Avebury

The chronology of Avebury's construction is unclear. It was not designed as a single monument but is the result of separate projects undertaken at different times during late prehistory. Aubrey Burl has suggested dates of around 3000 BC for the central cove, 2900 BC for the inner stone circle, 2600 BC for the outer circle and the henge, and about 2400 BC for the avenues. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the henge was made by the middle of the third millennium BC, while dates from some of the stone settings indicate a construction period of roughly 2870 to 2200 BC. Building on that scale indicates that a stable agrarian economy had developed in Britain by around 4000 to 3500 BC; the people who raised such monuments had to be secure enough to spend time on activities that were not essential to survival. Mike Parker Pearson noted that the stones were added to the henge at a similar date to the construction of Silbury Hill and the major building projects at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, and speculated that a “religious revival” at that time drew huge quantities of resources into ceremonial monuments.

The henge is a large circular bank with its ditch on the inside, measuring 347.4 metres in diameter and over 1,000 metres in circumference. Within it lies the great outer circle, 331.6 metres across, one of the largest stone circles in Europe and the largest in Britain, either contemporary with the earthworks or built four or five centuries after them. It is thought to have held 98 sarsen standing stones, some weighing in excess of 40 tons; the two at the southern entrance have an unusually smooth surface, likely because stone axes were polished against them. Two smaller circles stand nearer the middle, the northern ring holding a cove of three stones, the southern ring destroyed in the 18th century, the remaining sections of its arc now lying beneath the village buildings. The West Kennet Avenue, an avenue of paired stones, leads from the south-eastern entrance, and traces of a second, the Beckhampton Avenue, lead out from the western entrance.

What the builders intended has remained elusive, and archaeologists have not settled it. Many have suggested that the henge could have been a meeting place for the people of the area at seasonal fairs or festivals, with those attending watching ceremonies from the earthen banks. A lack of pottery and animal bone in the excavated material has been read as a sign that entry to the henge was prohibited, the absence of “mess” indicating “sanctity”. Burl believed that rituals were performed at Avebury “to appease the malevolent powers of nature” that threatened Neolithic life, such as the winter cold, death and disease. Colin Richards, working from the circles of Orkney, suggested that such monuments might have represented the centre of the world, an axis mundi, a possibility Aaron Watson took up for Avebury, while the two rough shapes of the stones, tall and slender or short and squat, have produced theories about the importance of gender in Neolithic Britain. Human bone recovered by Harold St George Gray points to some form of funerary purpose, with parallels in the disarticulated bone often found at earlier causewayed enclosures, and ancestor worship has been proposed as a purpose that need not exclude any male and female ritual role. Because the ditch lies inside the bank, the defining characteristic of a henge, the earthwork could have served a purpose that was not defensive; astronomical alignment remains a common theory for the positioning of the stones.

By the British Iron Age the monument had ceased to be used for its original purpose and was instead largely ignored, with little archaeological evidence that many people visited it. Burl believed that the Iron Age Britons living in the region would not have known when, why or by whom Avebury had been built, perhaps holding some vague understanding that an earlier society had raised it, or taking it for the dwelling of a supernatural entity. After the Roman invasion of southern Britain in AD 43, visitors reached Avebury and its surrounding monuments along a newly constructed road, coming from the nearby towns of Cunetio and Durocornovium and from the villas and farms around Devizes; Roman-era pottery sherds uncovered from the ditch are the evidence they left behind.

