Recent analysis of animal bones within Durrington Walls indicated, to the archaeologists involved, that people had travelled there from all over the British mainland, along with animals then eaten inside the henge[1]. But what would these people be doing there? It had earlier been suggested that an elite responsible for building Stonehenge lived in a wooden roundhouse within the henge ([2] see figure 1). So, people may have come from elsewhere to help the building works now found between Stonehenge and Avebury.
More recently, pits have been found [3] within a circular strip that I notice lies between 3168 feet and 4038 feet from Durrington Walls, a boundary 864 feet wide. The pits may contain the material remains of the building elite and perhaps of those workers who died, functioning like nearby barrows but vertically.
This post aims to explain why this might have been done according to a significant geometrical pattern. In the megalithic, numbers played an active role and this perhaps inspired the myth of Atlantis recorded by Plato – the classical Greek writer who transmitted the ancient notion that numbers had a causative role in forming the “world soul”, rather than our usage for number: a means to quantify things within civilized societies or laws of nature.
Continue reading “Durrington Walls and its massive circle of Pits”
