'Beyond the Stones' : 35th Anniversary of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site

so stonehenge made one of our most iconic monuments but it's also connected to a much wider sacred landscape and much of this important landscape is part of the stonehenge avery an associated science world heritage site an area of over 26 square kilometers containing some of the most incredible prehistoric monuments in the world but not all of these monuments are as well known as the mighty megaliths at stonehenge so to help celebrate the 35th anniversary of the world heritage site i want to invite you to take a look beyond the stones and explore with me how enigmatic long barrows can provide tangible connections to ancient communities how epic avenues lined with huge stones can help us see how important journeys were to these people and how even gigantic earthworks can give us insight into the people who made them using archaeological discoveries intriguing artifacts artistic reconstructions and of course state-of-the-art technology we'll explore the incredible stories of the journeys people and communities behind some of these magnificent wonderlands [Music] [Music] true [Music] to help understand the world heritage sites i'm going to see dr matt levers at the cookie stone as he discusses how the results of some recent excavations have helped increase our understanding of communities and belief systems within the landscape hi matt hi emma as visitors we might think that the excavations have have stopped in this area but with wessex archaeology has actually undertaken quite a few recently haven't we can you tell me more about them yeah of course um we had carried out a very large program of excavations uh what we call the armed basin programme for the minister of defence we excavated a site just behind me there on lark hill and then another one over in the distance in the middle distance there at bulford right on the edge of the world heritage site the earliest and most interesting thing that we found was it was at lark hill just just over there was what we call a causeway enclosure at its simplest it's a circular space that's marked out by a ring of uh of banks and ditches it's called a causeway enclosure because in between the individual bits of ditch is a causeway so it's not it's not a continuous ring of ditch it's a broken like a string of sausages with gaps in between they're not defensive they're not meant to keep people out they just close off the space this is in the early neolithic this is sort of just after 4000 bc so 6 000 years ago more or less um and at that time people weren't weren't sedentary they were still mobile they moved around they probably were nomadic pastoralists they would have heard of animals and this kind of thing they didn't grow fields full of crops and this kind of stuff so they're mobile and they move around probably seasonally fairly small groups family groups things like this and then every so often they all meet up at various times in in the year and this is probably what these cause of enclosures were it's the places where individual groups of people who have spent most of the year moving around with their animals come together to meet up people will have will have met up to exchange marriage partners whatever their equivalent of marriage partners were you know that kind of thing uh to exchange animals perhaps um people from cornwall would maybe come in here with the stone that they mined from from the lizard peninsula that's very good for making axes pottery from from that part of the world travels over to this part of the world uh you find axes from places like the lake district there's lots of things are moving around really people are moving all around and they're centering in this area might not necessarily be one person coming all that way but the thing might be passed from hand to hand and the objects might travel that whole distance so yeah uh they they will have been the the places where people came to carry out all those kind of activities that glue a society together if you're if you're fairly small disparate groups that meet up occasionally the occasions when you meet up are really important for like social cohesion and things like this so this is what these causes and closures will have been and they'll have been religious centers as well because obviously that's a part of how you glue your society together is through religion but at lark hill what we found is that one of these one of the gaps between these ditches one of these causeways was very broad they're normally not very broad but this one was meters and meters wide so it looked to be an entrance at this entrance it pointed off down a dry valley toward the river raven and just coincidentally it also seems to point at a hill in that direction called sydbury now sydra hill is the highest point on the horizon in that direction from the cause of enclosure at lark hill looking out of that entrance towards sydbury points in a very particular direction and that direction is the direction of the sunrise on mid-summer and that's the thing that obviously you see stonehenge stonehenge is points to the same thing it points to that exact same phenomena much later 700 years later but it's a repeated thing so we can say with some degree of certainty that that causing a closure at lark hill is where it was precisely because it was situated to take advantage of that sun rising over sydra hill it's a it's a very important location in in in the landscape that's it's mind-boggling that the archaeology that we can dig up can tell us about beliefs and practice because it is it's it is actually dug within the landscape even though it's religions in inferible femoral and intangible concept the way that they situate how they live connects to that it does i mean normally when we think about archaeology we think about objects thinking about pots or animal bones or tools or things like that but sometimes you can see you get glimpses into what's going on in people's heads um and that's that's when it gets really interesting is when you can actually figure out what these people were thinking and why they would have been thinking it the evidence that bulford is contemporary with the founding of stonehenge so when stonehenge set that sink in when stonehenge was first built before any of the stones were there and it was just a circular bank and ditch with a ring of uprights possibly timbers possibly stones people were on that hilltop at bulford doing