The new henge discovered at Stonehenge appears to be a Neolithic henge and timber circle 900m from Stonehenge itself. It was discovered in July 2010, two weeks into a project looking at the archaeology around the Stonehenge World Heritage Site in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. The project, scheduled to run until 2013, is looking at how the surrounding landscape would have looked when Stonehenge was first built.[1][2]
The henge was found using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers; the discovery is below ground and not visible to the naked eye.[3] The resulting images suggest a large circular ditch feature which appears to have been dug out in scoops. There is also evidence for a ring of 1 metre wide pits around the inside edge of the ditch which may have supported a free standing wooden structure. The ditch appears to have two entrances; one in the north-east and another in the south-west, thus it appears to have the same alignment as Stonehenge. What might be a burial mound has been found in the centre, although this may have been built at a later date.[2][3]
The project, called Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes, centres on the general landscape at the site. It is headed by Vince Gaffney[2] and is run in conjunction with English Heritage, the National Trust, the University of Bradford, the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, the latter two organisations funding the project. Its aim is to map 14km2 the Stonehenge landscape, to visually recreate the iconic prehistoric monument and its surroundings and to transform how people understand the landscape of the area.[1][2][3]
Some doubts have however been expressed about the henge, Mike Pitts, editor of the magazine British Archaeology, put forward an alternative interpretation, that the site was the remains of a barrow, with a mound in the centre, with an outer ring of posts, surrounded by an irregular ditch that would have served as quarry for the mound.[4][5]
Later Pitts suggested that the postholes could even be modern – an Ordnance Survey map from the 1970's showed a fence marked out, of early 20th Century construction, perhaps erected by the Office of Works or a local farmer.[6] This was picked up by The Mail on Sunday which claimed that Pitts was "in no doubt that this was a modern fence line".[6] Vince Gaffney responded that "We have mapped numerous fences and we know what they look like. The features appear to be 3ft across and as deep as 3ft. I have never seen a fence line that required holes that are 3ft across and 3ft deep. ... we would still suggest this is a ritual monument of the late Neolithic period."[6] Pitts promptly apologised, made it clear that he had never said that he was "in no doubt" that the pit-holes were modern, and withdrew any suggestion that the pits were modern.[7]