ENGLAND - Prehistory

Stonehenge Fence?

Initial results indicate the palisade—of which only a short timber section was found—was constructed 1,000 to 1,500 years after Stonehenge's famed stone circle. An older ditch appears to form part of a longer boundary system that runs for about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers), dig co-leader Pollard said.

The new findings hint that Stonehenge was still in use as a religious site until much later than previously suspected.

"The monument is in a reserved part of the landscape that was probably being regarded with a degree of veneration or significance," Pollard said.

(Related: "Stonehenge Partiers Came From Afar, Cattle Teeth Show" [September 12, 2008].)

"It's telling us something about the attitude of later communities to the presence of what by that stage would have been quite an ancient monument," he added.

But Pitts of British Archaeology said that the new dating evidence suggests the palisade and ditch may have little connection to Stonehenge.

"It may actually have more to do with a network of new land-boundary divisions that spread across Salisbury Plain, in common with much of southern England in the Bronze Age after Stonehenge was going out of active use," Pitts said.

People and animals were often buried in such ditches, he said.

"For example, we have a number of curious burials of cattle and horse heads and parts like that in ditches elsewhere on Salisbury Plain. It may be part of the way in which boundaries are marked as land is being parceled up into different units."