Bulford’s Solstice Alignment Pushes Stonehenge’s Origins Deeper Into the Past
A Neolithic site in Wiltshire is adding a new chapter to the story of Stonehenge. Archaeologists now say that Bulford, a settlement and ritual landscape near the famous monument, was aligned to the midsummer sunrise about 500 years before Stonehenge’s great stones were raised.
The site dates to 2950 B.C.E. and appears to have centered on two wooden posts placed nearly 400 feet apart. Their line, researchers say, marked the rising sun at midsummer and may also have related to the winter solstice. The discovery suggests that the Stonehenge landscape was already shaped by solar observation long before the sarsens arrived.
Bulford came to light in the mid-2010s, when Britain’s Ministry of Defense asked Wessex Archaeology to excavate the area before new accommodations for soldiers were built. Between 2015 and 2017, archaeologists uncovered nearly 50 pits filled with pottery, animal bones, stone tools, and charcoal. The quantity of material points to repeated gatherings, not a fleeting occupation.
The solar connection emerged later. Phil Harding, the lead archaeologist, noticed that the line between the two largest postholes seemed to match the midsummer sunrise. Fabio Silva, a skyscape archaeologist, then reconstructed the period sky, landscape, and horizon and confirmed the alignment. Harding called it “one of the greatest finds of my career.”
A smaller aligned pit held an especially rare disc-shaped flint knife, which researchers believe may have symbolized the sun. Based on the depth of the post pits, the wooden posts are estimated to have stood nine to 13 feet tall.
Silva said the alignment shows that communities were already engaging with the summer and winter solstices in the Stonehenge landscape centuries before the sarsen stones were erected. He added that Stonehenge now appears less like an isolated beginning than the product of older traditions rooted in the same terrain.
Bulford is not the earliest alignment site in the British Isles — Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales, Maeshowe in Scotland, and Newgrange in Ireland all predate it — but it may be one of the clearest prototypes for the Neolithic alignments that followed in Wiltshire.
