I found the following certainty that the Aubrey Holes held stones interesting as it is taken from the 1924 edition of Stonehenge Today & Yesterday - Frank Stevens which was the official guidebook and is contemporaneous with the excavations.
... the recently discovered Aubrey Holes" (1920). When Aubrey made his plan of Stonehenge in 1666, now preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, he indicated upon it certain depressions at regular intervals inside the circular earthwork. Time had entirely obliterated these depressions, so after due examination of the map at Oxford, Col. Hawley, with Mr. R. S. Newall, explored the sites in 1920, with the result that 23 of the depressions were discovered and excavated, and others located already await their future labours. They occur roughly at intervals of 16 ft. within the outer bank, and vary little either in size or shape, being rather over 3 ft. deep and ft. in diameter, all more or less circular. The solid chalk, which lies very close to the surface at Stonehenge, has in many cases been crushed on the sides of the holes nearest to the outer circle of Trilithons, which suggests that the stones which formerly stood in these holes have been removed from them. That the holes contained upright stones is beyond question. Nearly every one of the 23 holes examined contained cremated human remains, and in three cases the cremation had taken place in situ....
This is the first I've heard about cremations being performed in any of the holes.
ReplyDeleteNeil
Nice piece of research Tim!
ReplyDeleteSomething that is obvious and shows that the stones were in place during the 'so called' first phase of Stonehenge - which clearly make the initial construction much older than current 'estimations' blowing MPP's initial bluestone version of Stonehenge in Wales - out of the water!!
RJL