The Lost Solstice Monument That Predates Stonehenge By 500 Years

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0:41We get Stonehenge. We love Stonehenge. For those who don't know, for some reason, Stonehenge was built 4 ,000, 5 ,000 years ago. It's a ring of massive standing stones surrounded by an earth bank and ditch in the southwest of England. And it's associated with the summer solstice, as you say, also the winter solstice, because the stones align with the sun setting and rising at these times. Yeah, so there's been loads of theories about what it is, and I think the current one is that it's this ancient solar calendar. But this week, archaeologists have discovered evidence of an even older structure that might have served as a prototype for Stonehenge.

1:16From New Scientist, this is The World, The Universe, and us. I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. And I'm Dr Penny Sarche. To discuss this new discovery, we're joined by archaeologist Phil Harding. Welcome, Phil. What have you found? And this is not actually at Stonehenge, is it? But it's nearby. No, it's at a site called Bulford. Bulford is a small village on the southern limits of the Salisbury Plain training area, a military area. It's about five kilometres east, northeast of Stonehenge itself. So it's more or less within the Stonehenge landscape. and we were commissioned to do some excavations there in advance of a new development to create a larger garrison for the army because we were closing down the garrison in Germany.

2:03So there was a massive archaeological programme in the southern part of Salisbury Plain and of course being that close to Stonehenge it had to have some archaeology and that's where I come in. There's so much archaeology in that part of the country, the southwest and the Salisbury Plains specifically. What was happening at this site then that you've now been uncovering? Well, the area that we excavated, it covered an area of 13 hectares. So it was a big area. And there are four phases. And they basically divide into brackets of 500 years. So the first phase is about 3 ,500 BC. That's an early Neolithic phase.

2:51And then our phase two comes in about 3 ,000 BC. And that is at the beginning of the late Neolithic. And, of course, the point about this 3 ,000 BC phase is that it is where they're doing the groundwork. They're cutting the ditch that would be later on is, well, is the embryonic Stonehenge. And then our stage three is 2500 BC, which we have at Bulford, two Henge monuments, that's these circular ceremonial monuments. But that coincides with what we all know and love about Stonehenge, the introduction of the big Sarsen stones and that solstitial alignment, which you were talking about earlier on.

3:38And then our last prehistoric phase at Balford is about 2000 BC when we have a Bronze Age monument. So what were they doing here? What have you found there and what do we think they were using it for? Our phase two, which is like I say, the beginning of the late Neolithic, we found close on 50 pits. And those pits were all full up with, well, rubbish, animal bone, pottery, work flints. It's the sort of debris that we would get from domestic life, but also some of the bones that we were finding there suggesting that this was a ceremonial feasting episode. And 50 pits of that day is almost unheard of.

4:22But what was really, really impressive was that we also found two pits that were different to all the others. The rubbish pits were what I call cylindrical. They were circular, about a meter in diameter, and about 50 to 60 centimeters deep with circular flat bases. And these two extra ones were like what I call a truncated cone. So they didn't have vertical sides. They had tapering sides that came down to quite narrow bases, about 50 centimeters across. The fillings were totally different. The fillings were chalk rubble. There was not the amount of rubbish that we had in the other pits. When I looked at those, some of the artifacts, some of the pieces of pottery were steeply inclined in the fill.

5:18They weren't lying flat. They were nearly vertical, as though these bits had been added in to avoid created as you took out a post or some sort of support. And so that gives us the idea that what we were looking at with these two and these two features were that they were post pits, large pits. They're a meter deep, large pits to support big posts. Because we've got so many, we had about 40 radiocarbon dates from the rubbish pits, and they date to 2 ,950 BC, like I say, about 3 ,000 BC. the dates from these two post pits are exactly the same date so we know they are contemporary and so what i did then being an archaeologist you do it instinctively is i took a pencil and a ruler and i joined them up and because i know the area pretty well i've lived here all my life and i know where the uh summer solstice points to at stonehenge i want to see how that related to what I had at Bulford, what I found was that the sight lines, if you like, of Bulford were pretty much parallel to the ones at Stonehenge.