Signs of settlement appear at Avebury in the Early Middle Ages. A grubenhaus, a timber hut with a sunken floor, was constructed just outside the west bank in the 6th century, though only a few farmers appear to have inhabited the area at the time and they left the monument largely untouched; during the 10th century a church was built just west of it. Burl raised the possibility that a small group of British warriors used Avebury as a fortified site to defend themselves against Anglo-Saxon attack, an idea he took from etymology, the site perhaps having been called weala-dic, or Waledich, meaning “moat of the Britons”, in the Old English of the incoming settlers. Those settlers followed their own pagan religion, and four sites within a ten-mile radius of Avebury appear to be named after the god Woden, among them Wansdyke and Waden Hill, though whether they attached any religious association to the henge itself is not known. The earliest known written record of the monument is a charter of King Athelstan of 939, which defined the boundaries of Overton, the parish adjacent to Avebury. In the following century invading Viking armies from Denmark came into conflict with Anglo-Saxon groups in the area, and it may be that they destroyed Avebury village; the prehistoric mound at Silbury Hill was fortified and used as a defensive position, apparently by a local Anglo-Saxon population attempting to protect itself from Viking aggression.

By the Late Middle Ages England had been entirely converted to Christianity, and Avebury, an evidently non-Christian monument, began to be associated with the Devil in the popular imagination of the locals. The largest stone at the southern entrance became known as the Devil's Chair, the three stones that once formed the Beckhampton cove as the Devil's Quoits, and the stones inside the North Circle as the Devil's Brand-Irons. At some point in the early 14th century the villagers began to demolish the monument, pulling down the large standing stones and burying them in ready-dug pits at their sides, presumably because they were seen as having been erected by the Devil and as standing in opposition to the village's Christian beliefs. How that situation came about is unknown, though Burl suggests it might have been at the prompting of the local Christian priest, the likely contenders being Thomas Mayn, who served the village from 1298 to 1319, or John de Hoby, who served from 1319 to 1324. Soon after the toppling of many of the stones the Black Death hit the village in 1349, almost halving the population; those who survived focused on the agricultural work that kept them alive, and would have had neither the time nor the manpower to attempt any further demolition.

It was in the early modern period that Avebury was first recognised as an antiquity that warranted investigation. Around 1541 John Leland, librarian and chaplain to Henry VIII, travelled through Wiltshire and made note of the existence of Avebury and its neighbouring prehistoric monuments. The site nonetheless remained relatively unknown to anyone but locals: when the antiquarian William Camden published his Latin guide to British antiquities, Britannia, in 1586, he made no mention of it, and although he rectified that in the English edition of 1610, the monument at “Abury” received only a fleeting reference as what he believed to have been “an old camp”. Sir John Harington referred to it again in 1634 in his notes to Orlando Furioso, after which further antiquarian investigation was prevented by the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651, one of whose battles was fought five miles from Avebury at Roundway Down.

John Aubrey first encountered the site while out hunting in 1649 and was, in his own words, “wonderfully surprised at the sight of those vast stones of which I had never heard before”. Hearing of Avebury and taking an interest in it, Charles II commanded Aubrey to come to him and describe the site, which he did in July 1663; a fortnight later the two travelled to visit it together on the monarch's trip to Bath, and the king, further captivated, commanded Aubrey to dig underneath the stones in search of human burials. Aubrey never undertook that order, but in September 1663 he began a more systematic study, producing a plan that has proved invaluable for later archaeologists because it recorded many standing stones that were destroyed by locals soon afterwards. His description of the monument at “Aubury” appeared in the new edition of the Britannia published in 1695, while the many notes he made privately on Avebury and other prehistoric monuments remained unpublished.

