Free Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson Page A

it predates Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. Perhaps the remote northern islands spawned a religious and cultural reformation that eventually spread across the whole of Britain. Similar square house plans of this period are known from Wales and eastern England. This was probably the standard form of housing across Britain, replacing the long rectangular houses of the previous millennium and itself to be replaced in the Bronze Age by round houses.
    Just northeast of the large house at Durrington was a small house, also rectangular, with a proportionately small fireplace. The door of this little house was probably also south-facing, and the scatter of small chalk lumps around it showed that it had cob walls like the other, but there were no holes for stakes to support the walls. At three meters by two meters this was a tiny building, and the lack of debris on its floor shows that it was a shed or store. This pair of one big and one little house was separated from all the others by a short length of fence, surviving as acurving line of postholes. It is evident that this was a main house with an ancillary outbuilding, set within their own compound. Turning back to the plan of Skara Brae, we saw that House 7 similarly had its own outbuilding, and that this pair of structures was separated from the other houses by a long passageway. Comparing the plans of the small ancillary structures, we could see that the Scottish outbuilding was virtually identical to the one we were digging in Wiltshire.
    We found another three houses down the slope from these two. In all of these we identified beam slots for beds set around the central fireplace but no elaborate fittings like those found in the large house. The houses’ doorways were difficult to spot but two faced west and the third to the south. This group of buildings provides a glimpse into a society that was not equal in terms of how people lived. The large house was near the top of the hierarchy (literally, too, by being at the top of the slope) and it had all the features of a family dwelling. With floor areas of almost 25–30 square meters, these houses were certainly big enough to each accommodate a nuclear family of parents and children. Perhaps the head family lived in the top house and their relatives or dependants lived in the smaller houses lower down the slope. The piles of broken cooking pots in the rubbish heaps outside these smaller houses form a stark contrast with the almost shard-free surface of the large house and its compound; perhaps the people in the small houses did the cooking for the residents of the large house. How many more households formed this segment of the community is difficult to tell, but the Skara Brae village seems to have consisted of nine or ten houses as a social unit.
    While part of the team concentrated on excavating the delicate house floors, Julian opened two trenches inside the western half of the henge itself. Back in 1996 a team of geophysicists had discovered a group of five ditched enclosures in this part of Durrington Walls. These enclosures formed an arc, running north to south, with the largest—about 40 meters in diameter—in the center. This largest enclosure was circular and its entrance (facing east down the slope) was visible on the geophysics plot. This enclosure had actually first been located many years before, in the 1920s, from aerial photographs of cropmarks. Were these various features going to be Neolithic, or were they Iron Age like the ditch we had dug in 2004? Positioned on the slopes above the SouthernCircle, whatever they were, they would have had fine views of the valley leading down to the river. We selected the largest enclosure and its southern neighbor for investigation. At the center of each, the magnetometer showed a small hot spot—would this be a prehistoric burial?

A plan of the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney. The Durrington Walls houses are very similar in plan and internal organization but