LONDON — They were rich, tightly organized and gods-fearing farmers at the dawn of history who threw huge religious monuments skyward centuries before the ancient Egyptians raised the Great Pyramids.
Now a major discovery is shedding new light on the convictions and the vision of these early Britons, ancestors of the stone-circle builders who left their most lasting mark at world-famous Stonehenge.
Without setting eyes on it, scholars announced this month that they have discovered the remains of a huge circular timber temple below the hooves of farmer Richard Young's sheep in a 37-acre pasture near the village of Stanton Drew, about 80 miles north of Stonehenge.
"I think it is certainly among the top 20 archeological finds this century," said Geoffrey Wainwright, chief archeologist for English Heritage, Britain's leading conservationist of historic buildings.
The nine-ring wooden temple at Stanton Drew, marked by underground remains of the pits into which 5-ton, 30-foot oak trunks were carefully spaced, is about 5,000 years old.
The vast and elaborate Neolithic structure was 100 yards in diameter and was surrounded by an enormous ditch 15 to 20 feet deep with a large gap facing the northeast. Such structures are named henges after the one at Stonehenge, said Andrew David, an English Heritage specialist who surveyed the site.
Neolithic timber palaces are unique to Britain. The Stanton Drew find is almost twice the diameter of Stonehenge, Wainwright says, and far bigger than any of the other seven previously discovered circular wooden henges.
Neil Linford, an archeological geophysicist who worked on the discovery team, said the temple was found in September thanks to a newly developed and highly sensitive magnetometer, which measures the concentration of iron and oxides underground. In effect, the machine showed the regular pattern of the postholes through residues of rock and decayed wood, Linford said.
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"Really good geophysical archeology, X-raying the ground before or without digging, is an exciting new development. It is a bit like the dawn of aerial photography in the '20s--that's how the timber temple we call Woodhenge was discovered around 1931," said Andrew Fleming, a prehistorian at Lampeter University in Wales.
The postholes were about 3 feet deep, 3 feet in diameter and 3 feet apart. Neolithic man would have slid a tree trunk into each hole and propped it upright, but the overall structure was too big to have been roofed, Wainwright says.
