Construction mysteriously halted before the structure was completed.
The mysterious ring of standing stones in Wiltshire, England has drawn in scores of visitors for millennia. Modern visitors have likely been unaware that just two miles away, beneath a Neolithic settlement called Durrington Walls, evidence of a massive circle of wooden posts around five times the size of Stonehenge has been hiding underground.
A partial excavation of the newly discovered wooden henge revealed that the construction project was probably never finished, The Independent reports. Shortly after its construction began, work on the nearly completed monument appears to have abruptly stopped around 2460 BC. The 6 to 7-meter-long (20 to 23-foot-long) posts were yanked out of their holes, which were filled in with blocks of chalk. A spade made from a cow’s shoulder blade was buried beneath the chalk fill in one of the holes.
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"For some strange reason they took the timbers out and put up the enormous bank and ditch that we see today," National Trust archaeologist, and member of the excavation team, Nick Snashall told the BBC.
Why were the posts removed in such a hurry? The researchers believe it might have been a literal attempt to bury the past. The cessation of construction coincided with the arrival in Britain of the Beaker culture, which straddled the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age. Though its spread through Western Europe can be traced by the appearance of distinctive pottery vessels, the arrival of Beaker culture also introduced a new set of religious and political ideas.
Snashall tells The Independent, “The new discoveries at Durrington Walls reveal the previously unsuspected complexity of events in the area during the period when Stonehenge’s largest stones were being erected – and show just how politically and ideologically dynamic British society was at that particularly crucial stage in prehistory.”
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