Post by UKarchaeology on Apr 1, 2016 16:22:52 GMT
Another ‘Stone Henge’ even bigger than the world famous heritage site and dating back nearly 5,500 years has been discovered by archaeologists.
First hint of the Neolithic site was unearthed three years ago during construction for Crossrail in East London, it emerged this week.
Large stone monoliths were detected using latest geophysics radar that can penetrate the ground and soil-testing in a survey in 2013 around Victoria Park, between Old Ford and Wells Street Common.
The survey was for a possible tunnel linking Crossrail with the Overground’s North London Line at Hackney Wick, following an old abandoned Victorian railway branch to Old Ford and the Millwall Docks. The tunnel, in the event, has never gone ahead.
The findings were kept under wraps for fear of souvenir hunters digging up Vicky Park looking for prehistoric artefacts.
But now the archaeologists from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute have announced what could be one of the biggest ancient Neolithic sacred sites in the world—‘Wells Henge’, similar to Stonehenge and the Avebury Circle both in Wiltshire, but far grander, measuring at least half-a-mile across.
“This has been under our noses for many centuries,” Prof Vince Gafney said. “We’re looking at one of the largest stone monuments in Europe and don’t think there’s anything like this anywhere in the world. This is completely new and the scale is extraordinary.”
The 20ft and 30ft monolithic stones are thought to have been laid out at least 5,500 years ago, experts believe, and have been buried under what is now Vicky Park for the last 3,000 years. The top of the stones are just 6ft below the grassy surface.
But the first hint of something under the ground came more than 170 years ago, researchers at the Metropolitan Archives have found, when Victoria Park was being laid out in the early 1840s as a new open space for East London. The top of one obelisk was accidentally unearthed with a pickaxe by the Victorian workers—but astonishingly dismissed as old pre-Reformation ruins of a medieval convent and hurriedly covered over again.
Archive records at the time put it down to rubble dumped out on the Hackney Marshes when St Katharine’s Docks were being built next to the Tower of London in 1825, on the site of St Katharine’s Monastery.
Now experts are convinced that what was dismissed as medieval rubble has, instead, turned out to be ‘Wells Henge’, one of the most important Neolithic finds anywhere in the world.
Full story: www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/archaeologists_unearth_huge_neolithic_wells_henge_1_4470991