DISCOVERY FROM SKY

Waikato Times, Volume 119, Issue 19884, 13 May 1936, Page 4

DISCOVERY FROM SKY

*“WOODHENGE” LOCATED in. BRONZE AGE TEMPLE (Own Correspondent—By Air Mail.) LONDON, April 5. Eighteen thousand years :20 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 man died. The trunk: decayed. One summer’s day a. young man in an airplane saw tWo clightlv darker rings in the grass below him. It. was an R.A.F. ’plane doing R.A.F. work, so Group-Captain GA S. M. Insall, V.G.. M.C., controlled his excitement till he was ofl‘ duty. Then he hired a prlvate ’plnne. went back and took a photograph. From that photograph of a field at Arminghall‘ near Norwivh, and the happy accident that an airman hnd 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 excuvntions.

The photograph told Dr. Clark and his helpers just whnt to expcct, and they were ahle to dig without injuring the handiwork of the men who died 16,000 years before Christ. They found the temple exactly as it had been left except that the tree trunks had rottcd away. First there was fl, shallow circular ditch. Within that was a. mound, giving into a deeper ditch. The middle of the circle was a flat 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 hat path which had obvim sly been the entrance. it was obvious to the archaeologists that the ditcher. had been out with rough spades, to make the mound. Here the people stand to watch the rites that were performed in the centre. murh as spectators stand on emhnnkments now to watch tootbull matches. Pieces oi pottery found at the bottom of the outer ditch—probably the Bronze Age workmen‘s dinner ilnslre —provcd the period at which the temple was built Discovery of this pcr‘ feet epecnncn of a Bronze Age temple has added to linen-ledge of Stonehenge. There is constant controversy as to when Stonehenge was built, The Int-1: that. it is i)llli' H] the shine wny~mrvlcs. pillar; in the middle in horseshoe formation—as the Arinlnghnll “bongo" shows that it was built at the same time The Nnrluik men used wood lllstand of stone bar-align it was more easily nvnilnlnle:

"155} lenrlrlszmrlrds 0t )ears the ditches have hcon filled in Yot thv earth thac <i|ted into them is still distinct.