Stonehenge is one of Europe’s best-known prehistoric monuments. Its distinctive silhouette is immediately recognisable to people both within these shores and further afield, and every year over 1.5 million visitors flock to see the celebrated stones, some travelling considerable distances to do so. It has long been suspected that Stonehenge’s fame also extended far beyond the Salisbury Plain area when the monument was relatively new – some of the Neolithic pottery recovered from the site is of a type that was probably originally developed in Orkney – but now new research has revealed quite how wide-ranging its prehistoric renown may have been.
Drawing on dietary evidence from a settlement two miles from Stonehenge, the findings form part of a new exhibition at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre. Feast! Food at Stonehenge is the fourth exhibition to appear in the building’s purpose-built display area, and the first of these to feature new analysis undertaken since the centre opened in 2013 (see CA 288). The story of these discoveries begins a decade earlier, however, with the Stonehenge Riverside Project’s excavations in 2003.
This project focused on Durrington Walls, Britain’s largest henge enclosure, which had originally been excavated by Geoff Wainwright in 1967 (CA 5). These early investigations, undertaken ahead of the rerouting of the A345, revealed the remains of two enigmatic monuments made from concentric rings of timber posts, and the modern team had set out to reassess the site and its surrounding landscape. What they discovered was decidedly more domestic in nature than the ceremonial circles, though: the remains of a late Neolithic settlement (CA 208).
A century of Tutankhamun