An inconspicuous stone and turf monument on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, southwest England, is likely 4,000 years older than first thought, according to local archaeologists. The rectangular structure, coined King Arthur’s Hall and previously recorded as a medieval animal pen by the UK government, is now believed to be Neolithic, dating back 5,500 years.
Its purpose, though, remains a mystery. According to archaeologists, nothing like it has been found anywhere in the world.
Cornwall National Landscape, a partnership of 21 organizations which manages the county’s protected land, commissioned the most recent excavation following an investigation by local amateur archaeologists, who questioned the structure’s medieval origins.
The “hall” comprises a banked enclosure measuring 160 by 68 feet. On the inside, it is lined with 56 standing stones up to almost 7 feet tall.
“There isn’t another one of these anywhere,” James Gossip, the archaeologist heading up the dig by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, told the Guardian. “There is nothing built at that time or subsequently in prehistory that is a rectangular earth and stone bank with a setting of stone orthostats around the interior. There is no other parallel.”
During the excavation, the Cornwall Archaeological Unit – together with experts from the universities of St. Andrews, Reading, and Newcastle –carried out soil dating using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). They found that King Arthur’s Hall was dug out around 3000 BCE.
“[The people who originally created the ‘hall’] dug down through the earth of Bodmin Moor to the loose granite on the surface, and they piled it up to make these ramparts,” Gossip said. “And what they did in our favour was they buried these very ancient soils below them which we could target for OSL.”
Regarding the mysterious monument’s name linked to King Arthur, it’s almost certainly nothing to do with him, given he is associated with the Anglo-Saxon period in the 5th and 6th centuries CE. In fact, it’s not even known if he existed at all.
“The middle ages was a period when the Arthur name starts being attributed to all sorts of unusual sites that the local population at the time probably didn’t understand,” Gossip explained. “That suggests its original function had been lost by that point, but people attributed it to King Arthur because he had this association with something mythical and powerful.”
Gossip added that during the middle Neolithic period, which predates the bronze age, people started to settle in the same place and building enclosures for the first time. “The thinking is that these are meeting points for communities, perhaps to mark special occasions or to carry out ceremonies,” he said.
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