A boundary that guided - or warned

June 21, 2020 11:42 PM

Following hard on the heels of MrsPotato's recent Mefi post on a 7000 year old stone circle and astronomical site in Egypt, is this - a 1.2 mile diameter circle of giant shafts around Durrington Walls, a henge monument a couple of miles from Stonehenge.

Each shaft is more than 5 metres deep and 10 metres in diameter. They have found 20 so far, through geophysical prospection, ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry, and there may have been at least ten more, each dug from the earth with 'stone, wood, and bone'.

One implication remarked on is what a construction of this size and relative spacing says about the builders ability to count large numbers.

"The boundary may have guided people towards a sacred site within its centre or warned against entering it."

posted by reynir (21 comments total)

Omg this has been a marvelous week of archaeology posts. Thank you so much for sharing.
posted by Kitchen Witch at 11:48 PM on June 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting! Stonehenge is such a deep well of continuous discoveries, I love it that just as archaeology looks like it is closing in, up pops another discovery.
posted by unearthed at 12:08 AM on June 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I did wonder when making the post - is it just me that finds the comment on how this shows neolithic folk can count somewhat patronising and unremarkable for peoples who could construct complicated astronomical sites based on complex calendars?
posted by reynir at 1:24 AM on June 22, 2020 [17 favorites]

From the article: The Durrington Shafts discovery...is all the more extraordinary because it offers the first evidence that the early inhabitants of Britain, mainly farming communities, had developed a way to count.

From the OP: ...is it just me that finds this somewhat patronising and unremarkable for peoples who could construct complicated astronomical sites based on complex calendars?

No, it's not just you. This is something struck me as totally idiotic about the Guardian's reporting on the discovery. It's not just complicated astronomical sites, either. People in the neolithic constructed buildings. This involves measuring things and doing math, even if what you're building is just a small house – let alone impressive structures like Stonehenge. They had trade networks. Of course they could count!
posted by nangar at 1:25 AM on June 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

In S.M Stirling's islands in the sea of time, I was riveted by the descriptions of the apprentice priestess (Swindapa) who had to memorize the position of all the stars and the seasons - the implication that prehistoric man was primitive (in today's context) feels no different from the implication that an Amazonian tribe is primitive - they're really coming down hard on establishing the advanced superiority of contemporary western civ aren't they?
posted by Mrs Potato at 2:07 AM on June 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

“The boundary may have guided people towards a sacred site within its centre or warned against entering it.“

Please, just leave it alone until 2021, please. We’ve had enough for this year.
posted by like_neon at 2:16 AM on June 22, 2020 [8 favorites]

“The boundary may have guided people towards a sacred site within its centre or warned against entering it.“

Interesting. I wonder if this is a place of honour and/or a highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. Should definitely keep digging.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:09 AM on June 22, 2020 [21 favorites]

Having been to a local ancient technology centre and tried digging a hole with a deer shoulder bone, my mind boggles at digging a hole that large, even if there are lots of you doing it.
posted by dowcrag at 3:38 AM on June 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

A little more from Heritage Daily which includes a link to an interactive map of the immediate area.
posted by adamvasco at 3:52 AM on June 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

Now I wonder if - all this time - the smaller Stonehenge might have been an aborted first attempt by a prop designer who mistook feet for inches.
posted by rongorongo at 4:02 AM on June 22, 2020 [19 favorites]

"Four thousand five hundred years ago"

These astronomical sites sure take a long time to reload.
posted by otherchaz at 5:34 AM on June 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

Here is a link to the published research article. Lots more info there.
posted by carter at 5:40 AM on June 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

No, it's not just you. This is something struck me as totally idiotic about the Guardian's reporting on the discovery. It's not just complicated astronomical sites, either. People in the neolithic constructed buildings. This involves measuring things and doing math, even if what you're building is just a small house – let alone impressive structures like Stonehenge. They had trade networks. Of course they could count!

And even if you don't have counting numbers that go that high, there are still plenty of ways to measure off distance. People back then weren't dumb and they were obviously able to complete complex engineering and construction, even if they might not have had access to advanced mathematics or survey equipment.

That aside, this is interesting to read, and I also wonder what the purpose behind digging so many huge pits might have been. That is a lot of work with hand tools even now, never mind with bone and wood implements.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:53 AM on June 22, 2020

Once you know to look for them, least some appear to be visible in Google maps, but others weren't obvious in the aerials and must be more subtle on the landscape.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:59 AM on June 22, 2020

I also wonder what the purpose behind digging so many huge pits might have been.

