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Mike Pitts writes: If you visit Stonehenge now – as huge numbers did in August – you’ll really see signs that things are changing. Work continues in the car park to prepare a turning circle at the end of what will be the stub of the old A344. The road itself as it once continued eastwards to Stonehenge Bottom has now all but gone, exposing the chalk below. Wessex Archaeology has been monitoring it, and has excavated parts of the two parallel Avenue ditches, and a small part of what looks like the lip of the Heelstone ditch, as Ollie Good kindly showed me.
My interest in this was naturally strengthened by my excavations immediately beside the road there in 1979 and 1980. We had several advantages over the modern archaeologists.
The team were almost all volunteers, archaeology students and staff from Southampton University, so brought considerable skill, but at no cost to the Department of the Environment, which was technically running the show, through me as its employee directing the digs. The areas we excavated were by comparison very small. Though the long, narrow nature of the trenches brought its own problems, their scale, and no cost restrictions on labour, meant we were able to hand excavate the entire thing, including cleaning all the “natural’ by hand. All artefacts excavated within features were plotted in 3D, and we recorded over 20 vertical sections.
Read more, with lots of photos at
http://mikepitts.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/a344-memories-real-archaeology-at-stonehenge-as-work-continues-to-remove-the-road-and-car-park/
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road