An enormous pit circle near Stonehenge was created by Neolithic-era humans who might have conceived it as a portal to the underworld, according to archaeologists behind a newly published paper.
“The architects of Stonehenge may have had the heavens in mind when they built the great stone monument in Wiltshire,” the Guardian reports, “but the team believes the makers of the Durrington pit circle were more interested in an underworld.”
The Durrington circle comprises some 20 pits stretching more than a mile near the Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, an arrangement of what are thought to have been standing timber posts now memorialized by concrete markers at the Stonehenge World Heritage Site in Wiltshire, England. Evidence suggests that some of the pits were 32 feet wide and 16 feet deep, a finding “heralded as possible early evidence of numerical counting, as the large size of the circle meant its makers would have needed to keep track of their position in some way—the structure is too big to be created by sight.”
Some experts thought the pits could have been natural features of the land when they were first detected in 2020, but a paper titled “The Perils of Pits” published in the journal Internet Archaeology “details work that has taken place since then and concludes that they were made by humans,” per the Guardian.
The newspaper cites Vincent Gaffney, a professor at the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford, calling the pits an “extraordinary structure,” given their size and requirements needed to have constructed them, if in fact they were constructed as claimed.
“Now that we’re confident that the pits are a structure, we’ve got a massive monument inscribing the cosmology of the people at the time on to the land in a way we haven’t seen before,” Gaffney said. “If it’s going to happen anywhere in Britain, it’s going to happen at Stonehenge.”