all sorts of very interesting things where we're standing now at the cuckoo stone isn't only interesting because it's the cuckoo stone it's also interesting because of the of a line that it sits on because that way is the stonehenge cursus which is essentially a two mile long straight line uh made by bank and ditch it points to here right things are starting to be connected indeed and if you carry on that way you can see on the near horizon in front of his wood henge yeah wood hinges again that's later that's like neolithic but there's early neolithic material underneath it that sits on the same line if you keep the line going a dead straight line it gets to that hilltop at bulford so there's a there's a there's a line that's marked out through the landscape of early neolithic sites so we're starting to see just just from standing here that it's not our focus shouldn't just be stonehenge it is actually the wider landscape that moves out we've got people moving we've got trade we've got lark hill we've got the causeway enclosure that predates stonehenge this version of stonehenge i mean we've got later on we get bulford it's all starting to rise up you can't hope to understand stonehenge just by looking at stonehenge it doesn't exist in isolation it's a it's an integral part of a much bigger landscape this is one of the reasons why a lot of a lot of interpretations of stonehenge don't make sense because they just look at stonehenge they're in the wood looking and inward looking is no good you've got to be outward looking because everything connects together this is this whole landscape all these features landscape they all connect together [Music] from speaking to mats i'm beginning to see how the excavations at lark hill provide an insight into the people of the early neolithic but i want to find out how these early communities came to be what made people gravitate towards this area and how did those communities interact with the early phases of stonehenge to find out more i'm joined by a familiar face [Music] so behind us phil is bulford and it's quite important to this wider heritage landscape can you tell me more about it i guess and after 50 years of digging if i had to pick out one it'd have to be bullford but it's an amazing sight and it's one of those sorts of sites that makes you glad to be an archaeologist we didn't know it was there until we dug it what did you find there was always right from the word go when we went over it with uh aerial photographs what looked like a big pair of spectacles a figure of eight yeah and these turned out to be two late neolithic henge monuments very very much smaller versions of sort of stonehenge and and the durrington wars behind me and all that sort of thing but but ceremonial monitors but they were they're quite late on in the story the first in the story was a dead man and he was he was a an early neolithic man she was buried on top of the ridge and what i think is important about him being up there is that the people were living on the site were actually living in the valley and i think what we've got here is that is this continuity because down in here you've got the avon valley that's where the mesolithic people were living and so the next stage in our in our island story is from the mesolithic into the early neolithic they didn't just up sticks and come straight out of the valley they carried on a lot of those traditions one of the beauties of of what we found at bullford was that we were getting traces of early neolithic people living in the actual valley and then they would be burying their dead upon the ridge and i think when they put him in the grave they marched that grave with a mound and then after that that site became special do we know why what sort of life he might have lived to make him so special not yet we don't but we will learn more about him and where perhaps he came from whether he was a low court or whether he was an immigrant once we start doing some scientific techniques and that's a beauty of what we can do these days we've got so many techniques that are available to us now that would not have been available to us when i started my career 50 years ago how was it that people came to revere that site and build that kind of figure of eight double henge ah well you see you after uh our early neolithic burial there's an another phase and that's the really important one for me anyway because we had we found 50 pits and they were filled up with an amazing array of of late neolithic early in the late neolithic we're looking now about 3000 bc 2950 bc to be precise because we got so many radio carbon dates we gave up counting they are all exactly the same date and the crucial thing about that is that that is the time when they were actually starting the groundwork at stonehenge that's when they were actually cut in the ditch and creating the bank those people who living at my site in bulford may have been part of the ground workers who are actually building stonehenge and so you've got three phases you've got our early neolithic burial who kick-starts activity on the site really starts to make it special then you have our our our people at the early end of the late neolithic about 2950 bc the people who started building stonehenge then you get the two henges and they're going to be the same people who are starting to put up the big stones at stonehenge so you've got this lovely little link between my site at bulford and the most famous site in the area and that's what makes it so wonderful because i can do that excavation there and i can contribute not merely to this local study but our whole study of of of of neolithic britain if you like you mentioned that there's lots of different artifacts an abundance of artifacts found within these pits what were some of the things that were more memorable the material from my site it's the largest collection of material of that date from the south of england it it was literally groundbreaking stuff wonderful flint work um a really superb object a discoid or knife i never found a discoidal knife in my life and after 50 odd years of digging you tick the box because you found one it was christmas bingo it was christmas come early our pottery from bullford we got a similar set of pottery from on this side of the haven so we've got two sites of the same sort of day on both sides of the haven where do you reckon the pottery has got the nearest connections then in style i don't know somewhere else in the local area i don't know