Much was already in that paper: 48 pits on the hilltop dated ~2950 BCE, feasting debris and scatter leaning east towards Sidbury Hill. The solar interest was already on record. Even the star find. The "rare disc-shaped knife" now presented as a possible image of the sun's disc 4/
...which is very easy to be sceptical about! - listed simply as "a discoidal knife" among the pit finds. But here's the gap. The structure actually being announced - two posts, 120m apart, on the solstice line - isn't described in the 2021 paper at all. 5/
The post features Leivers does describe at Bulford don't match it: they're several centuries later (~2470-2570 BCE, not 2950) and much closer together (the nearest large pair about 64m apart, not 120m). Presumably there is now earlier dating for the two large 'alignment' pits 6/
What is rather odd is how those two large pits were missed - Phil Harding spotted them from the unpublished work. (here he is at Stonehenge of course - I was delighted be able to chat to Phil at length at Grimes Graves a couple of years back) 7/
Here I tried to find the two posts on the published plan. I can't. Every pit is shown as the same small dot, with 48 packed onto one hilltop. I plotted some 120m lines on the 50 degree solstice bearing - you can align this through dozens of pit pairs by chance... 8/
So there's no picking the proposed aligned pair off the plan - far too many fit, and we're deliberately not proposing one. The actual two posts must have been singled out in the dig as large, deep post-holes, and that evidence just isn't on the published figure. 9/
None of which makes it wrong of course - the setting is real, the date is real, the solstice bearing checks out. It's plausible and a comfortable fit with what's known - it's just running ahead of the published evidence presumably for the sake of that solstice announcement. 10/
And fair play to them for getting the excitement in early - the detail is promised in a forthcoming Army Basing Programme volume (free via Wessex Archaeology's Open Library) and a Prehistoric Society piece. Until then it can't really be checked. 11/
We await the publication with great interest. More on our new page for the the Bulford Neolithic Pits and Alignment which shows what must be the location for the alignment https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=63957 12/
The location of the pits and alignment is close to the very nicely reconstructed henges which you can visit here: https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=60365 13/
There's more in my forum post on the current gaps in the interpretation: https://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=10434&forum=4 14/
...here's the very interesting 2021 paper our pages were all based on, from Matt Leivers, which also discusses potential alignments on the Stonehenge cursus: Stonehenge and the Emergence of the Sacred Landscape of Wessex Internet Archaeology 56. https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue56/2/index.html 15/
@megalithic
Very thorough analysis, thank you.