Last month I began a tour around the final county of the UK that I had yet to visit in these pages: Wiltshire. I began in the north and headed south as far as the Vale of Pewsey. This month I will continue into what is popularly seen as the most fertile of all archaeological hunting grounds: the county’s central belt around Salisbury Plain. I will devote future columns specifically to Stonehenge and Avebury, so we will pass through these on this occasion and commence a stone’s throw from the former’s eastern edge, in Amesbury.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
I used to live near Amesbury, and I was always of two minds about the town – is it to its advantage, or rather disadvantage, that it has Stonehenge on its doorstep? It always felt unfairly overlooked in favour of its neighbour, for the town has some stunning archaeology that in any other context would make it famous. Amesbury’s archer featured as the cover story of CA 184 (February 2003), shortly after his discovery. The first finds made on that site came from a Romano-British inhumation cemetery, but then came the early Bronze Age finds, including the burial of a man aged between 35 and 45, who had died around 2300 BC. He was quickly nicknamed ‘the Amesbury Archer’ because of the many arrowheads buried with him, but the grave contained far more than just these – indeed, more artefacts than any other British burial of this period, among them the earliest known gold objects ever found in England. CA 251 and 265 (February 2011 and April 2012) delve into the detail both of this site and of a burial at nearby Boscombe (more of which in a moment), and there was an update on the former in CA 384 (March 2022), when advances in DNA analysis since the Archer’s discovery revealed he was a first-generation immigrant born in the western Alps along the modern-day Franco-Swiss border.
Back in the early 2000s, another Bronze Age find was made at nearby Boscombe Down that has become inextricably linked with that of the Archer: the ‘Boscombe Bowmen’. CA 193 (August 2004) focused in on this site, where a mass grave of commensurate early Bronze Age date to the Archer was discovered nearby. In total, seven individuals were buried there – three adult men, a male teenager, and three children – and their burial rite was unusual. Analysis of the skulls suggests that the men and the teenager were related to each other and originally came from Wales, and the eldest man was buried in a crouched position with the bones of the others scattered around him, their skulls resting at his feet. They became known as the ‘Bowmen’ because several flint arrowheads had been placed in the grave. CA 195 (December 2004) provides the link between the Archer and the Bowmen sites (which lie only a few hundred metres apart): the discovery of a previously unknown sarsen circle 50m in diameter. And as I mention above, CA 251 and 265 examine the complex interconnections of place and people within the wider prehistoric landscape there. Amesbury is, of course, also associated with the Mesolithic discoveries at Blick Mead, but we will cover that site in more detail next month.
Heritage on the River Thames