Stonehenge — the Neolithic landmark on the English countryside that served as a sacred site, an observatory, an astrological calendar, a burial ground, and more — continues to reveal secrets some 5,000 years after its construction.
ScienceDaily.com reports that British archaeologists with the Stonehenge Riverside Project have found evidence that another stone circle stood less than two miles away on the banks of the Avon River.
Today, all that is left of that second circle are nine depressions in the ground, but those plus other archaeological evidence (Stone Age tools, evidence of fires) lead scientists to believe that 25 standing stones once formed a circle more than 30 feet across on the site, surrounded by a henge, or a circular ditch with an external bank. They’re calling it “Blue Stonehenge” because they believe the standing stones were bluestones mined from the Preseli Mountains in Wales, more than 150 miles away.
They also suspect that around 2500 BCE, Blue Stonehenge was dismantled and its stones incorporated into Stonehenge proper when it was rebuilt. Still, according to the article, Blue Stonehenge should be considered part of the overall Stonehenge complex and not a separate construct, since it stood at the end of the Avenue, a ceremonial way that led from Stonehenge to the Avon.
It all fits in with what the Stonehenge Project’s members believe was a Neolithic community along the Avon, which included a village they discovered in 2005 and call Durrington Walls. That village, the scientists speculate, represented a “domain of the living” that was linked with a “domain of the dead” through the newly discovered circle and Stonehenge.