create structures of this scale generally in almost every period is some sort of theological or cosmological belief which drives

them to do these things i do frequently compare these to medieval cathedrals and great churches you know many of which start off as small martyria smaller churches and for one reason or another grew and grew and people invest their time their lives and their effort into those the stones behind you of course were dragged over tens of kilometers from the marlborough downs to the north a paper just published within the last week on sourcing some of the stones suggests the Alderstone indicates that that whilst it may have been coming from a much further distance and the blue stones come from the Preselis was being dragged over the landscape by hand and the muscle of men and women. Faith drives people and nothing demonstrates that more than Stonehenge

itself and these huge monuments. I think though the question that possibly leads from that is why is the scale of these things so great? And my answer is probably because it does grow from small things, iterative events over the years the one thing again that most people don't always consider when visiting Stonehenge that the earliest bit of architecture we would like to call it in Britain is the row of Mesolithic posts not that far away from where you're standing in the 9th millennium BC something was marking out this area from a very early stage once it had been marked out in some ways it simply was repeatedly visited it was embellished it became important for its embellishments and it grew with time

and attracted more embellishments as time went on. In a sense, it's a stigmatic event. It is, in some sense, self-building because some of the things that look structured to us, the barrows around the envelope, for instance, they were not planned by the people who put up those trilithons. They occur because those trilithons are there. The site is there and the appearance of planning and development

occurs because of earlier events, time and time and time again. Then they're all linked, you know. In the end, everything is linked. The Great Cursus to the north of you, you know, it's an enclosure, three kilometres long, running east-west, 100 metres wide. And that has a series of pits in, which seem to be linked to the solstitial arrangements from Stonehenge itself. So these massive monuments, which give the impression of planning, are linked as a consequence of the development of the landscape over millennia. I'm going to finish up now Vince with a question from HistoryHits subscriber Heather Thorold.

Is there a lot to discover at sites around the UK if we look at them in a much wider way? And in fact I'll ask is there much more to discover here? We are processing the huge amounts of geophysical data that we've got. amounts of geophysical data that we've got. It is an enormous amount of data and we should expect to find different relationships of features and sites emerge from that. Will we find similar features elsewhere? Well we'll find different features elsewhere. We should not underestimate the complexity of these monuments, the societies that built them and the scale at which they were prepared to invest their energies in terms of construction Stonehenge will remain unique but many other areas there are vast monument complexes in across the country you know

Millwall Basin and Millfield Basin and Northumbria for instance Dunragget in Scotland all of these remain to have surveys and studies at the scale of which we've carried out at Stonehenge carried out around them so you know it's not just watch this space watch all these other spaces. Well Vince Vince, the rain is coming down now. My brief window in the sun has come to an end. My laptop's getting flooded. So thank you very much for giving me so much of your time. Congratulations on this breakthrough research.

And I look forward to following what's coming next. Thank you very much. Glad I could come along. Hi, everyone. It's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review.

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