There is, it seems, nothing hotter than news that dates back 5,000 years. The announcement that there are up to 90 15ft-high standing stones – admittedly no longer standing – buried at Durrington Walls just northeast of Stonehenge has produced a burst of pre-historical hysteria. “This is archaeology on steroids,” proclaims Vince Gaffney, head of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, which has been using scanning techniques to see what lies beneath Salisbury Plain.

Gaffney and his team have spent the past five years revealing that, far from being a single, isolated monument, Stonehenge lies at the centre of a complex web of henges (earthworks surrounded by banks and ditches), shrines, processional routes and burial sites covering an estimated 12 sq km. Durrington Walls has been labelled a “superhenge” – at 500m in diameter the largest in Britain. Clearly, it will have to be excavated and the whole Stonehenge site opened up as a kind of neolithic Disneyland. Or will it?

English Heritage, which looks after the site, says we shouldn’t hold our breath. “Archaeological excavations may play an important role in proving these findings,” says a spokesman, “and we will await any academic proposals and consider them.” The number of landowners involved – some of the wider Stonehenge site is on private land – and the cost of excavation will, he says, present problems. There is also the little matter of the A303, which runs close to Stonehenge. Plans to turn it into a dual carriageway will complicate life for archaeologists.

But road-building is not the only cause of destruction of precious remains. “When you excavate you destroy the things you are excavating,” says pre-historian Dr Ros Cleal, another reason a neolithic Disneyland is unlikely. She expects part of Durrington Walls to be excavated, but believes much will be left for future archaeologists to consider.

Dr Cleal, co-author of a book on Stonehenge, is now curator of the museum at Avebury, home of the largest stone circle in Europe. Avebury is just over 20 miles from Stonehenge, and you would think some of the 1.2m annual visitors to Stonehenge might also want to visit Avebury, where you can actually touch the stones. But few do – the museum gets just 60,000 visitors a year. Barack Obama made a point of visiting Stonehenge when he was in the UK for the Nato summit in 2014 – he said it was on his “bucket list” – but he didn’t go to poor old Avebury.

The British public (and American presidents) have yet to grasp the fact that Stonehenge is not the only pre-historical game in town. The fact that stones have been laid on top of other stones and it looks more like a building than most neolithic monuments is obviously a factor in making it the superstar among henges, but there are many other sites throughout the UK that attract just a handful of visitors because of what Dr James Leary, who was in charge of the excavation of nearby Marden Henge, calls the “fetishisation” of Stonehenge.

Even though we are unlikely ever to see Durrington Walls in all its glory and will have to make do with virtual tours, the discoveries there have usefully emphasised that the Neolithic does not begin and end with Stonehenge. It is a bizarre and mysterious point on a long and complicated journey. Just like the A303, in fact.