B-SIDE-ART

The excavators were not looking for anything old. They were clearing ground for a nuclear reactor. Beneath the topsoil on England's Suffolk coast, where two power stations already hum and a third is under construction, the sand held a shape that shouldn't have still been there: a faint rectangle, its edges gone soft after nearly six thousand years, but still legible enough for archaeologists to trace. Nobody had stood inside its boundary since roughly 3800 BCE. Oxford Cotswold Archaeology, the charity conducting the dig ahead of the Sizewell C nuclear station, has identified the shape as a long enclosure — a rectangular earthwork bounded by ditches, measuring about 165 by 65 feet. Stonehenge didn't have a single stone standing yet when someone was already digging this rectangle. Long enclosures like it are rare. Unlike burial mounds or settlements, they typically held no bodies and few possessions, because their purpose wasn't storage or shelter. Most archaeologists bel...