Destruction at Avebury reached its peak in the latter part of the 17th and then the 18th centuries, possibly influenced by the rise of Puritanism in the village, which vehemently denounced things considered to be pagan. The majority of the standing stones were smashed up for building material in the local area, the method being to light a fire to heat the sarsen, pour cold water on it to create weaknesses in the rock, and then break up the fire-cracked stone with a sledgehammer. The antiquarian William Stukeley visited in 1719 and witnessed the destruction being carried out by the local people; between then and 1724 he returned to the village six times, sometimes staying for two or three weeks at the Catherine Wheel Inn, and made meticulous plans of the site. Disgusted by the breaking of the sarsens, he named the local farmers and builders responsible and wrote that “this stupendous fabric ... hath fallen a sacrifice to the wretched ignorance and avarice of a little village unluckily plac'd within it”. Stukeley took Avebury for a “British Temple” fashioned by the druids in the year 1859 BC, read the two inner circles as temples to the moon and to the sun respectively, and came to believe that Avebury and the monuments around it were a landscaped portrayal of the Trinity, backing up his erroneous idea that the druids had followed a religion very much like Christianity. He published his findings in Abury, a Temple of the British Druids in 1743, having intentionally falsified some of his measurements to fit his theories about the site's design and purpose. A rival explanation was already in print: the Reverend Thomas Twining's Avebury in Wiltshire, the Remains of a Roman Work of 1723 held that the monuments were the work of the later Romans, on the reasoning that writers such as Julius Caesar and Tacitus had not referred to stone circles among the Iron Age Britons whereas later historians had described such megaliths.

Excavation at Avebury began piecemeal. In 1829 the foot of the Cove stone was dug to a depth of a yard, and in 1833 Henry Browne claimed to have found evidence at the Cove for burnt human sacrifices. In 1865 the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society supported A. C. Smith and W. Cunnington through a week of excavation in fourteen places, including around the Cove, where they found no human bones. In 1894 Sir Henry Meux sponsored a trench through the bank of the south-east sector which gave the first indication that the earthwork had been built in two phases; at a depth of four feet the diggers uncovered a “curious box-like structure formed of chalk blocks” containing twenty deer horn picks of large size, all worn down by use.

By the beginning of the Victorian era in 1837 the majority of the Neolithic standing stones had gone, either buried by pious villagers in the 14th century or broken up for building material in the 17th and 18th, while the population of the village was rising and further housing was being built inside the henge. In the 1870s, to prevent more construction on the site, the wealthy politician and archaeologist Sir John Lubbock, later created Baron Avebury, purchased much of the available land within the monument and encouraged other buyers to build their houses outside the henge rather than within it. Interpretation from outside archaeology continued alongside the digging: the Reverend R. Weaver's The Pagan Altar of 1840 gave Avebury and Stonehenge to the Phoenicians, James Fergusson's Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries of 1872 made the megaliths an Early Medieval monument commemorating the final battle of King Arthur, and W. S. Blacket's Researches into the Lost Histories of America of 1883 credited Native Americans from the Appalachian Mountains. Burl has defined such readings as “more phony than factual” and in many cases “entirely untenable”.

The site was next surveyed and excavated on behalf of the British Association by a team of workmen under the direction of Harold St George Gray, who worked there in 1908, 1909, 1911, 1914 and 1922. A group walking the site during the first season reported that “Mr. Gray went down 17 ft. from the present bottom to the original one”, finding levels with pottery of which the oldest and lowest was “either early Bronze or pure Neolithic, dating Avebury as 1700 BC”. The discovery of over 40 antler picks on or near the bottom of the ditch allowed Gray to demonstrate that the builders had dug 11 metres down into the natural chalk using red deer antlers as their primary digging tool, throwing up a bank 9 metres high around the perimeter. He recorded the base of the ditch as 4 metres wide and flat, though later archaeologists have questioned his use of untrained labour and suggested that its form may have been different. Gray found few artefacts in the ditch fill, but he did recover scattered human bones, among which jawbones were particularly well represented, and at a depth of about 2 metres the complete skeleton of a woman 1.5 metres tall.

