The area surrounding Stonehenge, UK, may have acquired enormous significance for Stone Age humans thousands of years before the famous monument was built, suggest archaeologists working at a nearby site called Blick Mead.
The Stonehenge monument was built between 3000 and 2000 BC. It is a ring of standing stones, surrounded by an earth bank and ditch.
Lying more than a kilometre to the east of Stonehenge is Blick Mead, the site of a spring where warm waters rise up through the chalky bedrock. Archaeologists have been excavating there for 聽and have found over 100,000 stone tools and the remains of animals.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 a great site,鈥� says at University College Dublin in Ireland. She says the sheer number of stone artefacts found there is 鈥減retty astonishing鈥�.
People lived at Blick Mead long before Stonehenge was built 鈥� dating studies suggest people were active there between 8000 and 3400 BC. This indicates the first people at Blick Mead were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, distinct from the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge.
These hunter-gatherers may have been drawn to the area because of the water source. Lewis says springs often attracted prehistoric people, and those sites became important.
at the University of Southampton in the UK and his colleagues have used data from Blick Mead to estimate what the landscape there was like during the Mesolithic period, which took place from 15,000 BC to 5000 BC in Europe. The researchers drilled a core down into the ground to examine and date the layers of sediment. They also identified pollen grains preserved in the sediment, which indicate the types of plants that grew in the area.
Crucially, they also obtained plant DNA directly from the sediment, which revealed a wide mix of plants. There were plenty of trees, including apple, elm and willow. But there were also many wetland plants like buttercup, and an increasing abundance of plants that live in open grasslands, such as clover. The pollen studies largely confirmed this, revealing lots of grasses.
The researchers concluded that Blick Mead and the surrounding area were a mixed habitat with some woodland and some open grassland. It isn鈥檛 possible to say how extensive the trees were relative to the grasses, but it definitely wasn鈥檛 a closed-canopy forest. 鈥淲hat Blick Mead suggests is that there were some open areas, and I don鈥檛 think you can go much further than that,鈥� says Hudson.
Some of the clearances were probably made by large grazing animals like aurochs, the wild relatives of domestic cattle, bones of which have been found at Blick Mead. Mesolithic people may also have cleared some of the trees, but again it isn鈥檛 possible to say how extensively they did so.
Hudson thinks the partial clearances during the Mesolithic made it easier for later Neolithic farmers to clear wider areas. By the time Stonehenge was under construction, the area was probably largely treeless.
That is in line with evidence from other Stone Age monuments, says Lewis. 鈥淚n the late Mesolithic, some of those sites had grass underneath them before people came and built monuments.鈥�
While Blick Mead was occupied for a long time, Hudson and Lewis both say it is unlikely this was a permanent home. Hudson suggests the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers visited at certain times of year, perhaps to host feasts of auroch meat.
Over time, increasingly formalised activities may have taken place, culminating in the construction of Stonehenge. By that time, people may even have forgotten about the Blick Mead spring.
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