orkney orkney we've got pots that were made in orkney about 3000 bc you could lose them with the pots that i had at bulford but they were also creating phenomenal neolithic monuments and so and so there this is that transfer of iodized transfer of people and this is what makes the whole thing so wonderful you're not just looking at one spot in wheelchair you can start exploding the whole thing and that's the beauty of archaeology making those advances and and this is the wonderful thing about our new techniques and thank the lord they decided to build a housing estate just on the crucial site so with the excavations at balford have they opened up our gaze that by looking out from stonehenge we start to see that people are connected with different sites it does relate so strongly to stonehenge but it so strongly relates also to the river haven because now we've got beaufort of about 2950 bc on the east side of the valley which is associated with the tour stone and we've got a contemporary site associated with a cuckoo stone on the west side so you've got two two contemporary sites both making the same sort of pottery both got links to um saracen stones and both got direct links to stonehenge the neolithic site at balford shows how people at that time were connected to the wider world the incredible assemblage of pottery shows how the sights in this sacred landscape weren't only important locally but drew people in from distant places nowhere is this more visible than in the incredible beaker burial known as the amesbre archer discovered just three miles south east of stonehenge he is an exceptional discovery [Music] we discovered the the burial of a man between 35 and 45 years old who was buried with an immense amount of wealth and objects of the beaker period which is right at the intersection of the end of the stone age in the beginning of the bronze age for instance a very dynamic and interesting period that's happening we obviously were keen to understand where he had come from and one of the techniques that has been coming in the last 10 20 years and has been refined and getting better was isotope analysis by looking at what is stored in his teeth which gives a little fingerprint of the origins where people have come from and that has very clearly indicated that he came from the alpine reaches maybe central northern germany switzerland austria that area and in fact he's a migrant it is interesting to know that at that particular time there are huge changes in britain but certainly stonehenge the last phases of stonehenge are also happening at around about the same time we can probably surmise that one of the draws that brought him to this region was the the power and the nature of the activities going on as uh determined and shown by stonehenge these huge monuments which have drawn people in drawn ideas in and would have acted as focuses for the communities not only locally but potentially internationally the thing about the olmsby archer that is exceptional is the sheer volume and nature of what was buried with him over a hundred and fifty objects were buried in total he didn't have one beaker pot he had five beaker pots had copper knives these are some of the first copper knives in britain to to have been found some of the earliest but he also had flint knives he was right at the cutting edge between the end of the stone age and the bronze age period and his fines reflect both sides we also have some of the uh earliest gold jewelry found with him hairdressers um he had a number of other objects which is why he got called the amesbury archer provisioned for the afterlife so he could hunt and provide for himself with a mass of flint arrowheads he was buried with wrist guards for his wrist um which a finely ground stone which would have been lashed to his wrist and protect against the bow coming back but those objects are from the continent they're from spain potentially france at his back was a small cushion stone which analysis of it afterwards shows that it's a mini anvil and that is one of the keys again at this crucial period in history where metals are starting or just coming in the very early bronze age that here we have an individual who has proof and evidence they were a metal worker they would have been seen as being magicians at the absolute cutting edge of technology they would have been incredibly important to those communities and it can't be a coincidence that the amesbury archer where he came from from continental europe was an area where copper was being produced very early so the amesbury archer is really just signposts some of the ways that we can now get individuals and get the individual stories you can trace their movements not only with the materials that they had and brought with them but also now this the secrets that are hidden inside their bodies in their teeth their movements and this science is absolutely fantastic thousands of years ago these people were making huge journeys we know you know from the goods being traded and things but now you can point to an individual you can actually hold and see an individual that made these trips and journeys and that is fascinating [Music] the amesbre archer and his grave goods provide archaeologists with a scintillating insight into one individual's impact on a community but as i head some 23 miles north to the other half of the world heritage site at avebury phil has promised me an even more tangible look at prehistoric communities and their burial practices [Music] so this is this is amazing can you tell me a little bit about what this place actually is well what we are now in in is the the chamber of the west kenneth longborough it it it's literally an early neolithic tomb if you like and it's about i don't know 3600 bc somewhat like that they excavated in the 50s and there was probably somewhere between anywhere between 30 and 50 individuals people in here there were some burials inhumations but there were some cremations as well but the thing is that because we can walk in now they would have been able to walk in then as well and what you're doing is is that they have a an association with their dead and they would probably have selected bits of granny to take away because they select they worshipped her they had an association with her and quite often times if you look at an early neolithic monuments you find bits of humans not the whole thing would anybody allow be allowed to come in here and bury granny or would it be only special people well