Could start with the landscape, in the beginning there was nothing, then someone came along and created a monument,(wood or stone)making a place in space. Once something has been created it takes on ancestral form in the minds of later people..Neolithic longbarrows focus their attention on the dead - their creators. What you see round Stonehenge, Avebury, Knowlton Henges and the Mendips are great sacred or ritual landscapes. People gathering, bringing their dead, slowly this landscape gathers its history and its forms and shape - cursuses, standing stones, circles, longbarrows and round barrows; the focus of religion may change (its not all to do with alignments on sun,moon and mountain) but the evidence is always littered in the landscape. Pryor calls it Land of the Living and Land of the Dead - two landscapes, one practical the other symbolic. Modern man has lost the ability to live in this symbolic world of nature, our knowledge of what the word sun or moon means is tarnished by the technical and scientific evidence of today; their viewpoint would have been totally different..... so their would have been linking factors between the great post holes in the carpark and Stonehenge itself, its just difficult I suppose to find a continuing pattern of evidence of settlement. Why for instance did the bluestones come from Preseli Mountains, someone suggested it was a sort of DIY stone circle transported because the stone was particularly magical but they could have been brought by the clan or tribe who originated in Wales.. wittering as usual...

There is generally much less evidence for Mesolithic activity compared to later prehistoric periods. Mesolithic structures were normally very ephemeral and evidence for them is thin on the ground. As organic materials do not normally survive, the best evidence for Mesolithic presence often comes from the presence of flint scatters - which are datable only to the broadest chronological periods. This means that it is very difficult to establish fine-grained chronologies and establish continuity between Mesolithic and Early Neolithic sites.

One of the things that makes the presence of the Mesolithic Stonehenge post-holes so remarkable is that there are so few seemingly "non-domestic", "non-utilitarian" Mesolithic sites in the British Isles, and guess what, one pops up at Stonehenge! This would seem to suggest that the memory that this place was important in the Mesolithic continued into the Early Neolithic. Of course we don't know whether this memory/knowledge was transmitted in stories, or whether it was in some way marked at the site itself. We know from many other sites (long barrows, chambered tombs and causewayed enclosures) that there is a broad continuity of the importance of some places from the Mesolithic to the E. Neolithic. So whilst many things changed with the start of the Neolithic at least some elements of earlier beliefs seem to have been retained.

This is from an excellent 1998 paper by Mike Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina entitled Stonehenge for the Ancestors

"There is a possibility that more such post holes may lie within Stonehenge Bottom, to the north of the monument, prehaps forming a ceremonial focus of some sort. Tranmission of oral traditions over so many millenia is extremely unlikely but the post voids were visible as pits when Stonehenge was constructed as indicated by their Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age tertiary fill. Thus there is the possibility that these unusually ancient diggings into the land were recognized as the work of human angency belonging to a time remote from the Neolithic. In this connection, Stonehenge Bottom is unusual in being an apparently empty space lying at the centre of one of the most densely constructed ceremonial landscapes in prehistoric northern Europe. This apparent absence of features may relate not only to the 'dead zone' set apart for the ancestors but perhaps also to as yet undiscovered pre-Neolithic structures".

Hi

Complete newbie here, apologies if I'm covering old ground.

It was only a couple of days ago I found about these post holes in the Stonehenge car park. I've been looking into the apparent coincidence (?) of the relationship of the alignment of the Giza pyramids with the three stars that form Orion's belt. And then I discovered information about the Thornborough Henges Complex, which shows a similar arrangement... and then I saw a photo of the concrete markers in the Stonehenge car park. And I was gobsmacked to find that they appear to be in the same two-in-a-line-and-one-off-to-one-side alignment.

It can't just be me that thinks that this has to be more than coincidence, surely? Yet I can't seem to find out anything much about these post holes. Lots and lots of speculation about Stonehenge itself, of course, but not a great deal about these much older post holes, and certainly nothing that suggests that there's any relationship between these and the three stars of Orion's belt.

Any thoughts?