Archaeologists Have Made An Incredible Discovery At Stonehenge

George Dvorsky

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Using powerful ground-penetrating radar, investigators working around Stonehenge have detected a trove of previously unknown burial mounds, chapels, shrines, pits — and most remarkable of all — a massive megalithic monument made up of more than 50 giant stones buried along a 1,082-foot-long c-shaped enclosure.

This news is unreal — and it's resetting virtually everything we thought we knew about Stonehenge. Just a week after finding out that Stonehenge was once a complete circle, archaeologists from Birmingham and Bradford universities, and from the Ludwig Boltzman Institute in Vienna, have shattered the image of Stonehenge as a desolate and lonely place

After four years of painstaking effort, and by using a magnetometer, a ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and a 3D laser scanner, archaeologists have shown that Stonehenge was once a sprawling complex that extended for miles.

And then there's the previously unknown "super henge," a monument located just two miles from Stonehenge. Scans suggest that each buried stone is about three meters (10 feet) long and 1.5 meters (5 feet) wide. The stones are positioned horizontally, not vertically, but it's conceivable that they originally stood upright like other standing stones. The archaeologists suspect they were brought to the site shortly before 2,500 BC. 

 As for the other henge-like Neolithic and Bronze Age religious shrines, they range between 10 and 30 meters ( 32 to 100 feet) in diameter. Scans also revealed around 20 large ritual pits, each up to five meters (16 feet) in diameter. More than a half dozen Bronze Age burial mounds were discovered, along with four Iron Age shrines or tombs, and a half dozen Bronze Age and Iron Age domestic or livestock enclosures.