Durrington Walls: A Time Team Special

Britain's biggest henge
About three kilometres to the north east of Stonehenge, bisected by two roads, one of them the busy A345, is a huge circular earthwork, or henge: Durrington Walls. Despite damage from the road construction and many years of ploughing, its high bank and ditch is still a striking feature on the landscape of this world heritage site. And while Stonehenge may be Britain's most famous prehistoric monument, Durrington Walls is its biggest.

Bigger even than the henge at nearby Avebury, which encloses virtually an entire village within its circle, Durrington Walls is approximately 480 metres in diameter. Its ditch, six metres deep, 16 metres wide and topped by a three-metre bank, is almost one mile around. Built about 4,500 years ago during the Neolithic era, around the same time as the first phases of construction of Stonehenge, it would have been a huge project for the people of the time. According to Time Team's Mick Aston, 'Most people in southern England must have been involved in some shape or form, because if they weren't doing the building work they would have been supporting the people who were.'

During the summer of 2005, Time Team filmed the excavations taking place at Durrington Walls as part of a ten-year archaeological investigation of the Stonehenge world heritage site. The project, which was in its third year in 2005, has already involved collaboration by ten universities, four archaeological projects and countless experts as well as Time Team, who built a reconstruction of the massive timber circles that would once have stood on this site.

1967 excavations
The first significant excavations at Durrington Walls took place in 1967, when the A345 was being improved. These revealed the remains of two timber circles: the Southern Circle, a large multi-ringed structure at the south-eastern entrance to the henge; and the smaller, two-ringed Northern Circle inside the henge. Time Team's reconstruction was of the Southern Circle.

The 1967 excavations also uncovered late Neolithic pottery and huge quantities of animal bones on the site, suggesting that feasting had taken place there. A large number of deer antlers, found mainly at the foot of the ditch, were identified as picks used in the construction of the monument.

Recent excavations
In 2003, as a prelude to the recent excavations, English Heritage carried out a magnetometry survey, which identified two new entrances to the henge. Over the next two years, excavations were carried out outside the henge and in one large segment cutting across the bank and ditch.

The area outside the east entrance was found to contain a series of Neolithic pits, large quantities of animal bones, pottery and worked flints, including arrowheads. There were also traces of hearths, again suggesting feasting. Study of the bones found on the site, as well as of the fat residues found on pottery, showed that a large proportion came from pigs, as well as a smaller quantity from cattle. Examination of pig teeth finds showed that they belonged to animals that were about nine months old when they were killed suggesting that this took place in midwinter. The teeth were also found to suffer from caries, or decay, leading to speculation that they had been deliberately fed honey to sweeten their meat.

Other finds on the site included flint representations of male and female sexual organs, a fragment of a carved chalk plaque and evidence of Neolithic domestic buildings. Most exciting of all for the archaeologists, they also found a massive Neolithic roadway – the first of its kind in Europe – made of compacted chalk and leading down to the river Avon from the henge entrance.

Linking the living and the dead
This led Professor Mike Parker Pearson to claim a definite link between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge, which also had The Avenue leading down to the river. Drawing on his experience of archaeological work in Madagascar, he has put forward the idea that the two sites were interlinked and in use at the same time. He believes the wooden structures at Durrington Walls, temporary and subject to decay, were representative of the land of the living, while the stones at Stonehenge, permanent and unchanging, represented the world of the ancestors. The two were linked by ceremonial routes – the roadway at Durrington Walls and The Avenue at Stonehenge, joined by the river Avon – along which the remains of the living would make a literal and metaphorical journey to the land of the dead.

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