‘Prototype’ for Stonehenge’s solar alignment found
Excavations at Bulford have revealed the remains of a 5,000-year-old structure suggesting that the solstice was celebrated on Salisbury Plain centuries earlier than thought. CA reports.
Salisbury Plain
Stepping stones: Travelling on the trail of the Stonehenge bluestones
Professor Keith Ray completed his 222-mile journey from the Preseli Hills to Stonehenge on Sunday 21 April. Carly Hilts joined him for the final few miles of his adventure.
New Woodhenge dating aligns chronologically with Stonehenge
Radiocarbon dating at Woodhenge has revealed that it was built at almost exactly the same time as the circle at neighbouring Stonehenge. This exciting new data shows that Stonehenge was not a one-off in its original landscape. Woodhenge lies just…
Excavating around Salisbury Plain
Last month I began a tour around the final county of the UK that I had yet to visit in these pages: Wiltshire. I began in the north and headed south as far as the Vale of Pewsey. This month I will continue into what is popularly seen as the most fertile of all archaeological hunting grounds: the county’s central belt around Salisbury Plain
Resurrecting Imber: Exploring relics of a requisitioned village
When the Salisbury Plain village of Imber was taken over by the War Department in 1943, its inhabitants all departed, never to return. What has recent archaeological work revealed about the life and death of a long-lived Wiltshire community? Richard Osgood reports.
In View
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history titles.
The world of Stonehenge: placing a famous monument in context
A new exhibition at the British Museum explores the landscape that Stonehenge emerged from, and the social, cultural, and technological transformations it witnessed. Neil Wilkin and Jennifer Wexler told CA more.
This week: Stonehenge
As the UK's most famous ancient monument, it is a sight familiar to millions around the world. But despite its popularity both as a tourist attraction and as an icon of Britishness, there is a sense in which Stonehenge has always felt strangely isolated.
Experimental ‘Bronze Age roundhouse’ unveiled
The new roundhouse was built almost entirely by 33 volunteers from Operation Nightingale, a charity assisting the recovery of wounded and traumatised military personnel and veterans through archaeology.
Digging Dunragit’s prehistoric past
If these post-holes form part of this larger complex, it would mean the entire site extends for 2.5km across the landscape, making in one of the most significant prehistoric ceremonial clusters in Britain, perhaps on a par with those at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney, Kilmartin Glen in Argyll, and even on Salisbury Plain.
Secondhand Stonehenge? Welsh origins of a Wiltshire monument
It has long been understood that the Stonehenge ‘bluestones’ – a catch-all term used to describe any of the monument’s uprights that are not thought to have been sourced locally – represent a variety of different types of rock, but their origins have been a subject for heated debate. Now archaeological and geological research have combined to pin down some of their sources, and to shed new light on how – and why – the stones were brought to Salisbury Plain. Mike Parker Pearson explains.