Did humans observe the solstice at this site centuries before Stonehenge?
Two wooden posts sunk into a hillside three miles east of Stonehenge may have been the earliest known solar alignment on that landscape, scientists say.
Five hundred years before Britain’s Neolithic farmers began celebrating summer solstice at Stonehenge, new research suggests their ancestors may have been marking the same event at a wooden prototype erected on a hillside three miles or so east of where the world-famous trilithons stand today.
“What we have here is the earliest known solar alignment on the Stonehenge landscape,” says Phil Harding, an archaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, who describes the find as the most exciting of his career. The announcement comes in the week when thousands gather once again at the 4,500-year-old stone circle to witness the midsummer sunrise.
Unlike the elaborate stone monument we know today, this potential prototype Stonehenge, which overlooks the modern-day village of Bulford in Wiltshire, consisted simply of two massive upright wooden posts set in the ground some 400 feet apart and along a sightline pointing directly at the spot where the first rays of the midsummer sun would break the horizon.
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Radiocarbon dated to around the year 2950 B.C., the two sighting posts were sunk around the same time the great circular henge was being dug three miles away at the site that would eventually become Stonehenge.
“It’s possible that that this might even have been a kind of navvy camp for the workers who were doing the digging,” says Harding, who originally discovered the site while conducting archaeological survey work for the U.K. Ministry of Defence, which owns much of the land in the area. The narrow range of radiocarbon dates from the site suggest that it was used for only a few years, perhaps just the time it took for construction crews to dig the circular earthworks at Stonehenge and set up a more permanent means of observing the solstice.
Not everyone is convinced by the findings. “Two postholes don’t make a particularly convincing alignment,” says Jim Leary, senior lecturer in field archaeology at the University of York. “To call it an alignment, I’d expect a longer row.” However, he added, such an alignment “wouldn’t be out of place for this period.”
Vince Gaffney, a landscape archaeologist at Bradford University and lead scientist of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project, a four-year remote sensing survey of the area around Stonehenge, agrees that it’s difficult to say for certain whether this was a deliberate alignment. “It’s just two points, but it’s not impossible,” he says. “There have been earlier suggestions of precursor alignments in the Stonehenge landscape but these are currently not proven. If this is correct, it’s important.”
One thing researchers agree upon is that some of the newly described artifacts found at the site offer an intriguing early glimpse of life for the builders of Stonehenge.
A new analysis of the Bulford site
The story of the discovery began more than a decade ago, with a decision by the U.K. Ministry of Defence to build barracks and housing on the vast Salisbury Plain Training Area, near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. Four large tracts of land were set aside for the project, one of them being the 30-acre plot overlooking Bulford where the 5,000-year-old encampment was discovered. Wessex Archaeology, a charity, was commissioned to undertake extensive archaeological surveys of all four areas before construction began.
Although the excavation took place between 2015 and 2017 and housing has since been built over the Bulford site, Harding and his team have only recently grasped its potential importance. “We simply had so much material from so many sites we had to work our way through,” says Harding. “These things can’t be rushed.”
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Nor was there anything visibly exciting on the surface to give them a hint that this site might be special—just traces in the soil marking where the two post pits were originally dug together with several dozen other pits containing pottery shards, worked flints, animal bones, and charcoal left behind by the people who worked and feasted there 5,000 years ago. “We didn’t grasp the significance of the post pits at first,” says Harding. “It wasn’t until we drew a line between them and noticed that it was exactly parallel with the solstice sightlines at Stonehenge.”
The post holes themselves were about three feet in diameter and 30 inches or so deep, deep enough to support a beam of 12 to 14 feet high, while carbon dating indicates the posts holes were dug at about the same time, says Harding.
Analysis of a layer of ash found at the bottom of one of the post holes further suggests that the wood used for the sighting posts may have come from an ash tree. “Ash grows like a weed on these chalk plains.” says Harding. “They would have had plenty to choose from and it’s tree that grows tall and straight, perfect for setting up a solar alignment like this.”
A digital reconstruction of the night skies over Britain in 3000 B.C. and the landscapes in Wiltshire by skyscape archaeologist Favio Silva indicates the monument at Bulford would have been an accurate observatory for marking the solar cycle at the time. “Although the rising and setting positions of the sun, moon, planets and stars do not appear to radically change within one’s lifetime, over the centuries they do,” Silva says.
The researchers plan to publish their research later this year.
A Scottish connection
Perhaps the most intriguing discoveries at the Bulford site were the hundreds of shards of pottery decorated in a distinctive “Woodlands” style, an artistic tradition that originated in Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands, around 3200 B.C. Finding so much of it some 700 miles away in Wiltshire at such an early date adds to the growing body of evidence that a strong cultural connection existed between the peoples who built Stonehenge and those who built the grandiose monumental landscapes in Orkney.
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“We have pieces here that are identical to those found in Orkney,” says Matt Leivers, Wessex Archaeology’s senior research manager. “The pots themselves were made here in Wiltshire. We know that. The clay is local, but the decorative style is purely Orcadian.”
While examples of this Woodlands style of grooved-ware pottery have been found elsewhere in the Stonehenge area, says Leivers, the collection found at Bulford is the biggest of its kind. Microscopic food residues on the shards—animal fats from pork and milk—allowed the archaeologists to radiocarbon date the shards to around 2950 B.C.—a period when Orcadian ideas and artistic traditions were rapidly spreading south.
“The early date on this pottery shows just how rapidly this culture was spreading,” says the University of York’s Jim Leary. “All in all it adds to the growing story of Stonehenge. So much of Late Neolithic culture appears to have come from the Orkneys. In a way Stonehenge was simply clinging to its coattails.”
