Oldest example of architecture in Britain found near Stonehenge.

A 500 acre prehistoric ceremonial complex came to light in Damerham, South England in June 2009, when members of the English Heritage were doing a routine air survey and saw mysterious crop circle-like formations that were caused by buried structures interfering with plant growth.

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According to Helen Wickstead of Kingston University and leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project, the 6,000 year old wooden temples and two massive tombs at the site are possibly the first known examples of architecture to be found anywhere in Britain.

Archaeologists are amazed that the find remained hidden for so long, considering it is only around 15 miles away from Stonehenge, and the extensive work that has been done in the region previously.  According to Wickstead;

“To find any new monuments of this date still visible as humps on the ground is unusual but to find two is fantastic - we were flabbergasted.  If we can excavate, we will be able to say a lot more about Neolithic people in that area and find out things like who was buried there, what kinds of lives they led, and what the environment was like 6,000 years ago.  It is rare to find sites of this kind and the tombs are likely to be of national importance”.

Helen Wickstead.  Source

The tombs, also known as ‘long barrows’, are under two mounds, the largest of which is around 70 meters long.  According to Wickstead, these type of burial mounds are a rare find, the last of this kind to be found and excavated in Britain was in the 1950s.  Although the tombs have yet to be excavated, archaeologists expect to find that they are built into chalk bed rock and reinforced with wood.

People in the region at the time would usually leave their dead outside to be eaten by birds and animals.  Some bones of people deemed to be important enough were sometimes buried in these types of mounds along with the bones of their ancestors, however not all long barrows contain bones, some being more like cenotaphs today.

Two large round ditch-encircled structures around 57 meters wide were also found and evidence of postholes found through nonintrusive electromagnetic surveys suggest rings of upright timber, further evidence of a ceremonial significance at the site.

Archaeologists are baffled by another find at the site, a U shaped enclosure with postholes that date to the Bronze Age, around 2000 – 700 BC in Britain.  A total of twenty-six burial mounds also dating from some time in the Bronze Age are scattered across the site, which is also littered with stone flint tools and samples of the earliest type of pottery known in Britain.  Evidence suggests by the time the Romans arrived in the first century AD, the area already had cultivated fields.

This site may serve to show that ceremonial activity in the late Stone Age and into the Bronze Age was not always confined to big religious centres like Stonehenge but was a part of life for people in less politically important areas also.