‘Before Stonehenge, there was Woodhenge and Strawhenge’: High-tech 3D digital map reveals vast ritual monuments complex

Eddie Izzard, it seems, was right about the Druids. Before Stonehenge, there were indeed other “henges” on Salisbury Plain.

Thanks to a new, state-of-the-art 3D digital map, scientists have revealed that Stonehenge was surrounded by a sprawling landscape of chapels, burial mounds, massive pits and ritual shrines. Maybe not “Woodhenge” or “Strawhenge,” as comedian Eddie Izzard joked in his “Dressed to Kill” standup routine in his debunking of conventional views of history, but not far off.

The vast hidden complex of archaeological monuments has been uncovered around Stonehenge using high-tech methods of scanning below the Earth's surface.

The findings show that the iconic monument did not stand alone, but was accompanied by 17 neighboring wooden or stone shrines as well as dozens of burial mounds dating back 6,000 years.

The findings show that Stonehenge was the center of a complex arrangement of ritualistic monuments that had expanded over time and massive prehistoric pits forming astronomical alignments.

Experts have been scanning an area of 12 square kilometers for four years, the largest geophysical survey ever undertaken, to see what mysteries can be unveiled. They used state-of-the-art instruments including magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar arrays, electromagnetic sensors and lasers.

Project leader Professor Vincent Gaffney, from the University of Birmingham, said the area around Stonehenge is unknown land which has never been explored.

“Despite Stonehenge being the most iconic of all prehistoric monuments and occupying one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the world, much of this landscape in effect remains terra incognita,” said Gaffney.

"New monuments have been revealed, as well as new types of monument that have previously never been seen by archaeologists,” he added.

The experts created a three-dimensional digital map of the findings. "This is going to change how we view Stonehenge. It is not yet another find from Stonehenge, it's a fundamental step forward in the way we understand it,” Gaffney said.

The results from the collaboration between Birmingham University and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Austria were disclosed at the British Science Festival.

The survey shows a thriving ritual landscape around Stonehenge to which people would have travelled for hundreds of miles for great festivals. Individual tribes or families were also able to erect their own smaller monuments alongside the great central megaliths of Stonehenge, experts say.

Gaffney added, "You've got Stonehenge which is clearly a very large ritual structure, which is attracting people from large parts of the country. But around it people are creating their own shrines and temples. We can see the whole landscape is being used in very complex ways."

Durrington Walls, dubbed “Superhenge,” is the largest ritual monument of its type in the world with a circumference of 1.5km. The new survey shows that this was originally flanked with a row of 60 massive huge posts or stones, up to three meters high.

Among the many burial mounds is a barrow 33 meters long, within which signs of a massive timber building were found. Evidence suggests this was the site of complex rituals involving the dead, including the removal of flesh and limbs.