"Amazing, "" fascinating ", " revolutionary ", the archaeologists british are full of superlatives. Because the discovery announced this Monday around the site oh-so-mysterious Stonhenge could bring us much light on the nature of the environment of the time and on the civilization that, there are five millennia, and stamped the residue with the soil of the present county of Wiltshire.

This discovery may simply be said to be the largest structure of prehistoric ever discovered on british soil. It is a twenty pits of more than a dozen meters in diameter and about 5 meters deep that appear to spread in a circle of 2 km diameter. At the centre of this circle, a site already well known to archaeologists and tourists, another "henge" called Durrington Walls, located 3 miles from Stonehenge.

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These large pits would be used as limits, indicating the entrance to the sacred site, as you can imagine on the map published with the study. "This is a discovery without precedent and is of major importance, explains to the Guardian professor Vincent Gaffney. The key research on Stonehenge and its landscape are now being overwhelmed by the size of the structure and by the fact that it was not discovered until today when they are so close. "

A late discovery through technology

the Stonehenge part of the archaeological sites, the most studied in the world, this late discovery is all the more spectacular. The different pits, although very large, are naturally filled in over the centuries, and have long been regarded as sinkholes or natural ponds dew ponds dug for the needs of the livestock in pastures that are deficient in water frequently found in England. It will be necessary to exploit the latest technologies to identify geological anomalies that are these various chasms and reveal their nature to the big day.

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twenty of these wells have been discovered, but the archaeologists estimate that almost half have disappeared and are no longer visible. "The size of these pits and the size of the circle around Durrington Walls are absolutely unique," continued the archaeologist. This demonstrates the importance of the site of Durrington, the complexity of the monumental structures of the region of Stonhenge, and the willingness of the communities of the neolithic period to register their system of beliefs in cosmic in a way and at a scale that nobody had ever anticipated. I can't imagine the effort it took to produce to dig pits as large with tools of wood, stone and bones ! "

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This discovery also provides, according to archaeologists, the first inhabitants of England had developed a way of counting. The construction of a circle of this size, and the attention paid to the positioning of each pit, has very probably been formed with hundreds of not. In many ways, this discovery leaves a glimpse of a society much more complex than we imagined until then.