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Before Stonehenge: village of wild parties
Stonehenge is merely one part of a much wider sacred landscape represented today by the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The evidence is mounting that Stonehenge itself represented a domain of the ancestors, and, as such, a place in which the final rites were performed in elaborate ceremonies marking the passage of the recently deceased from life to death.
The Neolithic Christmas seems to have been a matter of wild parties, with feasts of barbecued pig, half-eaten joints tossed to the floor, and much deliberate smashing of crockery – and noone bothering to clear up the mess. That is the picture that emerged when, in September last year, a team of archaeologists led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson uncovered the remains of the largest Neolithic village ever discovered in Britain. They found it outside Durrington Walls, part of the great ritual complex around Stonehenge in Wiltshire. ‘English Heritage’s magnetometry survey had detected dozens of hearths – the whole valley appears full of houses,’ said Parker Pearson. ‘We have excavat
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