And we thought the Rolling Stones were oldTHOUSANDS gather on Salisbury Plain to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge every summer, when the prehistoric standing stones align with the rising sun as they have done for over 4,500 years. Yet for ancient British revellers this most famous “henge”—a circular basin surrounded by a ditch and bank on its circumference—may well have played second fiddle to a supersized cousin next door.
Just 3km to the north-east lies Durrington Walls, a 500-metre-wide earthwork that today is merely a vague ridge surrounding a flat interior. Now a team led by Vincent Gaffney of the University of Bradford and Wolfgang Neubauer of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Austria, working with colleagues from the University of Birmingham, have found that up to 200 giant stones once stood over this site, dwarfing its more famous neighbour.
The researchers are mapping the entire area around Stonehenge by driving their small tractors across the land towing two types of detectors. The first type measures local disturbances in the magnetic field, which would show up any anomalies from pits,...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1O3rTBQ
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