b'Environmental geophysics Environmental geophysicsdepending on where you are around the world and the state of your local civilisation. The Neolithic is in the Late Stone Age i.e. before metal (seems that the Bronze Age was next). It is usually defined as the time when a group of people are able to start domesticating animals and grow crops and are therefore not surviving solely as hunters and gatherers. It started about 12 000 years ago, and in Northern Europe finished roughly around 3700 years ago, earlier than that in, for example, the Middle East, and the same or later in other parts of Mike Hatchthe world. Figure 1.The three aligned henges of the Associate Editor for Next clarificationwhat is a hengeThornborough Complex. Source: Wikipedia.Environmental geophysics(honestly I didnt know that it was a michael.hatch@adelaide.edu.au thing)? A henge is a Neolithic earthwork,vertical gradiometry data, but then I got typically a circular bank with an internallooking at the scale of the anomalies ditch surrounding a central flat area(2 nT only, see Figure 2) and realised that that was probably the reason. These Henge-ing your bets about 20 m in diameter. They werentsurveys were run in 2012 and 2013 lived in, and are thought to have been(although they appear to tie into other Welcome readers to this issues column onused for rituals (Figure 1 shows one that issurveys run earlier) and the anomalies geophysics applied to the environment.in such good condition it could still be inwere at first attributed to human-created I am hoping that all of you are doinguse today). Third, bit of background (ok,(Neolithic?) dewponds (or turkeys well enough in this time of COVID; I amnot background, but I found this in mynests in Australian English) or, to a series certainly staying busy and so far feelresearch)did you know that over thereof solution features that followed the healthy, and hope the same for you. (Europe mostly) there are archaeologicalcontours of the dry valley. Many were contractors (that alone is somewhatfound to have Bronze Age and older tools This months column is not so muchamazing to me, but wait theres more)and other artefacts in them.about the environment as about anwho specialise in geophysics? Seriously, archaeological study that involvessometimes I wonder where my careerUltimately, it was a combination of some of the tools that we shallowwould have gone in another setting. factors that convinced the authors that geophysicists are known to use. I amEnough background, lets get to thethese features were likely to be man-referring specifically to the discovery ofstudy. I like the opening line of the article:made, and that their locations were not the Giant Shafts near the DurringtonA series of massive geophysical anomalies,random. Images from the GPR showed Walls Henge in England. This, then, is alocated south of Durrington Walls Hengethat many of the features were deeper brief summary of the scholarly articlemonument, were identified during (a)than your average dew pond, and had (Gaffney et al. 2020) written to describefluxgate gradiometer survey undertakensteeper walls (Figure 3). Additionally, it this work (https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/ by the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapesappears to be more than coincidence issue55/4/). The Guardian also provides aProject (SHLP) (Gaffney et al. 2020). Thethat all of these pits form a rough very good summary of the work: https:// italics are mine. I found it fascinatingcircle 750 to 950 m from walls of the www.theguardian.com/science/2020/ that the tool of choice for these surveysDurrington Walls Henge (not a complete jun/22/vast-neolithic-circle-of-deep- is the fluxgate magnetometer collectingcircle, but some of the area is yet to be shafts-found-near-stonehenge. surveyed). Figure 4 shows the extent of First things first, I know very little about Druid archaeology, besides that Stonehenge exists, it has to do with understanding the position of the sun at the solstices, and is amazing not only for the fact that those Druids figured out where the sun was at certain times of the year, but also that they moved some big rocks over 100 km to get them to the site. My thanks to Wikipedia for helping me out here, and for some of the following background information (I contribute to Wikipedia every year or soit is such a great resource).We have all heard of the Neolithic, butFigure 2.Fluxgate gradiometry images of three of the circular features south of Durrington Walls Henge. when was it? Well that seems to varySource: Gaffney et al. 2020. The article does not specify how these data sets were processed.AUGUST 2020 PREVIEW 26'