New Study Confirms Humans Made Pits on Salisbury Plain

WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND—According to a report in The Guardian, a series of pits detected about two miles northeast of Stonehenge with remote sensing technology has been dated to 4,500 years ago with optically stimulated luminescence dating conducted by Tim Kinnaird of the University of St. Andrews. Each pit measures more than 30 feet in diameter and some are 16 feet deep. If they had been natural sinkholes, as some have argued, the pits would have been different sizes, Kinnaird explained. Together, it is thought that the pits formed a circle measuring 1.2 miles in diameter, with the henge monument of Durrington Walls in its center, although not all of the pits have survived modern development, said Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford. “So effectively this really does say this is one enormous structure. It may have evolved from a natural feature, but we haven’t located that. So it’s the largest prehistoric structure found in Britain,” Gaffney concluded. The Neolithic people who built the monument, he added, must have been able to count their paces to measure the placement of the pits, forming a boundary that may have had cosmological significance to them. For more on this discovery, go to "Stonehenge's New Neighbor."