Landscape of the Megaliths

Excavation and Fieldwork on the Avebury Monuments, 1997-2003

Mark Gillings, Joshua Pollard, Rick Peterson, David Wheatley, Joshua Pollard, Rick Peterson

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781782975236
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume describes the results of the Longstones Project, a joint-universities programme of excavation and survey designed to develop a fuller understanding of the context and dynamics of monument construction in the later Neolithic (3rd millennium BC) of the Avebury region, Wiltshire. Several elements of this internationally important prehistoric monument complex were investigated: an early-mid 3rd millennium BC enclosure at Beckhampton; the recently re-discovered Beckhampton Avenue and Longstones Cove; a section of the West Kennet Avenue; the Falkner's stone circle; and the Cove within Avebury's Northern Inner Circle. The research sheds new light on the complexities and development of this monument rich area and consideration is given to the questions of how and why ceremonial centres such as that at Avebury came into being in the 3rd millennium BC. The importance of understanding the agency - the affective and perceived inherent qualities - of materials and landscapes is stressed; and the unusual character of the Wessex monument complexes is highlighted by comparison with the format and sequences of other ceremonial centres in southern Britain. The second part of the monograph tracks the later, post-prehistoric, lives of Avebury's megalithic monuments including a detailed account of the early 18th-century records of the Beckhampton Avenue made by the antiquary William Stukeley.

1

Introduction:

The Longstones Project and its context

The chalk downland of the Upper Kennet Valley of North Wiltshire, in southern England, provides the setting for one of the most impressive complexes of prehistoric monuments in Europe; an equal to the archaeological landscapes around Stonehenge, the Boyne Valley of eastern Ireland and Carnac in Brittany. Spread over an area of c.15km east-west by 10km north-south, centred on the village of Avebury, is a remarkable concentration of Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age funerary and ceremonial monuments (Figure 1.1). Their creation began in the second quarter of the 4th millennium BC with the construction of sites such as the Windmill Hill enclosure and East and West Kennet long barrows and, at this time, reached scales only occasionally matched elsewhere (Piggott 1962; Whittle et al. 1999). However, in terms of labour input, architectural complexity and visual dominance, pre-eminent status might be ascribed to the remarkable creations of the first three quarters of the 3rd millennium BC–the region’s later Neolithic. These include the Avebury henge and stone circles, the West Kennet and Beckhampton megalithic avenues (Figure 1.2), the Sanctuary and, occupying the floor of the Kennet Valley, the complex of palisaded enclosures at West Kennet and the giant artificial mound of Silbury Hill (Smith 1965; Whittle 1997b). Avebury is but one of a series of great later Neolithic ceremonial centres on the Wessex chalklands, others being present in the landscapes around Stonehenge, Knowlton on Cranborne Chase, and Dorchester in Dorset. These monument complexes are exceptional in the context of the British Neolithic, yet they continue to occupy a key position in our accounts of the period because of their perceived potential to inform us of aspects of social and economic organisation, belief, ceremony and materiality. A broader, public value, as ‘heritage’, is reflected in the inscription of both the Avebury and Stonehenge landscapes as a World Heritage Site in 1986.

Figure 1.1. The Avebury region, showing principal later Neolithic monuments and the earlier Neolithic enclosure on Windmill Hill

Figure 1.2. Avebury henge from the east. The Longstones excavations are just visible in the far centre

In this volume we provide the definitive report on a programme of excavation and survey on key elements of the later Neolithic monument complex, undertaken between 1997 and 2003 by a joint Universities team. Under the title of The Longstones Project, this programme of work was designed to develop a fuller understanding of the context, chronology and dynamics of monument construction in the later Neolithic of the Avebury region. Several elements of the late Neolithic complex were investigated: the Beckhampton Avenue, Longstones Enclosure and Longstones Cove to the west of Avebury; a section of the West Kennet Avenue and the near-by Falkner’s stone circle; and the Cove within Avebury’s Northern Inner Circle. Initially conceived as a small-scale, low-budget exercise in recording the extant three-dimensional components of the monument complex and the use of Virtual Reality modelling in its phenomenological analysis (see Pollard and Gillings 1998), the project rapidly developed and expanded its remit to incorporate a large programme of excavation. A highly readable account of the project’s early days, its coming into being, struggles with financing, various frustrations and successes, is given in Mike Pitts’ Hengeworld (Pitts 2001b, 178–80, 218–21). Work at the Avebury Cove was not originally intended, but a request from the National Trust for the project team to undertake excavation there in advance of stone stabilisation presented a unique opportunity to add to our knowledge of Avebury’s megalithic settings and fitted well with the project’s aims.