To power the ancient astronauts' spaceships from the ley lines, obviously.
posted by lovelyzoo at 9:06 AM on June 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m having trouble imagining why giant pits, too. Heffalump parking? Or could they have been seasonal pools, as suggested by now being taken for dew ponds? What’s the water table like there now?
posted by clew at 9:56 AM on June 22, 2020

Also, you don’t have to be able to count to make huge circles; it suffices to be able to make strong long string. Geometry is math too. (Not that I think they couldn’t count, it’s just the second case in a ?month? of forgetting half the heritage of mathematics. )
posted by clew at 9:59 AM on June 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is the only happy thing I've read after doomscrolling all morning. Thank you for sharing this.
posted by Tesseractive at 10:01 AM on June 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

For those of you wanting to play along at home here is google maps centred on Larkhill and here are streetmaps which I prefer here as Tumuli and ancient monuments are marked as such.
posted by adamvasco at 10:42 AM on June 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

For those of you concerned about the mention of counting in the popular media article linked, I would make three points.

First, I would be pretty careful about assuming what neolithic cultures could or could not do, and particularly, the details of how they went about doing it, unless you have specific information about the specific culture under discussion. Something as basic as tallying and counting was done in large number of wildly different ways, from everything we know about different ancient cultures.

Just for example:

• A bunch of ancient counting systems
• Egyptian numerals
• Etruscan and early Roman numerals
• Ancient Babylonian counting system
• General discussion and links to articles about various forms of early counting and numerals

Yes, people--even ancient people--were not complete dunces and could figure out how to count and tally things, but as near as I can tell the exact details about how this was done in neolithic Britain are almost completely unknown. So any clues, such as the details of how they measured such a large structure and what the outcome of that measurement was, are welcome and enlightening. The current structure is interesting both in that it is as precise as it is, but also that it isn't any more precise than it is. The actual degree of precision is an interesting bit of information.

Second, the point the researchers were getting at with the mention of counting paces etc is quite different from the conclusion you probably jumped to when reading the mass media summary and actually quite interesting:

Although visually striking, the apparent regularity demonstrated through the pit placement need not require any recourse to the existence of standard metrics during the Late Neolithic (Chamberlain and Parker Pearson 2007; Teather et al. 2019). The variation in the pit circuit does not suggest that precision was required and the goal to achieve an approximate distance appears to have been achieved through pacing. However, the distances involved may suggest the existence of a tally system to record steps rather than directly measure distance. Anthropology provides substantial evidence for a variety of tally systems across many societies, including those based on parts of the body (Biersack 1982; Owens 2001). Such systems are not themselves an explanation for the distribution of the pits but, in many societies, tallies or counts may themselves possess culturally embedded values and provide social linkages to status, enumerate kinship distance and other social information (Biersack 1982; Bowers and Lepi 1975). Archaeologically, some early tallies do appear to have linkages with astronomic, and, presumably, cosmological cycles (Rappenglück 2010). Without recourse to the extremes of numerology, it is conceivable that the act of pacing out a notional pattern on the ground might well have reinforced perceived cosmological linkages and these, in turn, may have been inscribed into the landscape through the massive pits found at Durrington.

From the journal article on the discovery, linked above:Gaffney, V. et al. 2020 A Massive, Late Neolithic Pit Structure associated with Durrington Walls Henge, Internet Archaeology 55. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.55.4

Finally, mass media articles about interesting scientific discoveries nearly always butcher the exact scientific details to some degree. Maybe use the minor bit of confusion the rough summaries engender to motivate your curiosity to actually look up the original research mentioned and actually learn a bit of something about the topic at hand, rather than fuel comments filled with useless snark and baseless speculation, whether posted here or elsewhere.

Comments filled with snark and baseless speculation don't solve the problem of bad science writing in the popular press, they add to it.
posted by flug at 11:12 PM on June 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

These ancient people owned livestock, presumably with flock/herds in the high 10's at least, and likely in the low 100's - it is inconceivable they didn't have means to count or tally. Likewise they built walls and other stone things - again it is hard to do these things well (and they did do things well) without being able to number things.

Also that area has always abounded in fogs and mist and while you may see where the sun landed on a certain auspicious day, sunny solstices may not be reliable, it may take you years to construct the gmomon - hard to do without some kind of calendar (and likely a project shaman too!) - I doubt this was any anywhere near as random as moderns like to think.

clew I think it would have been an atypical position for dewponds; they were/are more common on ridges/rolling dryland country.

Can GPR be run over Durrington without frying the inhabitants, or I wonder if buildings have been built to avoid these soft spots and potential locations could be teased out of the data that way?
posted by unearthed at 11:48 PM on June 22, 2020