Alexander Keiller developed an interest in Avebury and the West Kennet Avenue while excavating at nearby Windmill Hill, and decided that the best way to preserve the monument was to purchase it in its entirety. Heir to the James Keiller and Son marmalade business, he used his wealth to acquire much of the site between 1924 and 1939, along with Windmill Hill, as much of the Kennet Avenue as he could obtain, and Avebury Manor, where he lived until his death in 1955. He financed and led excavations on the West Kennet Avenue in 1934 and 1935, the north-west sector of Avebury in 1937, the south-west sector in 1938 and the south-east sector in 1939. Much of what stands at Avebury today can reasonably be called his creation, since he directed his team to find and re-erect fallen or buried stones and to build concrete pylons in the places of missing ones. Stuart Piggott co-directed the excavations, the local archaeologist William E. V. Young served as foreman, Doris Emerson Chapman illustrated the stones and the facial reconstructions of human remains found across the landscape, and Denis Grant King produced illustrations, plans and section drawings; upwards of 50 men from across Wiltshire worked as hands over the six years, doing the digging and the re-erecting of the stones.

It was Keiller's team that reached the man who had died in the medieval clearance. In 1938 they excavated the skeleton of a man from beneath Stone 38, later renumbered Stone 9, who had been carrying a leather pouch holding three silver coins dated to around 1320 to 1325, together with a pair of iron scissors and a lancet. From those tools the excavators surmised that he had probably been a travelling barber-surgeon who journeyed between market towns offering his services, and the evidence suggests he was fatally injured when the stone fell on him as he dug the hole in which it was to be buried in a medieval “rite of destruction”. He is known as the Barber Surgeon of Avebury, and the stone took its name from him; his death appears to have prevented the locals from pulling down any further stones, perhaps out of fear that a vengeful spirit, or the Devil himself, had exacted retribution for the toppling, and legends about a man crushed by a falling stone were still being told in the village in the 18th and 19th centuries. Of the 98 stones thought to have stood originally, only nine were still upright by 1939, with another ten fallen and the rest destroyed or buried by villagers in a process that had begun at least as early as the 1700s. Keiller and Piggott published only short reports: the outbreak of the Second World War, Keiller's failing health and dwindling finances, and Piggott's career, which took him abroad during the war and into new projects afterwards, meant that no full account appeared until Isobel Smith, commissioned by Gabrielle Keiller to synthesise and complete it, published in 1965, reorganised the stone numbering for the landscape and set Windmill Hill, Avebury and the West Kennet Avenue in context.

Keiller sold some of his property to the National Trust in 1943, and the Trust went on to acquire further farmland in the area; its policy was to demolish the houses within the circle as they fell vacant, but by 1976 those remaining were allowed to stand. Avebury has been a scheduled monument since 1882, and in 1986 the Stonehenge and Avebury landscape was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, now listed as Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites. The National Trust manages the monument, which it owns and operates jointly with English Heritage. By the late 1970s the site was drawing around a quarter of a million visitors a year, and the question of access at certain times of the year has been controversial, the Trust holding discussions with a number of groups about it. The monument has been adopted as a sacred site by adherents of contemporary Pagan religions including Druidry, Wicca and Heathenry, who regard it as a “living temple”; one group, the Gorsedd of Bards of Caer Abiri, concentrates almost entirely on ceremonies at the henge, which it calls Caer Abiri, its original ceremony composed by Philip Shallcrass of the British Druid Order in 1993. The Alexander Keiller Museum, built by Keiller in the 17th-century stables to hold the artefacts recovered from Windmill Hill and Avebury, is operated by English Heritage and the National Trust; its collections belong to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and are on loan to the Trust, and they include the skeleton of a child nicknamed “Charlie” found in a ditch at Windmill Hill, whose reburial the Council of British Druid Orders requested in 2006 before a decision was taken in April 2010 to keep it on public view. Investigation has continued alongside the worship and the visitors: in April 2003, during preparations to straighten some of the stones, one was found to extend at least 2.1 metres below ground and was estimated to weigh more than 100 tons, a National Trust geophysical survey later that year revealed at least 15 of the megaliths lying buried in the south-east and north-east quadrants, and in 2017 a survey by archaeologists from the universities of Leicester and Southampton indicated “an apparently unique square megalithic monument within the Avebury circles”, which may be among the earliest structures on the site.