Stonehenge: settlement may have housed its builders

Stonehenge is one of those classic sites one thinks of when archaeology is discussed. Now, archaeologists working at Durrington Walls on the Salisbury Plain about 2 miles from Stonehenge itself think they’ve located the settlement that the neolithic builders of the monument called home. With hundreds of residents, this settlement becomes the largest in Britain of its time 2,600 to 2,500 BCE. The houses excavated to date have the same layout as those at Skara Brae.

“In what were houses, we have excavated the outlines on the floors of box beds and wooden dressers or cupboards,” said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University. […] “It is the richest – by that I mean the filthiest – site of this period known in Britain,” Professor Parker Pearson told BBC News. “We’ve never seen such quantities of pottery and animal bone and flint.”

Read More at:
Stonehenge Builders’ Houses Found [bbc.co.uk]
Stonehenge Settlement Found: Builders’ Homes, “Cult Houses” [nationalgeographic.com]

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