The legacy of research and how it shaped the project

It is in reaction to the exceptional nature of the Avebury monuments, their scale, their survival, and perhaps the promise they seem to hold for comprehending a distant and ‘other’ world of social, spiritual and symbolic relations, that many generations of antiquaries and archaeologists have been drawn to study them. The history of research on the later Neolithic complex has been long, if intermittent, and is dealt with in detail in several publications (Ucko et al. 1991; Cleal and Montague 2001; Pitts 2001b; Burl 2002; Pollard and Reynolds 2002; Gillings and Pollard 2004). Famously, there is the early (mid 17th century) recording by John Aubrey, credited as the ‘discoverer’ of Avebury, though best regarded as the first to recognise the presence of its megalithic components; and the work of William Stukeley. Stukeley, working in the region from 1719–24, produced a remarkably full written and drawn record of Avebury, the two avenues, the Sanctuary and other archaeological features, at a time when many of the surviving megalithic settings were in the process of being removed and broken-up (Ucko et al. 1991; see also Haycock 2002b). The publication of his fieldwork, interleaved with thoughts on pre-Roman patriarchal religion in the British Isles, in Abury: a Temple of the British Druids (1743) left a legacy that had to be negotiated by subsequent researchers, the authors of this volume included. Thus, Richard Colt Hoare and Philip Crocker’s survey of the Avebury complex during the first two decades of the 19th century was very much coloured by Stukeley’s reconstruction of its original form (Colt-Hoare 1821); much the same is true of the ambitious campaigns of excavation and restoration undertaken by Alexander Keiller at Avebury and on the West Kennet Avenue in the 1930s (Smith 1965), and Maud Cunnington’s near-contemporary work at the Sanctuary (Cunnington 1931). In investigating sections of the Beckhampton and West Kennet Avenues, and Longstones Cove, we too have found ourselves influenced and guided by Stukeley’s observations; the work sometimes becoming an exercise in negotiating the direct observations and interpretive ‘gap filling’ of this remarkable 18th-century antiquary.

A second major influence on the project has been the recent work of Alasdair Whittle and the late John Evans of Cardiff University, which has done much to elucidate details of environmental change, histories of occupation and sequences of monument construction during the region’s Neolithic (Evans et al. 1993; Whittle 1993; Whittle et al. 1993; Whittle 1994; 1997b; Whittle et al. 1999; Whittle et al. 2000). In many respects, the project described within this volume continues and builds upon this work. Whittle’s investigation of the complex of late Neolithic palisaded enclosures at West Kennet, under the shadow of Silbury Hill, also provided a sobering lesson. Although part of one enclosure was detected in an aerial photograph in 1950 and subject to a small-scale investigation in the early 1970s, the true date, scale and significance of the site was only revealed during Whittle’s excavations between 1987–1992 (Whittle 1997b). Here was a stunning reminder of how, within such an apparently well-investigated and ‘known’ landscape, a major prehistoric monument could go undetected until very recently. We were to face much the same mixture of both surprise, and a reminder of the potential of what might remain ‘hidden’, through the ‘re-discovery’ of the Beckhampton Avenue in 1999. Largely discredited as a figment of Stukeley’s overactive antiquarian imagination, the Beckhampton Avenue was soon proved to be an archaeological reality through the relatively simple procedure of geophysical survey followed by machine-stripping of an appropriately sized and located area. At 1.3km long, this is now confirmed as one of Europe’s great megalithic constructions.

The research questions

From the outset, the key aim of the Longstones Project was to enhance understanding of the chronology and context of monumentality during the later Neolithic of the Avebury region. Embedded within this was a series of specific questions that guided the choice of site to investigate and the way in which each would be approached through fieldwork. We wished to know the relationships between earlier and later monumental structures in the Avebury landscape, and the extent to which monument construction in the 3rd millennium BC might have served as a means of appropriating historical and mythological pasts. There was the question of whether the building of megalithic avenues reflected a development from a ‘fragmented’ landscape of diverse, freestanding monuments in the 4th millennium BC, to one of cohesion during the 3rd millennium BC: were the megalithic avenues a powerful material expression of a growing concern with unity and the gathering together of sacred sites? We also wished to know whether the creation of the later Neolithic monuments of the Avebury landscape took place during short bursts of constructional activity or was the result of more progressive, steady development.

While each of these research questions has been addressed with varying levels of success, the results of fieldwork forced the project to confront a broader range of archaeological issues than existed within the original, Neolithic-focussed, interpretive remit. Following the excavation of a series of medieval and early post-medieval stone burial and burning pits during the 1999 season, and the discovery of Roman deposits associated with the Longstones Cove during 2000, it became apparent that an exclusive focus upon the region’s Neolithic was inappropriate. Monuments have a tendency to retain a presenc...