{"id":65293,"date":"2026-06-17T23:46:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T23:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/65293\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T23:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T23:46:15","slug":"stonehenge-discovery-rewrites-history-of-prehistoric-religion-in-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/65293\/","title":{"rendered":"Stonehenge discovery rewrites history of prehistoric religion in Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your support helps us to tell the story<\/p>\n

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.<\/p>\n

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.<\/p>\n

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.<\/p>\n

Your support makes all the difference.Read more<\/p>\n

Just three miles from Stonehenge<\/a>, archaeologists have made a remarkable discovery which sheds new light on the history of prehistoric religion<\/a>. <\/p>\n

For decades, it has been known that solar alignments formed a crucial part of the design of Stonehenge \u2013 but now, excavations near the world-famous monument<\/a> have revealed that sun worship was a significant part of the Stonehenge area’s religious practice at least 450 years before the main phase of Stonehenge was constructed. <\/p>\n

The discovery at Bulford in Wiltshire shows that by 3000 BC, prehistoric Britons were celebrating the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.<\/p>\n

Now archaeologists are beginning to wonder whether similar rituals and celebrations may have been going on at the site of Stonehenge centuries before the famous stones were erected.<\/p>\n

At Bulford, archaeologists, directed by a leading expert on the Neolithic era, Phil Harding of Wessex Archaeology, have unearthed a complex religious site consisting of 50 ritual pits \u2013 and what were almost certainly two timber monuments, exactly 120 metres apart, which were deliberately aligned with the summer and winter solstices.<\/p>\n

The pits (ritually filled with feasting debris) and the timber monuments (probably 3.5-metre tall 50-centimetre diameter potentially highly decorated wooden posts) were dug and erected around 5000 years ago \u2013 and the posts prefigure what was to be constructed in stone 450 years later at Stonehenge itself (when the key stones at that famous monument were specifically positioned to mark the summer and winter solstitial alignments).<\/p>\n

\"ArchaeologistArchaeologist Phil Harding at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain (PA)<\/p>\n

What’s more, Stonehenge\u2019s circular earthen bank, built long before the famous still-surviving stone monument, but at the same time as the newly-discovered Bulford site, is roughly 115 metres in diameter \u2013 so it is now conceivable that early Stonehenge may have had similar solstice-marking\u2019 totem poles\u2019 externally on opposite sides of its still extant earthwork circle (Stonehenge\u2019s original \u2018henge\u2019).<\/p>\n

Apart from Stonehenge and Bulford, the only other precisely solar aligned monuments (of identical or older vintage) known in Europe are at a giant tomb in Ireland and in at least two temples in Malta.<\/p>\n

Now scientists are likely to start redoubling efforts to search for such alignments at other sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe solstitial alignment discovered at Bulford is likely to help encourage archeoastronomers to investigate whether there are similar solar alignments in even older monuments in Britain, Ireland, western France and elsewhere,\u201d said archeoastronomer Dr Fabio Silva of Bournemouth University. <\/p>\n

\"NeolithicNeolithic woodlands pottery Found in Bulford, Wiltshire (PA)<\/p>\n

Interest in heavenly objects \u2013 stars, planets, the moon and the sun \u2013 were of immense importance to early civilisations and cultures. Yet, counterintuitively (within at least Europe and the Middle East), very early respect for the sun seems to have been a mainly Western European phenomenon, with early tombs often very roughly oriented towards the east, ie., towards the rising sun. Early sunrise-oriented tombs in Britain for instance date back to roughly 3700 BC.<\/p>\n

While in the Middle East, where civilisation originated, huge respect for the sun and sun worship itself did not happen, on the whole, until slightly later \u2013 indeed, in ancient Egypt, not until around 2700 BC. But, significantly, star worship (rather than sun-worship) appears to have been equally important in both early prehistoric Western Europe and the Middle East. <\/p>\n

The Bulford research is still in progress and will help archaeologists to understand the importance of cosmology in prehistoric religions. <\/p>\n

\"AA disc-shaped flint knife found at Bulford by Phil Harding of Wessex Archaeology (PA)<\/p>\n

Some of the ritual pits at the newly discovered site may, in some way, be connected to the solar alignment celebrations. It’s likely that those events featured communal feasting – and the pits certainly show evidence of that. Each of them is filled with feasting debris, broken pottery, goat\/sheep and pig bones and flint artefacts. <\/p>\n

But a cluster of them have more unusual contents \u2013 bones from giant wild cattle (aurochs) and red and roe deer, and in one specific pit, a very rare high status roughly circular flint knife (possibly symbolising the Sun) which had been placed in a deliberately vertical position, its now no-longer-extant wooden handle buried in the ground and its circular blade pointing upwards.<\/p>\n

It is conceivable that the area around this pit was used by key people (potentially priests or others) to witness the crucial solstitial alignments.<\/p>\n

The apparently extremely limited distribution of such neolithic era precise solar alignments in the world is as yet an unsolved mystery. As far as is known, they only occur in the Stonehenge area, a very major monument in Ireland (a huge tomb at Newgrange), in at least two very important temples on the small Mediterranean island of Malta and in a tiny number of locations elsewhere in the world. <\/p>\n

\"AnAn illustration issued by Wessex Archaeology of a reconstruction of summer solstice celebrations as they might have appeared at Bulford 5,000 years ago (PA)<\/p>\n

In virtually all the areas they occur, they tend to be associated with extremely high status prehistoric sites and locales. That suggests that any highly developed prehistoric \u2013 and often probably un-connected \u2013 solar cults may well have been elite-associated and relatively uncommon (though high profile), rather than common and widely distributed. <\/p>\n

The ongoing Bulford research is likely to shed further light on the nature of at least the Stonehenge area’s solar alignment tradition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bulford and other discoveries reveal that precise prehistoric solar alignments were very important in the Stonehenge area. Bulford itself pushes that phenomenon in that ritual landscape back by several hundred years,\u201d said archaeologist Dr Amanda Chadburn, co-author of Stonehenge \u2013 Sighting the Sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,3245,27582],"class_list":["post-65293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-heritage","tag-stonehenge"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116768118242048881","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}