Bluestone Henge twin?

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Bluestone Henge twin?



A new  digital reconstruction of the monument, discovered by the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2009 suggests that the circle of Welsh blue stones found at the southern terminus of the avenue may well have been oval, and not round. If this is correct, it echoes the layout of the Bluestone oval at the centre of Stonehenge.

Henry Rothwell, Creative Lead at Heritage Data Solutions explains;
“The model was created as part of the forthcoming smartphone app ‘Journey to Stonehenge’. When we built the first wire-frame of the circle we ended up with a fairly standard circular representation. We were using a low level aerial image taken by Adam Stanford. It showed the full extent of the excavation, including the socket holes of the blue stones, into which the Stonehenge Riverside Project team had placed upturned black buckets.”

However, while checking the wireframe model, Adam pointed out another upturned bucket on the far right of the image, which had been missed out of the original model. Rothwell continued, “Initially we tried expanding the circumference of the circle to make it fit, but that made it far too large – so we settled on an oval, which lined up perfectly. A configuration which is very similar to the Bluestone oval in the centre of Stonehenge.”

If this interpretation is correct, it adds an intriguing new angle to the relationship between the monuments that lie at each end of the Avenue.

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Bluestone Henge reconstruction with oval highlighted - Aerial-Cam/GE shot.
The excavations of 2009

Archaeologists from Sheffield and other universities had previously discovered this lost stone circle a mile from Stonehenge, on the west bank of the River Avon back in 2009.

The stones had been removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of blue stones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

Excavations in August-September 2009 by the Stonehenge Riverside Project uncovered nine stone holes, part of a circle of probably 25 standing stones.

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Excavations at Bluestone Henge with excavators standing in stone holes- Aerial-Cam.

The new monument was 10m (33 ft) in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank. These standing stones marked the end of the Avenue that leads from the River Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long (2.8km) processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age (the Neolithic period).

The outer henge around the stones was built around 2400 BC but arrowheads found in the stone circle indicate that the stones were put up as much as 500 years earlier – they were dragged from Wales to Wiltshire 5,000 years ago.
The link to Stonehenge

When the newly discovered circle’s stones were removed by Neolithic people, it is possible that they were dragged along the route of the Avenue to Stonehenge, to be incorporated within its major rebuilding around 2500 BC.  Archaeologists know that, after this date, Stonehenge consisted of about 80 Welsh stones and 83 local, sarsen stones. Some of the blue stones that once stood at the riverside probably now stand within the centre of Stonehenge.

Only the radiocarbon dating programme can clarify the sequence of events. The discovery of this stone circle may well be confirmation of the Stonehenge Riverside Project’s theory that the River Avon linked a ‘domain of the living’ – marked by timber circles and houses upstream at the Neolithic village of Durrington Walls (discovered by the Project in 2005) – with a ‘domain of the dead’ marked by Stonehenge and this new stone circle.

There is no evidence that the circle had a particular orientation or even an entrance. Soil that fell into the holes when the stones were removed was full of charcoal, showing that plenty of wood was burned here. Yet this was not a place where anyone lived: the pottery, animal bones, food residues and flint tools used in domestic life during the Stone Age were absent.

The shape of Bluestone Henge is still open for re-interpretation as most of the monument was not fully excavated, but preserved for future archaeologists to explore.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV4pHzLpyo&feature=player_embedded#t=0s

More information:

For more details of the ‘Journey to Stonehenge’ app see: http://www.journeytostonehenge.co.uk/

For more examples of Adam Stanford’s heritage images see: www.adamstanfordphotography.co.uk

Heritage Data Solutions: http://www.heritagedatasolutions.co.uk/

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/09/2011/bluestone-henge-twin