6:35They come to about 50 degrees off of north in the compass direction, and that coincides with pretty much the mid-summer sunrise. And so that got me really, really excited, and I'm not an expert to that extent. So what we had to do was get somebody whose word we could trust that could look into it and apply modern technology, modern computer programs and actually resolve whether or not this was a true alignment or Phil's crackpot theory about Stonehenge. So we'll talk about that because it's a skyscraper archaeologist, which is such an interesting title. But just to make it clear, so these wooden poles, where you think there were wooden poles, this is about 500 years before Stonehenge.

7:27That's why the whole idea is that it's perhaps a prototype for the alignment that you get at Stonehenge. Exactly. The crucial thing is that what we hoped and has now been confirmed is that these represent the first occasion, certainly on Salisbury Plain, and probably one of the first occasions in Britain where people have accurately captured the summer solstice sunrise, which is equal to the midwinter sunset. And it's exactly the same phenomenon that we're so familiar with with the Sarsen setting at Stonehenge. But the Sarsen setting at Stonehenge is 500 years after what we've got at Balford. Wow.

8:17So it's possible that what we've got at Bulford is not unique in that sense, but it would also have employed at the first phase of Stonehenge. The trouble is Stonehenge has been so worked over in subsequent periods that it has been possible to prove whether or not phase one also had a similar setting like Bulford. So Stonehenge itself might have started out with these wooden poles. Yeah. And then all of these pits filled with animal bones, it sounds like they were having a feast to celebrate the summer solstice or the winter solstice. Is that a fair guess? That's exactly it. I mean, we don't know whether or not they were celebrating the summer solstice or the midwinter sunset.

9:04And it might have been just like at Stonehenge now, they celebrate both. All we know is that at Balfour, the radiocarbon dates suggest a fairly short-lived site of activity. The radiocarbon dates, they stack up like a pile of coinage. But that doesn't mean to say that they all refer to one year. They could be, let's say, as much, well, 10 years. In radiocarbon years, 10 years is not very much one way or the other. So it could be that once they'd established the site of Bulford, They kept on using it for a few years. And who knows, maybe they were using Bulford while they were actually creating Stonehenge.

9:53I mean, it is not so far-fetched. I know when I started to dig at Bulford and we knew, we began to understand what the radiocarbon dates were. one of the colleague of mine said Phil do you realize the people who were at Bulford may actually have been involved in the construction of Stonehenge and that kind of really did set the hairs on the back of my neck and and really did just excite me. Phil I'm just wondering about how this was all talked about in those days or how this knowledge was transmitted because this is a long-term project was this all just handed down like vocally so much of what life must have been in those days was oral tradition that you passed it on you couldn't write a letter you didn't send a text you didn't phone people up so the only way you can communicate is it's like what i'm doing to you i'm physically talking to you and i'm sure a lot of those ideas and and people meeting one another and moving from area to area and ideas would have come down but what is impressive is the speed with which they come down because certainly the pottery in Orkney is only at least 100 200 years earlier than what we're getting in in Balfour so that spread of ideas is coming down at a really is a rate of knots once you've got that that sort of knowledge that you transfer you kind of know about the solar system and the solstitial system.

11:37It's passed on. It becomes part of your community lifestyle. And, of course, it's in reverence of the heavens and the solar system and all the rest of it. Worship and understanding of the heavens is just a universal thing. Phil what's your thoughts on the kind of marriage of science and religion that's going on at these sites because we talk about worship and the sort of pagan rituals that are associated with the feasts but you've also talked about understanding the cosmos you know was there a difference between science and religion back then they're both the kind of the same ways of trying to understand the world.

12:21Well, that's it. I mean, they live in a natural world. They rely on the cycles. They rely on the sun to give them light and heat and to generate growth. They need water to make crops grow, to make the grass grow for their herds. These people were incredibly ritualistic and things had symbols and symbolism that we probably find it difficult to understand. If you had a torrential downpour or torrential adverse weather conditions, you'd wonder what the gods are sending to you. To me, all those sorts of concepts are wrapped up in that. I don't think they necessarily regarded themselves as scientists as such.

