The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The Neolithic period
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Figure 4.7 Excavations on Site IV, a vast post-setting circled by a ditch, within the henge at Mount
Pleasant, Dorset (Geoffrey Wainwright).
of internal space, with exceptionally large stones flanking the southern entrance. Two large inner
stone circles with central stone settings further sub-divided the enclosed space, and there may
also have been timber settings, contemporary or earlier. Within Durrington Walls there were
certainly timber settings, the South and North Circles, the former about 40 m in diameter, and
consisting of six rings of timbers. Whether these settings were roofed or not is unclear. Deposits
of animal bone and artefacts, including sherds of broken Grooved Ware, were made in and
adjacent to the South Circle. The general nature of the rites seems to echo much earlier practices,
but the setting is more ordered, formalized and restricted.
The following examples come from central-southern England, but it is important to stress
that there were also large enclosed monuments, formed by bank and ditch (such as Brogar) or by
timber settings (such as Meldon Bridge in the upper Tweed Valley), and significant monument
complexes (such as Balfarg, Callanish and Brogar-Stenness-Maes Howe) in other areas. In the
south, Durrington Walls was a truly monumental earthwork. It too was added to an area long
significant, from the period of long barrows and causewayed enclosures, to the cursus monuments
and first phase of Stonehenge; a smaller henge was constructed at Coneybury (Richards 1990).
Immediately adjacent lay Woodhenge, a timber setting within a henge-style ditch. During the
Late Neolithic, according to radiocarbon dates (Cleal et al. 1995), Stonehenge was further
monumentalized. Bluestones from south-west Wales and sarsens from north Wiltshire were
assembled to create an eternal version in stone of the timber settings seen at Durrington Walls