THERE’S A LOT MORE TO LEARN NEAR STONEHENGE.

THERE’S A LOT MORE TO LEARN NEAR STONEHENGE. I posted here about “how excited [Annalisa] was by the possibilities she imagined in the landscape and barrows near Stonehenge.” She was sure that there was more to be found by archaeologists. Here is an article by Maev Kennedy in the Guardian about the Marlborough mound, a large mound at Marlborough college, a public school in Wiltshire. Kennedy says that generations of students would have climbed it. The Marlborough mound is near Avebury, which is near Stonehenge. The mound had been thought to date back to Norman times, to 50 years or so after 1066. Now, samples of charcoal from the core of the hill show that the mound dates back 3500 years earlier—to 2400 B.C. (For comparison, the wikipedia entry on Stonehenge says that the stone monument there is generally thought to date from 2500 B.C., although some believe that the first stones were not erected until 2400 to 2200 B.C.)

While reading about this find, I came across Robin Hood’s Ball, “a Neolithic causewayed enclosure located on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. It is approximately 5 miles from the town of Amesbury, and 2.5 miles from Stonehenge.” The wikipedia article says that: “Robin Hood’s Ball has never been comprehensively excavated.” So Annalisa was right. There is still a lot to be discovered right near Stonehenge.