Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, two miles (3 km) west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around 13 feet (4.0 m) high, seven feet (2.1 m) wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connecting horizontal lintel stones. Inside is a ring of smaller bluestones. Inside these are free-standing trilithons, two bulkier vertical sarsens joined by one lintel. The whole monument, now ruinous, is aligned towards the sunrise on the summer solstice. The stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred tumuli.
Amesbury is a town and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. It is known for the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge which is within the parish. The town is claimed to be the oldest occupied settlement in Great Britain, having been first settled around 8820 BC. The parish includes the hamlets of Ratfyn and West Amesbury, and part of Boscombe Down military airfield.
The Amesbury Archer is an early Bronze Age man whose grave was discovered during excavations at the site of a new housing development in Amesbury near Stonehenge. The grave was uncovered in May 2002. The man was middle aged when he died, estimated between 35-45, and is believed to date from about 2300 BC. He is nicknamed "the Archer" because of the many arrowheads buried with him. The grave contained more artefacts than any other early British Bronze Age burial, including the earliest known gold objects ever found in England. It was the first evidence of a very high status and wealth expressed in a burial from that time. Previously Bronze Age society had been assumed not to have been particularly hierarchical.
The prehistory of North Africa spans the period of earliest human presence in the region to gradual onset of historicity in the Maghreb (Berber:Tamazgha) during classical antiquity. Early anatomically modern humans are known to have been present at Jebel Irhoud, in what is now Morocco, approximately 300,000 years ago. The Nile Valley region, via ancient Egypt, contributed to the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age periods of the Old World, along with the ancient Near East.
The title of oldest town in Britain is claimed by a number of settlements in Great Britain.
Durrington Walls is the site of a large Neolithic settlement and later henge enclosure located in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site in England. It lies 2 miles (3.2 km) north-east of Stonehenge in the parish of Durrington, just north of Amesbury in Wiltshire. The henge is the second-largest Late Neolithic palisaded enclosure known in the United Kingdom, after Hindwell in Wales.
The Boscombe Bowmen is the name given by archaeologists to a group of early Bronze Age people found in a shared burial at Boscombe Down in Amesbury near Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England.
Records of archaeological excavations at the Stonehenge site date back to the early 17th century.
Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) in Wiltshire, England. The WHS covers two large areas of land separated by about 15 miles (24 km), rather than a specific monument or building. The sites were inscribed as co-listings in 1986. Some large and well known monuments within the WHS are listed below, but the area also has an exceptionally high density of small-scale archaeological sites, particularly from the prehistoric period. More than 700 individual archaeological features have been identified. There are 160 separate Scheduled Monuments, covering 415 items or features.
Stonehenge in its landscape: Twentieth century excavations by Rosamund M. J. Cleal, Karen E. Walker and Rebecca Montague is an archaeological report on Stonehenge published in 1995. It presented the results of a two-year intensive study of all the known records of the various excavations at Stonehenge in the twentieth century, including a rephasing of the development of the monument.
Vespasian's Camp is an Iron Age hillfort just west of the town of Amesbury, Wiltshire, England. The hillfort is less than 3 kilometres (2 mi) from the Neolithic and Bronze Age site of Stonehenge, and was built on a hill next to the Stonehenge Avenue; it has the River Avon on its southern side and the A303 road on its northern edge. The site is a scheduled monument and lies within the boundaries of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.
Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the use of the first stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5000 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing spreading to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at very different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
The Stonehenge Cursus is a large Neolithic cursus monument on Salisbury plain, near to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. It is roughly 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) long and between 100 metres (330 ft) and 150 metres (490 ft) wide. Excavations in 2007 dated the construction of the earthwork to between 3630 and 3375 BCE, several hundred years before the earliest phase of Stonehenge in 3000 BC. The cursus, along with adjacent barrows and the nearby 'Lesser Cursus' are part of the National Trust's Stonehenge Landscape property, and is within the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site.
The Sannai-Maruyama Site is an archaeological site and museum located in the Maruyama and Yasuta neighborhoods to the southwest of central Aomori in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan, containing the ruins of a very large Jōmon period settlement. The ruins of a 40-hectare settlement were discovered in 1992, when Aomori Prefecture started surveying the area for a planned baseball stadium. Archaeologists have used this site to further their understanding of the transition to sedentism and the life of the Jōmon people. Excavation has led to the discovery of storage pits, above ground storage and long houses. These findings demonstrate a change in the structure of the community, architecture, and organizational behaviors of these people. Because of the extensive information and importance, this site was designated as a Special National Historical Site of Japan in 2000., and a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Jōmon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan collection in 2021. Today the public can visit the site, its various reconstructions of Jōmon structures, and a museum that displays and houses artifacts collected on the site, which have collectively been designated an Important Cultural Property
Bluestonehenge or Bluehenge is a prehistoric henge and stone circle monument that was discovered by the Stonehenge Riverside Project about 1 mile (1.6 km) south-east of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. All that remains of the site is the ditch of the henge and a series of stone settings, none of which is visible above ground.
Evidence of human activity during the Mesolithic period in Irish history has been found in excavations at the Mount Sandel Mesolithic site in the north of the island, cremations on the banks of the River Shannon in the west, campsites at Lough Boora in the midlands, and middens and other sites elsewhere in the country.
Hildenbrandia is a genus of thalloid red alga comprising about 26 species. The slow-growing, non-mineralized thalli take a crustose form. Hildenbrandia reproduces by means of conceptacles and produces tetraspores.
The Iron Gates Mesolithic is a Mesolithic archaeological culture, dating to between 13,000 and 6,000 years cal BCE, in the Iron Gates region of the Danube River, in modern Romania and Serbia.
Falkner's Circle was a stone circle near the village of Avebury in the south-western English county of Wiltshire. Built from twelve sarsen megaliths, it measured about 37 metres (121 ft) in diameter, although only one of these stones remains standing. The ring was part of a tradition of stone circle construction that spread throughout much of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, over a period between 3300 and 900 BCE. The purpose of such monuments is unknown, although archaeologists speculate that the stones represented supernatural entities for the circle's builders.
The Coneybury Anomaly is a pit with animal and other refuse, interpreted as the remains of a cross-cultural feast, within the Stonehenge Landscape in Wiltshire, England. It was not apparent on the ground and was discovered in the 20th century by geophysical survey. Excavation has produced a large amount of early Neolithic pottery together with a large quantity of animal bone, and flint tools of both Mesolithic and Neolithic types.
