Durrington Walls - Excavations and Theories

Excavations and Theories

Richard Colt Hoare noted Durrington Walls in 1810, and observed that centuries of agriculture had left “its form much mutilated”. Geoffrey Wainwright excavated the route of the new A345 in 1966. He discovered the southern timber circle as well as a smaller one slightly north of it. Since 2003 the Stonehenge Riverside Project, led by Mike Parker Pearson, has carried out annual excavations at Durrington Walls. It identified the Neolithic village and avenue to the river.

Radiocarbon dates of approximately 2600 BC are roughly contemporary with the earliest stone phase at Stonehenge. It is likely that the builders of the stone monument lived here. Mike Parker Pearson believes that Durrington Walls was a complementary structure to Stonehenge, as evidenced by the similar solstice alignments. He suggests that the timber circle at Durrington Walls represented life and a land of the living, whilst Stonehenge and the down around it, encircled by burial mounds, represented a land of the dead. The two were connected by the River Avon and their respective avenues. A ceremonial procession route from one to the other represented the transition from life to death.

Geoff Wainwright and Timothy Darvill have contested Parker Pearson’s theories, however; they suggest that Stonehenge was a monument to healing and that connections between the two monuments were unlikely.