#Giant prehistoric circle of passageways discovered beneath Stonehenge

Stonehenge has long been one of history’s great mysteries — and the world heritage site has just revealed yet another layer to its story.

Archaeologists have discovered a network of underground shafts which span 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) near Stonehenge, presumed to have been built by the same Neolithic peoples who erected Stonehenge 4,500 years ago. It is believed that they served as guideposts leading to Durrington Walls, another one of Britain’s henge monuments, located 1.9 miles northeast of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.

“This is an unprecedented find of major significance within the UK,” said University of Bradford’s Vincent Gaffney, lead researcher on the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project. He told The Guardian, “Key researchers on Stonehenge and its landscape have been taken aback by the scale of the structure and the fact that it hadn’t been discovered until now so close to Stonehenge.”

So far, 20 of these vertical passageways have been found, each placed at a radius of more than nine football fields (864 meters) from Durrington Walls at its center. Each hole is more than 5 yards (5 meters) deep and almost 11 yards (10 meters) in diameter. Radiocarbon evidence proves the dirt in the shafts are contemporary with Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. The shaft’s perimeter also includes the Larkhill causewayed enclosure, which was built another 1,500 years prior.

Now dubbed the Durrington Shafts, scientists say the discovery proves that Britain’s first inhabitants may have been more advanced than previously thought — evidenced by their clear use of numbers and mathematics to build the henge network.

“The size of the shafts and circuit surrounding Durrington Walls is currently unique,” Gaffney explained in a statement. “It demonstrates the significance of Durrington Walls Henge, the complexity of the monumental structures within the Stonehenge landscape, and the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipated.”

He added, “I can’t emphasize enough the effort that would have gone in to digging such large shafts with tools of stone, wood and bone.”

In fact, the construction of Stonehenge itself was initiated only after ancient peoples dragged giant bluestones for 150 miles, from southwest Wales to the site in Amesbury, Wiltshire. It was then built in relation to the solstices.

According to Gaffney, the Durrington Shafts suggest a “huge cosmological statement and the need to inscribe it into the earth itself.”

He said, “Stonehenge has a clear link to the seasons and the passage of time, through the summer solstice. But with the Durrington Shafts, it’s not the passing of time, but the bounding by a circle of shafts which has cosmological significance.”

Stonehenge is one of the most studied sites in all the world, yet only recently have archaeologists had the technology to study the earth beneath the monument. Although the shafts had re-filled over a millennia, tools such as geophysical prospection, ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry showed scientists that what they had been presumed to be naturally occurring sinkholes were actually formed in a clear pattern.

“We are starting to see things we could never see through standard archaeology, things we could not imagine,” said Gaffney — whose research, a cooperation between a number of universities, is published in Internet Archaeology.

Scientists also found struck flint and bone fragments in dirt recovered from the shafts. According to Gaffney, some archaeologists believe “that, while Stonehenge, with its standing stones, was an area for the dead, Durrington, with its wooden structures, was for the living.”