13:15I'll tell you what, they were pretty good surveyors. Yeah. They were pretty good. And they were, you know, in 500 years' time, they were pretty good engineers when they created the stone version at Stonehenge. You know, it's a very advanced community that they were living in. You mentioned a skyscape archaeologist. You had to bring one in. What is that job? and why did you need to get someone with those skills on board? Well, because potentially this was going to be such a, well, such a big story. The fact that I'm sharing it with you now, you know, we needed to be pretty clear that what we had was not a figment of my imagination, that it was not just another crackpot theory about Stonehenge.

14:06Yeah, there are lots of them. So we want to make absolutely certain that what we were telling you and what I'm telling you now has been rubber stamped by somebody who knows. And, of course, what Fabio can do, he takes our data. We provide him with all the data, excavation data, and you can imagine on a modern excavation, that is pretty accurate. and then what he can do is he can reconstruct what the sun activity of the sun was like in 3000 BC. He can reconstruct where the sun would have come up and where it would have set 3000 BC. It's not a million miles away from where it is now, but it is different.

14:55And so if you want to know what it was like 3000 BC you have to apply it to 3000 BC not to 2026 AD makes sense I'll tell you what we were on tenterhooks while he was working on the data but I mean you can imagine the level of celebration at least I hope you can imagine the level of celebration when he came back. A pagan feast. Much feasting, yeah. Feasting and drinking of mead. Most of us worry about memory lapses as we age, but how do you know when it's something more serious? You can explore this question in our latest New Scientist CoLab feature, where Dr Tim Beanland separates dementia myths from scientific facts.

15:42He discusses the breakthrough drugs showing promise in slowing Alzheimer's, the potential for simple finger prick diagnostic tests and the incredible finding that nearly half the dementia cases globally could be prevented through lifestyle changes. It's a roadmap for brain health and you can't afford to miss it. Search dementia everything you need to know at newscientist.com or visit alzheimers.org.uk. This message was sponsored by the Alzheimer's Society. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks gemini and chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no place like chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus um nearby there's a stone circle at avebury yeah and then also there's this site blickmead where sort of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were living before we even had the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge.

16:49So Mesolithic, so way before the Neolithic. Yeah, but coming up to the point of the people who built Stonehenge. And one thing I've always wondered about the Salisbury Plain, which I've been to quite a lot, and it just feels sort of mystical. You feel close to the sky, don't you? We know that there are stone circles all across Europe, but was there something in particular special about this site where it was just a hub of knowledge and industry and sort of cultural development? Or is it just that we've studied it really well and we keep finding these things? I appreciate you may be biased because it's where you're from and you love it.

17:25Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you ask me, my stock answer is, why Wiltshire? Well, because it's the centre of the universe. but but i think i think on a less sort of flippant uh response i think you put your finger on it when you just mentioned the word hub because i have a great feeling about the the geology when you when you look at salisbury plain it is like a hub and the spokes from that hub go out you can go down to the southwest down the dorset downs you can go down to the south along the south downs out towards kent along the north downs or up to the north uh up the chilterns up through lincolnshire wolds yorkshire wolds and these are these these ridgeways all funnel in they provide natural routeways well-drained perfect conditions they got loads and loads of flint because you so you've got to make stone tools to the to the caves come home and you if you've got agriculture if you want to be even remotely agricultural the soils are nice and thin and well drained what we also know is that Salisbury Plain was considerably open land in my day when I was a youngster you you envisage that the whole of the whole of Britain was this impenetrable forest after the the old stage and what have you and that our Neolithic ancestors had to clamber through and cut all the trees down and clear the clearings yeah there's absolute rubbish I mean now we know we now know from studies certainly on Salisbury Plain the Salisbury Plain was a relatively open environment and so what that gives you is space to create monuments and that sort of thing.

19:24But in this instance, it gives you a really good viewshed because if you want to observe over long distances to see where the sun is rising or setting, you don't want to be fenced in by trees. You want to be able to see for miles away. And these big open spaces that you have at Salisbury Plain do that with plenty. well okay so Wiltshire is not the centre of the universe but it's the hub it is it is the hub of prehistoric Britain the hub of prehistoric Britain we'll leave it there thanks so much to our guest Phil Harding for joining us and thanks to you for listening as always do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts goodbye for now bye

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