Stonehenge 'on steroids' found 2 miles away

Matthew Diebel | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Researchers say Stonehenge used to have a giant neighbor Researchers in England just discovered a "superhenge" monument buried underground near Stonehenge. Video provided by Newsy

Stonehenge, the world-renowned circle of stone columns in southern England, may have had a brother.

A much bigger, older brother.

University of Bradford researchers announced Monday that they had discovered a monument of about 100 stones covering several acres thought to have been built around 4,500 years ago.

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project used remote-sensing technologies to discover the monument, which is near Durrington Walls, also known as "superhenge." Stonehenge, which is believed to have been completed 3,500 years ago, is about 2 miles away.

"What we are starting to see is the largest surviving stone monument, preserved underneath a bank, that has ever been discovered in Britain and possibly in Europe," Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist at Bradford University who leads the project, toldThe Guardian newspaper. "This is archaeology on steroids."

The evidence was found beneath 3 feet of earth. Some of the stones are thought to have stood 15 feet tall before they were toppled.

"Our high-resolution ground-penetrating radar data has revealed an amazing row of up to 90 standing stones, a number of which have survived after being pushed over, and a massive bank placed over the stones," professor Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, told CNN.

"In the east, up to 30 stones … have survived below the bank whereas elsewhere the stones are fragmentary or represented by massive foundation pits," he said.

"The extraordinary scale, detail and novelty of the evidence produced by the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, which the new discoveries at Durrington Walls exemplify, is changing fundamentally our understanding of Stonehenge and the world around it," Neubauer added.

"Everything written previously about the Stonehenge landscape and the ancient monuments within it will need to be rewritten," Paul Garwood, an archaeologist and lead historian on the project at the University of Birmingham, told CNN.

The findings were announced on the first day of the British Science Festival being held at the University of Bradford.

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