AERIAL ARCHAEOLOGIST

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 208, 30 May 1936, Page 24

AERIAL ARCHAEOLOGIST

The middle of the circle was a fiat space in which were eight holes, in horseshoe arrangement, where the tree-pillars had been. Cutting right through the two ditches and the mound was a flat path which had' obviously been the entrance.

Eighteen thousand years ago men working with rough bronze tools in what we now call Norfolk built a horseshoe of oak tree trunks as a temple to their gods.

The men died. The trunks decayed. One summer’s day a young man in an aeroplane saw two slightly darker rings in the grass below him. It was an R.A.F. plane doing R.A.F. work, so Group Captain G. S. M. Insall, V.C., M.C., controlled his excitement till he was off duty. Then he hired a private plane, went back and took a photograph. From that photograph of a field at Arminghall, near Norwich, and the happy accident that an airman had archaeology as his hobby has come the discovery of a wooden Stonehenge. A “woodhenge,” the archaeologists call it.

Dr. Grahame Clark, of Cambridge, at the request of the Norwich Research Committee, undertook excavations. The photograph told Dr. Clark and his Helpers just what to expect, and they were able to dig without injuring the handiwork of the men who died 16,000 years before Christ. They found the temple exactly ns it had been left except that the tree trunks had rotted away. First there was a shallow circular ditch. Within that was a. mound, giving into a deeper ditch.

What He Saw In Field Below

It was obvious to the archaeologists that the ditches had been cut with rough spades, to make the mound. Here the people stood to watch the rites that: were performed in the centre, much as spectators stand on embankments now to watch football ma tches.

Pieces of pottery found at the bottom of the outer ditch—probably the bronze age workmen’s dinner flasks—proved the period at which the temple was built.

Discovery of this perfect specimen of a bronze age temple has added to knowledge <ff Stonehenge.

There is constant controversy as to when Stonehenge was built. The fact that it is built in the same way—circles, pillars in the middle in.horseshoe formation —as the Arminghall “henge” shows that it was built at. the samp time. The Norfolk men used wood instead of stone because it was more easily available.

For thousands of years the ditches have been tilled in. Yet the earth that eilted into them is still distinct,