Prior Building the Stonehenge Structures, Hunter-gatherers Used Open Landscapes

Stonehenge is maybe the most well-known ancient monument in the world.

The initial monument was an early henge monument created around 5,000 years ago, and the distinctive stone circle was established in the late Neolithic period around 2500 BC.

Many burial mounds were created nearby during the early Bronze Age.

The hunter-gatherers in Stonehenge

(Photo : DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images)

According to a study conducted on April 27, 2022, in the accessible journal PLOS ONE by Samuel Hudson of the University of Southampton, U.K, and colleagues, hunter-gatherers made advantage of open forest settings millennia before Stonehenge structures were created, as per ScienceDaily.

Considerable study has been conducted on the land around Stonehenge's Bronze Age and Neolithic past, but little is known about previous ages in this area.

This raises issues regarding how ancient humans and wildlife used the area prior to the construction of the notable archaeological sites.

Hudson and colleagues recreate environmental conditions at Blick Mead, a pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer settlement on the outskirts of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, in this research.

The scientists use pollen, spores, sedimentary DNA, and animal remains to define the site's pre-Neolithic ecology, inferring partially open forest conditions that would have benefited big grazing herbivores such as aurochs as well as hunter-gatherer populations.

The research also calculates the dates of human involvement at Blick Mead.

The findings show that hunter-gatherers frequented this location for 4,000 years, until the period of the region's first known farmers and monument-builders, who would have profited from the space given by open habitats.

These findings suggest that the first farmers and monument constructors in the Stonehenge area met open ecosystems that had previously been maintained and utilized by huge grazers and earlier human populations.

History of Stonehenge

The oldest constructions documented in the region are four or five holes, three of which appear to have contained huge pine 'totem-pole-like' poles constructed between 8500 and 7000 BC during the Mesolithic period. It is unknown how these posts link to the later Stonehenge structure.

At a time when much of southern England was densely forested, the chalk downland around Stonehenge may have been an uncommonly open terrain.

This might explain why it became the location of an early Neolithic monumental building.

It is believed that structures such as the Heel Stone as well as the low hill known as north Barrow were early elements of Stonehenge; nonetheless, the first known important event was the building of a circular ditch with an inlet and outlet bank, which occurred about 3000 BC.

This encircled a 100-meter-diameter space and had two entrances.

It was a forerunner of the henge monument, as per English Heritage.

There were likely some timber constructions within the bank and ditch, and 56 pits known as the Aubrey Holes were built slightly within the bank.

There has been much disagreement regarding what stood in these holes: for long years, the assumption was that they housed upright timber pillars, but recently, the possibility that some of them may have held stones has resurfaced.

Stonehenge's stone settings were erected during a moment of considerable change in prehistory, just as new forms of 'Beaker' pottery and knowledge of metallurgy arrived from the Continent, together with a shift to the burial of humans with grave goods.

Well-furnished Beaker burials, such as that of the Amesbury Archer, have been discovered nearby from around 2400 BC.