A huge settlement has been dug up at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (near Stonehenge) according to the BBC. The BBC has footage and a radio summary as well.
This is fascinating. All the same, I can’t resist a rant about the BBC report and the archaeologists’ comments, assuming the BBC quoted them correctly.

• Firstly, the article is entitled “Stonehenge builders’ houses found.” Surely this says that the homes of the Stonehenge builders have been located. Clearly not.
  The body of the article says that the “The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.” Well, this is precise to within 100 years. I didn’t know that we could date Stone Age remains with such precision (but I will assume that some scientific method, such as radio-carbon dating was used, rather than assumptions based on “culture.” ) Giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt that both structures were built in the same 100 year period, where is there any evidence that the people who lived here put in shifts on Stonehenge? I’d love to be proved wrong on this but it seems unlikely.
• If it was the builders’ village, why did they carry out miles of extra walking every night, after a tough day’s megalithic rock shifting? Durrington is “near” Stonehenge, if you are in a car driving along the Salisbury road. It is no mean stretch on foot.
• The text suggests that the archaeologists have identified a huge village. Why do they have to assume that it was mainly a ritual site? Did Stone Age people not bother with the normal business of living ANYWHERE? Do we only care about ritual sites? So, when we find signs of everyday life, they have no value unless they can be tied to a ritual site? (Preferably, one that’s known around the world and would attract preferential funding?)
• Orienting sites to get the most sunshine in the winter must have been a practical necessity before electric light. We build our own houses to get the most light in the kitchen. Does facing the winter sun necessarily suggest some obscure calendrical purpose, what about practical architectural knowledge?
• The claim is that the site wasn’t occupied all year round- hence it was ritual in origin. From my limited understanding of early agricultural societies, I would have thought that some of the year would be spent in semi-nomadic search of food. After wandering around finding the best sources of game and vegetables, a return to permanent winter quarters makes senses. With little else to do in the bleak months, humans create occasions, like Christmas, to fill their time and cement social bonds. This doesn’t mean that rituals are the primary purpose of the winter lay-off, rather that the ceremonies are created during the leisure and social time it provides.
• Another piece of “evidence” for a largely ritual purpose is the large number of burials on the site. It was a large village. People must have been died with regularity. Do our current cities exist for mainly ritual purposes because we bury or cremate our dead within them?

Congratulations on a really important find. This rant is just a complaint that archaeology can be blinkered by ritual-centrism. This stops us from seeing Stone Age peoples as human beings – our own not very remote ancestors – who must have had more urgent things to do than to spend their entire lives focussed on cosmic rituals.