Wooden Posts at Bulford Aligned to Summer Solstice 500 Years Before Stonehenge

Two tapered postholes uncovered at Bulford, about five kilometres north-east of Stonehenge, once held timbers aligned to the summer solstice sunrise around 2950 BC. The alignment is one of the earliest known astronomical monuments in the British Isles. Wessex Archaeology excavated the site between 2015 and 2017 before the UK Ministry of Defence built housing for about 5,000 army personnel.

Workers found a cluster of pits containing grooved ware pottery. Forty radiocarbon dates placed the occupation in a narrow window around 2950 BC. Phil Harding, who led the excavations, said the settlement lasted a relatively short period, possibly about a decade.

5 metres at the bottom and were filled with chalk rubble rather than pottery. Harding interpreted the tapered pits as postholes that once supported timbers a few metres tall. One posthole contained charcoal from an ash tree.

1 degrees, pointing roughly north-east. Fabio Silva of Stone x Sky calculated that the posts, if up to 50 centimetres wide, would have aligned precisely with the summer solstice sunrise. 5 per cent.

Stonehenge’s outer sarsen ring and inner bluestone ring sit within an earth bank and ditch begun around 3100 BC, with stones added up to 1600 BC. The stones that mark the summer solstice sunrise and winter solstice sunset were erected about 2500 BC.

An earlier Neolithic enclosure at nearby Larkhill, dated to around 3700 BC, has an entrance facing roughly north-east that aligns with midsummer sunrise over Sidbury Hill.

Matt Leivers of Wessex Archaeology noted that people in the region incorporated solar alignments into ceremonial architecture from the earliest Neolithic period onward. @NewScientist reported the discovery at a press conference where Harding and Silva presented the findings.