Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
After last month’s scramble through Stonehenge, this month I turn north to amble around Avebury. I know I am not the only one to hold this site in high affection. Even on its busiest days, the circle there is rarely too crowded since it is so spread out, and, if you have the time, you can easily head out into the larger landscape.
Avebury village and Henge
For many people, Avebury means the Neolithic stone circle located in the Wiltshire village, and as such I commence there and work my way outwards. Alexander Keiller, the ‘Marmalade Millionaire’, was an influential landowner and field archaeologist across the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. He used his wealth to buy a large amount of the land in Avebury, but the National Trust gradually became the majority landowner of the village and the wider prehistoric landscape through a series of gifts and acquisitions, commencing in 1943 and concluding with the purchase of Avebury Manor in 1991. This complex history is told in an excellent series of museums, and there is currently a project digitising and exploring its archaeological archive (see http://www.aveburypapers.org). As they explain: ‘the only large-scale archaeological excavations to take place at Avebury were conducted just before the outbreak of WWII. Materials and objects collected and made at this time were left under-analysed for decades. As a result, we have – until now – only had a partial understanding of Avebury’s past and present’. This absence of fieldwork also explains the modest interest of Current Archaeology in the henge, with only five visits of note in over 50 years – CA 97 (June 1985), CA 225 (December 2008), CA 330 (September 2017), CA 332 (November 2017), and CA 351 (June 2019). Of these, the most significant news came in CA 330, when a square monument was unexpectedly identified within one of the stone circles, proving to be among the earlier structures on the site, although its use remains unknown.
The Stone Circles at Avebury made the ‘Context’ in CA 332.
Windmill Hill
Windmill Hill, a Neolithic causewayed enclosure to the north-west of the henge, is well-known thanks to fieldwork there in the 1920s and again in the 1950s that established it as the type site for causewayed camps (nowadays known as ‘causewayed enclosures’). Pottery established it as the type style for the Windmill Hill culture, an historic term for what are now understood to be several different cultural communities that existed at this time: see CA 229 (April 2009) and CA 259 (October 2011) for an explanation of the site in the wider context of the Neolithic. CA 57 (July 1977) paid the first significant attention to the site in an examination of its stone axes, and CA 58 (September 1977) built on this with a state-of-the-nation review of what was understood about causewayed enclosures at this time. CA 131 (October 1992) returned with refined radiocarbon dates for the site: 2920-2700 + 70 BC for the enclosure and 2950-2670 + 110-90 BC for the tomb, showing the two monuments to be broadly contemporary. Most recently, CA 347 (February 2019) provided an excellent overview of the latest thinking on this and similar Neolithic sites.
Beckhampton
Beckhampton Avenue – a long run of Late Neolithic stones curving broadly south-west from Avebury – is both famous and enigmatic: only a few stones remain standing, but, thanks in large part to William Stukeley’s 1743 bird’s-eye imagining of the landscape, the wider setting looms large in the imagination. CA 165 (October 1999) first reported from there when new fieldwork explored an area in the centre of the Avenue, revealing six stone holes along with an unexpected find: a causewayed enclosure to match nearby Windmill Hill. CA 167 (March 2000) then returned with a fuller report on that survey. Most recently, CA 179 (May 2002) reported on new fieldwork undertaken at what is known as Beckhampton Cove – today, a single stone, but a site that Stukeley recorded as being a box-like setting of sarsens within the course of the Avenue, akin to the cove that survives within the Henge. That fieldwork revealed a four-sided rectilinear construction, along with a surprise – Roman finds including Samian ware, animal bone, a spearhead, and armour. Roman votive offerings have been found in association with earlier Neolithic chambered tombs (including at nearby West Kennet Long Barrow), so the hypothesis is that this was also the case here.
Silbury Hill
Silbury Hill is, I suggest, the most famous component in the Avebury landscape. Its prominent location, its photogenic appearance, and its enigmatic origins have long made it a magnet for theories both scientific and pseudo-scientific. It first featured in the magazine in CA 5 (November 1967) and CA 8 (May 1968), when it was the star of a BBC Two documentary produced as part of the long-running Chronicle series, one of the first-ever ‘made for TV’ pieces of archaeological fieldwork (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chronicle-silbury-dig-the-heart-of-the-mound/zbypwty). The site then went quiet until it made its cover debut in CA 176 (November 2001), amid widespread press coverage following a collapse of the centre shaft in May 2000. CA 178 (March 2002) followed up on this, and CA 215 (February 2008) then provided the second cover story as part of the last look inside the shaft (the result of multiple historic explorations) before it was infilled. The results of that fieldwork were reported on in CA 293 (August 2014), the third cover story. This explained the complex evolution of the structure across the Neolithic. Most recently, CA 337 (April 2018) provided the latest cover feature, when the hill was part of a wider study of round mounds, a reminder of the extraordinary nature of this site as the largest prehistoric mound in Europe.
West Kennet and the Sanctuary
Fieldwork around West Kennet (to the south of the henge) has not just been focused on the early Neolithic long barrow there. The first detailed examination of this part of the Avebury landscape came in CA 118 (January 1990), when a palisaded enclosure dating from the Neolithic/Bronze Age (c.2000 BC) was identified, showing this to have been an especially busy period. At this point, the henge was long built and potentially already out of use, and the nearby long barrow, constructed more than a millennium previously, was formally blocked around this time: it was the subject of detailed analysis in CA 209 (May 2007). Most recently, CA 215 (February 2008) put both these sites in the wider context of the landscape, but otherwise that is it for CA’s sparse coverage of this element of Avebury.
Finally, I turn to the Sanctuary, to the south-east of the henge on top of Overton Hill. Nowadays there is little to see there, but CA 16 (September 1969) examined the site in the wider context of nearby Fyfield Down. Other than that, only CA 167 (March 2000) touches on this important site, the terminating point of the eastern of the two grand avenues of stones that headed away from the henge.
With this visit to Avebury concluding at the Sanctuary, I come officially to the end of my tour of the archaeology of the UK. Since CA 361 (April 2020), I have criss-crossed the country, visiting all four nations and every county. I have a few geographical loose-ends to tie off in future issues, but first I will pause to take a different, slower-paced perspective. I recently walked the Ridgeway National Trail from the Sanctuary in Wiltshire to Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire, and so in next month’s column I will share some of the sites and finds that feature along that ancient route.
Discover old issues: Read a selection of the articles discussed by Joe for free online at www.archaeology.co.uk/archive413. They will be available -for one month from 4 July. Print subscribers can add digital access to the entire back catalogue of CA for just £12 a year – simply call us on 020 8819 5580 and quote ‘DIGI413’.
You must be logged in to post a comment.