Free Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson Page B

were built in wood rather than stone. A photograph of House 7 is shown in Chapter 4.

    The mechanical excavator removed the topsoil, revealing pits cut into the lower part of the colluvium within the large enclosure. As the students excavated these, we could see that they were grain-storage pits containing Iron Age pottery—not the period of prehistory we were looking for, but not a surprising find either, as much of the interior of Durrington Walls was re-used by Iron Age farmers two thousand years after it was built.
    Another 30 centimeters deeper, we reached bare chalk. Here the hot spots turned out to be fireplaces in the centers of square houses just like those we had found down the valley beside the avenue. There was a house within each enclosure but their preservation was not good. Here in the interior of the henge, the top of the Neolithic ground surface hadbeen scoured away before the Iron Age and the plaster of the house floors had been eroded—except directly under the hearth, where the heat from the fire had made it as hard as rock. Each house was surrounded by a circular row of holes for fence posts. The house to the south had then also been encircled by a ditch, its entrance to the west, with the chalk deposited outside the ditch. This ditch and bank had turned the house into a mini-henge after its original fence had gone out of use.
    The sequence in the large enclosure was slightly different. This house and its surrounding fence were positioned at the center of a large circular enclosure whose bank had first been positioned inside the ditch, just like at Stonehenge, but had later been moved to outside the ditch when the ditch was dug out again. Although it had initially had a defensive-looking boundary feature (ditch then bank), this enclosure too had been turned into an inward-looking henge (bank then ditch). There were other unusual features within this large enclosure.
    First, the entire ground surface within the enclosure had been leveled. We had seen this kind of landscaping elsewhere, associated with the construction of each of the houses on the slope above the avenue and for the Southern Circle itself. Outside the circular fence a pit had been filled with the butchered remains of a whole pig, the remnants of a small feast. Halfway between an opening in the fenceline and the entrance to the enclosure, two huge postholes lay close together. They had held posts almost a meter in diameter. What was odd was that the postholes’ bases were at different depths. Julian wondered if this had been a way of making sure that the tops of the posts were at the same height. Perhaps these posts had supported a wooden lintel on their tops to make a trilithon-shape in wood. To their south, and right against the edge of the excavation trench, Julian found another similarly massive posthole. Was this part of another “tridendron,” one of two sets of massive posts flanking the approach to the central house?
    Whoever lived here was clearly very important indeed. Although the house’s floor area was no bigger than that of the large house further down the valley, it had footings for 1.8-meter-wide posts arranged in a square around its central hearth. These must have given this particular house a far more monumental appearance than the others; perhapsthese hefty posts supported a high roof. All the floor deposits had been washed away long ago, so there were few clues to what had happened inside the house. The fills of all the holes for the wall stakes and fence posts were clean as a whistle, completely unlike the black, organic fills in the corresponding features around the houses lower down the valley. Even the fill of the pit with the dismembered pig was much cleaner than equivalent pits associated with those houses. This was a very clean place despite the central hearth having been in long-term use. Whoever kept the fire burning also made sure that very little domestic rubbish was left lying about.
    Julian favors this