The Durrington "giant pit circle" -- fantasies or facts?

Following the garbled nonsense of the latest TV spectacular on the "giant pit circle" and everything else, featuring Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, it's refreshing to see something a bit more sober.

Leivers, M. 2021 The Army Basing Programme, Stonehenge and the Emergence of the Sacred Landscape of Wessex, Internet Archaeology 56. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.56.2

https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue56/2/full-text.html

I've been looking at this article, which makes it absolutely clear that the abundant pits around Larkhill, Bulford, Tidworth and Perham Down, at Ludgershall and between Bulford and Tidworth are natural features (mostly solution hollows and pits aligned on fractures or seepage lines), possibly with some opportunistic excavations associated with flint mining.  The only exceptions are post-holes, of which there are also many.  Most of the pits and hollows, little and large, have been infilled with sedimentary debris by natural and human agencies -- which is not surprising, since many of them date back to the Neolithic.

Matt Leivers appears to have no time at all for the Stonehenge obsession, and seems to think that the features in his area of study were created by people "doing their own thing" -- in spite of the fact that Stonehenge was not all that far away.  He says: "There is no apparent pattern, and whatever the solution hollows may have come to represent later in the Neolithic in terms of a boundary marker or separator of spaces, they had no such significance in the Early Neolithic, if such can be determined from the distribution and contents of the mostly small pits on either side of them." 

This is interesting:

"Thirty-eight of the Bulford pits contained over 1300 sherds of Woodlands Grooved Ware. Radiocarbon dates obtained from animal bone and charred hazelnut shells in the same features have provided modelled dates centred on 2950 cal BC, indicating that the Woodlands Grooved Ware from Bulford is almost as early (if not as early) as that from Orcadian sites claimed to be the style's place of origin. Modelling of Orcadian radiocarbon determinations has suggested that the Grooved Ware assemblage from Barnhouse dates to between 3160 and 3090 cal BC and 2890–2845 cal BC; that from Sanday to between 3210–2935 cal BC and 2815–2650 cal BC; and at the Stones of Stenness the sequence starts at 3020–2890 cal BC (Richards et al. 2016). 

Such apparent contemporaneity poses several questions about contact between Wessex and Orkney around 3000 BC, but it is significant in a second way, as being exactly contemporary with the construction of Phase 1 of Stonehenge. The phase 1 Stonehenge ditch is dated to 2990-2755 cal BC (Marshall et al. 2012), while Aubrey Hole 32 dates to 3000-2890 cal. BC (Parker Pearson et al. 2008, 18). It seems inconceivable that the community undertaking whatever activities resulted in the Bulford pits did not know about Stonehenge, and it is at least possible, and even probable, that the builders of Stonehenge and the Bulford people were the same. If this is the case, and if the Aubrey Holes were the earliest phase of Stonehenge, and if it is true that they mark the location of a bluestone circle (Parker Pearson et al. 2020, 164-8), what made users of  'Orcadian' pottery bring stones from Wales to this spot in southern England?"

A number of the pits and hollows were clearly associated with intensive flint knapping activity, with thousands of flint sherds around the edges and incorporated into later infilling; this supports the idea that the pits themselves might well have been the favoured sites for flint mining or quarrying.  They had to do it somewhere.......

On the circumference of a giant circle?  Hmmm.....

Leivers seems convinced that the "alignment" of larger hollows in the northern part of the Durrington landscape is entirely natural, and that it is in no way a part of a "giant circle of pits" so enthusiastically promoted by Vince Gaffney and his team.  In addition, he doesn't sound too impressed by the "southern arc" of hollows investigated by Gaffney and his colleagues with all their technical gadgetry -- quite apart from the fact that the supposed "giant pits" do not lie neatly on the circumference of any "great circle" at all -- and are much better interpreted as two intersecting rough alignments.  The author's scepticism comes out here:

"At Larkhill and MoD Durrington, all of the investigated examples were natural in origin, but at both the line was interspersed by smaller anthropogenic features (of very different dates: one Early Neolithic in the entrance of the Lark Hill enclosure, one Late Neolithic and a focus for burial and deposition at MoD Durrington). What this suggests is that the arc of 'massive pits' need not have been of any one thing, or of any one date. While many of the examples in the northern half were ancient geological features related to the topography, the southern parts of the arc (or some of them) could have been created by hand, very much later, and not all at once. None the less, even one of these features would have been an enormous undertaking that poses any number of questions, including when, why, and (not least) what happened to the spoil?"

I had almost forgotten that it is still possible for archaeologists to do archaeology without getting completely swept away by the obsession with myth creation.  So thank you, Mr Leivers........

This graphic was shown over and again in the TV documentary, and the repeated claim was made that the pits were uniform, 10m across and 5m deep.  In fact there was great variation in the characteristics and dimensions of the pits.  And where are all the other pits that were searched for around the supposed circumference of the "giant circle?  Have they just disappeared?