we don't know but you see this is one of the beauties of of what we can do as archaeologists because we can excavate these things now i know a lot of people in the modern world say you should you should respect the dead and revere them and honest we do respect them but we want to learn about our ancestors archaeology is all about people and our one place where we can actually touch the people is in a burial chamber like this because we can actually recover their remains it's it's just so exciting this is the first time that i've been in this long borough and i'm just i'm completely blown away if i touch this this is quite rough and all this is quite roughly hewn but that bit there was was was soft it was almost like it's polished that is a as a as a grinding stone it's where people polished and ground stone axes and so that stone was used for something else before it was brought in here this stone here is sarcasm it's one of the hardest stones well it's one of the hardest stones i know that's hours and hours and hours of somebody just gone to make a polished act of flint act that's amazing so the stones mentioned these assassin and these are local to this area they're local to the area but what is not local to these areas are these stones down here now these are these are a limestone yeah and they're being brought in from anywhere between six and 20 miles away you you don't you don't bring this by laurie no the only way you can do it is by people it just goes to show what a community a public effort if you like a construction like this would be and you all remember this thing is 100 meters long yes not just this bit that we can see it's not just this bit do we know what's beyond it's part of a chalk i mean it is literally a chalk bank and it would have been thrown up from the contents of the chalk on the ditches on either side this is all human labor again fjord with anthropics hefting it up by hand and at the end of it you get this gleaming white monument that is going to dominate the landscape not grassy not grassy at all but you see what there is an added bonus there is an added bonus because it means that from an archaeological point of view that area of neolithic landscape has been sealed for like five and a half thousand years so if you want to learn what the world what the world the natural world look like five and a half thousand years ago then what you need is a sample of the old ground surface that's been sealed underneath these banks that's what makes so many of these these areas around ave bree and stonehenge and all the rest of it so important the monuments are incredibly important but it's the the landscapes underneath that they protect and preserve that really is is the this is the source of so much potential information about the world that we that they lived in so we've come up this this big hill but as we were walking up i saw there was another quite unmistakable big hill over there you noticed that one year can you tell me more about it that is silvery hill the largest prehistoric man-made man in europe well come and have a look i've actually got a personal story about that oh i'd love to hear it let's go [Music] what i love about this this this area down here is that we aren't down in the river valleys now in a lot of cases the archaeology is actually better preserved in the river valleys if you can find them that's the difficulty finding the sights but what is happening in the river valleys tends to be that the soils are building up whereas if you go up onto the top of the hill plowing is moving all the soil down so that the actual soil cover and the site preservation is far worse up on top the hill than it might be down here so from an archaeological point of view these environments are absolutely crucial and you've actually dug on silvery hill haven't you we did i was here in 1969 the year that man landed on the moon and i can remember being there we we dug a big hole in in the outside ditch and periodically we could go into the main access to the mound was was into this tunnel they they shot a big tunnel right into the core what i can remember about that i shall never forget is that actually the right in the middle the actual core of the monument is constructed of turbs they actually built it up in stages but the first stage was to strip off all the all the turf and build a turf mound in the middle of a turf core and because you've had all of that chalk cover it literally the grass the grass was still green you you could you could you could see neolithic grass you could see neolithic plants as an example of what this part of the kennet floodplain was like in the late neolithic period that is just an absolute it's a time capsule it is a gem for archaeology you come here and you have to stand in awe of what our neolithic ancestors achieved our prehistoric ancestors achieved what we can learn about things like that is this amazing amount of labor input the the organization that it would have involved the the time scales and more importantly or just as importantly the backup the laborers who were involved in that would have needed to be fed housed watered they would have needed all the backup to keep them going and this is a long-term project the one thing that i bet you they weren't bothered about was time how long is it going to take the main thing is we want to build this thing we are going to create something to be proud of and that is something which that we tend we can tend to overlook how long is it going to take when you're going to finish when you're going to finish get on with it that would have taken as long as it takes well i think we should take our human activity up to the cafe now and i'll get you a drink but it might not be a pint how about that all right [Music] right then phil here's your coffee as promised oh welcome welcome cup of coffee so whilst i've been in the cafe this has appeared what is this beautiful and gigantic bit of flint well i mean i suppose it's sort of self-gratification i mean for a start you know how i love flints and i suppose the the sites that i've been talking to you about have been principally stone age sites and the stone age sites are based around this flint what i call the master substance you know it is it is their means of cutting scraping doing all the functions that they can but this bit here is is exceptional it is gorgeous and tactile i really think this this object was to them a point of reverence so this is not like a big hammer or anything like that