Mike Parker-Pearson, dig director from the University of Sheffield. DB2761P10

IT'S a funny way to spend your days - on your hands and knees with your backside in the air and your head in a hole in the ground scraping away at the hard chalk surface hoping to find...what?

Shards of human bones, bits of broken pottery, a coin or two, some sharpened pieces of flint arrowhead - they might not seem much to you and I, but to archaeologists, they could represent pure gold.

For the past four weeks, it has been open house at the digs at Durrington Walls, Woodhenge and the Stonehenge Cursus as excavations continue on the Stonehenge Riverside Project, a ten year investigation which began in 2003 into the Neolithic sites and their links with Stonehenge itself.

The £500,000 project, which is funded largely by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Geographic Society, is led by teams from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Bristol, Bournemouth and University College London, along with Wessex Archaeology.

Alongside the professors and academics on site are dozens of students, who have volunteered for the experience of getting down and dirty at what has turned out to be a rich and fertile series of excavations.

Schoolchildren and members of the public - an estimated 4,500 all told - have been welcomed onto the sites with guided tours available and experts willing to explain what is going on.

Special open days have been organised with living history re-enactors in woolly tunics, leggings and animal hide booties giving visitors an insight into Neolithic living, and Time Team's Phil Harding has spent an afternoon flint-napping to small but enthusiastic crowds.

Celtic Chris, busy drilling a hole in a needle he had made from the shinbone of a roe deer, was hopeful that Phil Harding might provide him with a flint knife blade later.

Celtic Chris gives visitors an insight into Neolithic living on his carpet of animal skins.

"It was a time when you knew where your clothes and your tools came from," he says.

But although the archaeologists are happy enough to show people around, they are playing their cards close to their chests when it comes to revealing the secrets they have, quite literally, unearthed.

"They are going mental over there at the moment," one tells visitors, indicating the dig down by the river led by Sheffield archaeology professor Mike Parker Pearson.

He wasn't saying what they were digging up, he explains, "but look on the website in December - there will be stuff up there to blow your head off."

This is the fourth year of fieldwork at the site and findings in previous years have already got the archeaological world in a lather.

All three sites - Durrington Walls, Woodhenge and the Stonehenge Cursus - form part of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.

Durrington Walls is Britain's largest henge. Bigger even than Avebury, with a diameter of approximately 480 metres.

With a mile long ditch and bank marking its boundary, it represents a major piece of construction work for Neolithic man. Excavations in 1967 when the A345, which cuts across it, was being improved revealed a large number of deer antlers at the foot of the boundary ditch, thought to be used as picks in construction of the monument.

The National Trust's Lucy Evershed, who was conducting tours of the site during the open weekends, said: "It would have been really hard work.

"It was all made in one go so we are looking at teams of people working here.

"It could have involved 4000-5000 people."

The excavations also revealed the remains of two timber circles: a multi-ringed circle at the eastern entrance to the henge and a two-ringed circle inside the henge.

Professor Parker Pearson is convinced that there is a link between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge forming a religious complex used for funerary rituals.

The purpose of Durrington Walls and its timber circle, he believes, was to celebrate life while the stones at Stonehenge represented the world of the ancestors.

Little evidence of human remains have been found at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge.

"It's all guesswork but perhaps this was the land of the living and you follow the river down to Stonehenge to get to the land of the dead," suggests Lucy.

Both henges appear to be linked by ceremonial routes - The Avenue at Stonehenge and a 30m wide roadway of compacted chalk and flint chippings from the henge entrance at Durrington Walls - both leading to the river Avon. Both sites are aligned with the midwinter solstice - Stonehenge to the midwinter solstice sunset and Durrington Walls with the midwinter solstice sunrise More recent finds include evidence of dwellings dating back to 2600-2500BC - the same period that it is believed that Stonehenge was built, giving rise to the theory that these dwellings must have housed the builders of Stonehenge.

Last year, a total of eight houses were excavated, but geophysical surveys indicate that there could be as many as a hundred more, making it the largest Neolithic settlement found in Britain.

Certainly, this year's excavations will be trying to determine the size of the settlement and find out more about the people who lived there.

Excavations outside the east entrance to the henge have uncovered huge quantities of animal bones, pottery and traces of hearths, suggesting feasting, and examination of pig teeth found at the site suggest slaughter at nine months - again pointing to midwinter.

It all adds up to huge midwinter Neolithic knees-up.

"This is where they went to party - you could say it was the first free festival," Professor Parker Pearson told BBC News when the finds were first announced last year Excavations in the 1920s to the south of Durrington's near neighbour, Woodhenge, found Neolithic remains beneath the Bronze Age burial mounds, and the archaeologists this summer have been anxious to find out more about the building that was there.

They have also been looking for evidence of a pathway to link Woodhenge and Durrington Walls.

The Stonehenge Cursus is a long rectangular earthwork that extends for about 3km to the north of Stonehenge.

No-one has yet been able to identify its exact purpose - it was given the label cursus by early archaeologists who thought it might be for chariot-racing - or to date it precisely.

But Professor Parker Pearson is hopeful that there has been a breakthrough.

"We've been able to find some dating evidence for the Stonehenge Cursus," he said.

"It's the fourth attempt to investigate but the first time to find something that will enable it to be dated."

Visitors have also been fascinated by work around the Cuckoo Stone, a lone sarsen stone lying in a field in a direct line from the Stonehenge Cursus and Woodhenge.

Digging has successfully uncovered the hole that originally held the stone upright and archaeologists are hoping to find out whether it was once part of a group of stones and/or whether it marks a burial site.

The Project's Megan Price, from Oxford University, said of this year's dig: "It has been a real success so far and we have found a number of things we did not expect to find.

"There were three urns carrying ashes from cremations which we found around the Cuckoo Stone at Woodhenge and there were the complete skeletons of Roman burials, which were also at Woodhenge, and then there were the numerous smaller finds such as pottery and other bits and pieces at the other sites.

"The next stage is to take away everything we have gathered and analyse it.

"This is such fertile ground for archaeology - there is so much going on here.

"There is literally layer after layer, moving through the different ages, and with the removal of each layer of ground one unearths a wealth of information about the past.

"Digs of this size can tell us so much about the past."

9:38am Thursday 20th September 2007

Print   Email this   Comment