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IN THE RIGHT PLACE
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    Working out where we should dig in the next excavation season in 2005 was difficult. All our trenches in 2004 had been in the wrong places. Only the trench halfway between the river and the henge had found Neolithic remains, and even that trench was not quite where it should have been. Had we known in advance how severe the erosion was immediately upslope from the riverside, we would have positioned the trench westward, further up the slope, where preservation was better. In 2005 we could undo the mistake and put the trench in the right place.
    This might be our only chance to look for what we had predicted in our theory about Durrington Walls. We had to open a trench that would produce undisputed evidence of concentrated human settlement. The pits that we found in the first year’s digging were full of feasting rubbish but that wasn’t enough proof – they could be the remains of some one-off event, like Coneybury. If we didn’t find an avenue or better evidence that Durrington Walls had been a place of the living, we’d have to pack up and go home for good.
    If there were an avenue or roadway outside Durrington Walls, perhaps a new trench into the better-preserved zone, south of where we had found the pits, would pay dividends. If we found an avenue here, then we were on the right track; if not, Ramilisonina’s theory could be dismissed. It was also worth extending the trench northward beyond the group of pits. Kate Welham’s geophysics team had found an anomaly in this area. They had detected it using an earth-resistance survey, which measuresthe resistance to electrical current below ground. High resistance is created by dense and dry features, such as walls, whereas low resistance is found in damper areas, such as the fills of ditches and pits. The anomaly north of our 2004 trench was a large circular area of high resistance; it could be a small henge or a round burial mound.
    One of the most exciting moments of archaeological excavation is the removal of plowsoil by mechanical excavator to see what lies beneath. However much research has been done above ground to work out what is there, the mechanical digger always reveals surprises. Machine stripping of topsoil is a delicate task: Take off too little, and what remains has to be laboriously removed by hand; take off too much, and you’ve destroyed valuable archaeological layers. It all depends on the sharp eyes of the archaeologist and the skilled hand of the digger driver.
    The 2004 season had shown us that well-preserved Neolithic remains lay immediately at the base of very shallow plowsoil, buried as little as 0.15 meters (six inches) deep. As I watched the hired digger prepare the trenches in the summer of 2005, the driver gently removed the topsoil to reveal a layer of black soil filled with animal bones and potshards. This was an entire ground surface that had been preserved for more than four thousand years—a complete surprise. Not only was the ground strewn with settlement waste (what archaeologists call “midden”), but it had also survived four millennia of weathering and erosion.
    The chalklands of Wessex are famous for their archaeological remains of all periods, but normally an excavator sees only the lower parts of features, such as pits, ditches, and graves, that have been cut into the chalk bedrock. The uppermost layers have usually been destroyed over time by natural and man-made processes. Rainwater percolating through soil on to the surface of the chalk reacts with the calcium to form a weak hydrochloric acid that eats away at the upper layers of chalk; meanwhile plowing not only breaks the surface to accelerate this weathering but also actively erodes the chalk. Most of the uplands of Wessex have been plowed since prehistoric times, and studies have shown that nearly a meter of chalk has been removed. We therefore rarely see a view of the Neolithic at the original ground level—this has vanished