stonehenge - English Heritage

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outcrops on the south coast (Wymer 1977, 333; and cf.
Palmer 1970). Another possible import is the perforated
dolerite pebble hammer, probably from the Welsh marches,
found inside Durrington Walls (Crawford 1929, 49–50; but cf.
Roe 1979, 36). Rankine (1956, 159–60) lists two additional
hour-glass perforated pebbles from within the Stonehenge
Landscape – from Bulford and Winterbourne Stoke – but little
is known about the findspots.
Structures and deposits securely dated to the sixth and
fifth millennia BC are scarce within the Stonehenge
Landscape, as across southern England generally. At
Stonehenge itself an animal bone from the packing of
Stonehole 27 in the sarsen circle has been dated to
4340–3980 BC (OxA-4902: 5350±80 BP) and may be
regarded as residual and indicative of pre-henge activity
that is otherwise invisible (Cleal et al. 1995, 188–90 and
529). Excavations at Boscombe Down Sports Field revealed
possible Mesolithic pits, but further details must await
publication of the work.
EARLY AND MIDDLE NEOLITHIC
(4000–3000 BC)
From about 4000 BC the quantity and range of archaeological
evidence in the Stonehenge Landscape increases
considerably. The fourth millennium BC, conventionally the
early and middle Neolithic (Phases B–D in Whittle’s (1993, 35)
sequence for the Avebury area), sees the construction of
numerous earth, stone, and timber monuments. It was
probably at this time that substantial clearings were opened
in the Wildwood, with pasture and secondary woodland
developing (Allen 1997, 126–7).
Archaeologically, this period is well represented in the
Stonehenge Landscape, with many of the main classes of
evidence present. Investigations of these have, in one case,
been used to define a nationally recognized class of
monument, the oval barrow, while the Stonehenge Cursus is
widely accepted as the first example of its kind to be
Illustration 23
The Coneybury ‘Anomaly’.
[After Richards 1990,
figure 24.]
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