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The Aubrey holes are a ring of fifty-six (56) Chalk pits at Stonehenge, named after the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey. They date to the earliest phases of Stonehenge in the late fourth and early third millennium BC. Despite decades of argument and analysis, their purpose is still unknown although an astronomical role has often been suggested. Whilst visiting the monument in 1666, Aubrey noticed five circular cavities in the ground and noted them in his records. These features were ignored or not seen by the later antiquarians to investigate the site, and it was not until the 1920s during the work carried out by Colonel William Hawley that Hawley's assistant Robert Newall identified a ring of pits he named in honour of Aubrey and his early survey. The depressions seen by Aubrey himself are more likely to have been different features from those that now bear his name. Mike Pitts in a 1981 article in ''Nature'' pointed out that the holes had been backfilled thousands of years before Aubrey visited the site.〔Pitts, M. W. (5 March 1981). "Stones, Pits and Stonehenge". Nature 290: 46–47.〕 The presence of later cremation burials and sarsen stone chips in the holes' upper fills supports this. That none of the other antiquarians who visited the site noticed any such holes implies that they were not permanent features either. Pitts argues that they were more likely to be the cavities left by features that had recently been removed. He has suggested that perhaps further megaliths stood at Stonehenge which occupied these other holes and are now lost. ==The Aubrey holes themselves== Twenty-five of the holes were excavated by Hawley in 1920 and seven more in 1924. In 1950 Stuart Piggott and Richard Atkinson dug two more Aubrey Holes which brought the total excavated to thirty-five, including one that Richard Colt Hoare may have encountered whilst digging beneath the fallen Slaughter Stone in the early nineteenth century. It was found that the pits were an average of 0.76m deep and 1.06m in diameter. Twenty-five of the pits contained later cremation burials inserted into their upper fills along with long bone pins which may have secured leather or cloth bags used to hold the remains. Their presence makes Stonehenge Britain's oldest cremation cemetery. The pits appear to have been refilled with the freshly excavated chalk rubble soon after being dug as no weathering has been noted on the chalk sides of the pits. They may also have been dug out and refilled numerous times. The holes are in an accurate, 271.6m circumference circle, distributed around the edge of the area enclosed by Stonehenge's earth bank, with a standard deviation in their positioning of 0.4m. The circle they describe is around 5m inside the monument's bank. Twenty-one of the holes remain unexcavated and no reliable dating material has been recovered from the other thirty-five. The only available carbon date from the holes comes from charcoal in one of the later cremations. It gives the broad range of 2919-1519 cal BC. That sarsen stone chips have only been found in the upper fills of the excavated pits implies that the digging of the holes predates the megalithic phases of Stonehenge. From this stratigraphic evidence it is therefore likely that the holes were dug during the first phase of the monument, Stonehenge 1 (around 3100 BC) and were then reused for burials during Stonehenge 2 in successive centuries. By the time the standing stones of Stonehenge 3 were erected (around 2600 BC), the holes had fallen out of use. The positions of the holes are today marked at the Stonehenge site by white discs laid in the ground surface. Archaeologists number them 1 to 56 counting clockwise from the later Slaughter Stone at the eastern side of the north east entrance. Hawley reburied the human cremations he found, placing them in the backfilled hole number 7. These remains were re-excavated in August 2008 as part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. A plaque dating from the 1935 reburial was uncovered at the site. The project was detailed in an episode of the PBS TV series Nova around the same time.〔http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-stonehenge.html〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Aubrey holes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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