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.