no no no this this object i found this i found this in a field just below where the the west kenneth long barrow is you do not get flint of this size in the eighth bree area it ain't there and that means that that flint was brought into the area i think the most likely source is east anglia all the way from east anglia and so that then brings in sets in motions these ideas about some of the patterns that we've been talking about how people are mobile in the landscape how they've been moving around the countryside and of course this site is is literally a stone stroke not a literally no no but a stone throat away from the ridgeway so you're you're you're looking at your your neolithic motorway that that is coming down and it's coming down to to to the avery area yeah what made them stop from the ganache and make a load of axes out of this i'm gonna all the tools i need for life i know you'd like to get your hands on this wouldn't you and no well i but i do but but i wouldn't want to break it up it is such a beautiful object it's a it's a it's not just a stone tool it's a it's a a thing that you put on an altar i keep feeling that so much of what is important about that is if it's viewed in profile we have we've walked up to west kennett long barrow you've seen silvery hill you've not seen silvery hill from above you cannot see silvery hill from above unless you're in an airplane you see silvery hill in profile and i think that this thing was designed to be seen in profile you really get a sense of that echoing the reverence of those landscape features it's just and and you see it's not it's not just those landscape features that we see in profile there's a lot of natural features that we see in profile the set in sun the rosin sun when you see that coming up over the horizon what do you get you get this wonderful curving profile and and it's that relationship that those people that lived in prehistoric period had with with springs with rivers with the natural world they knew that natural world far better than we do in a lot of respects and and i know i'm hypothesizing about this to most people they might say it's just a block of rock it's very beautiful but when you start pondering about it and you start thinking about it where it's come from the mechanics of getting it down there trust me as a flint knapper the craftsmanship in being able to make this sort of thing and and then you realize that it is um i don't know to me a totemic to probably use that word totemic item it is a thing to be revered it's exceptional it is unique through our journey so far we can see just how deep the connections go between people and this sacred landscape and these connections are still with us today these incredible monuments still hold that magnetism and mystery as visitors to the world heritage site we can walk through the same monuments as these ancient communities we can touch worn grindstones inside burial mounds and perhaps even share that same sense of awe as we behold the huge stars and stones within this landscape one particular place within the world heritage site that i find completely awe-inspiring is avery henge and to help me understand this site further national trust archaeologist dr nick snatial has agreed to meet me at the covestone hi nick thanks for joining us can you tell me a little bit about their avery stone circles and henge uh well i suppose the first thing to say about the avery stone circles is they're the largest prehistoric stone circles anywhere in the world and they're not just one monument we've got a huge stone circle and inside it are two smaller stone circles and in each of those there's another stone setting and outside of all of that there's a vast ditch which is about nine meters deep everywhere it's been excavated and outside of that is a commensurately large bank which has four entrances in it so it's just a vast monument in and of its own right now stonehenge and avery are connected has been there the world heritage site but is there any kind of archaeological connection between the two sites uh absolutely there are several connections for a start um they're built and in use at roughly the same time so when we look at the whole of both of the landscapes that surround them the monuments in them all run really from the beginning of the neolithic the period of the first farmers right through to the end of the early bronze age so right down to about 1500 bc but more than that there's a physical connection with some of these rocks the stones that you see here are avery are salsa stones and of course we we know that some of the larger rocks that you see those great grey lentils at stonehenge that are so famous um they assassin too and at least one of them came from not that many miles away from here at west woods which is also on the marlborough downs which is where avery is situated this gigantic rock that we are standing in front of what is it this forms uh part of an inner setting of three stones uh which the antiquity william stookly in the 18th century named the cove because the three of them together looked a little bit like a cove or a harbour a few years ago there were some concerns that this stone and the other surviving stone here of the cove were leaning a little bit and so there had to be some engineering work done and because of that some archaeologists professor as he is now josh pollard and professor mark gillings were sent down to excavate at the base of the stones they got over two metres down and essentially the engineer said you don't need to go any further because this is not going to fall it's so deep in there and it is so huge and the engineers managed to calculate what the um the approximate weight of this stone must be and it weighs a minimum of 100 tons that's almost unfathomable to imagine say it's 100 tons over two meters down do we know what it was used for like how how do they interact with this very tactile massive monuments we don't know for sure at any of these monuments exactly how they're used but one of the interesting things about the shape of this cove as it originally was is it's a little bit informed like if you think of that the horseshoe of stones that sits in the center of stonehenge so and we we kind of see these horseshoe type settings in a number of different places and monuments where you have this inner setting so it's likely that this was one of the central focus of the monument and as far as we can tell this monument appears to be ceremonial in nature ceremonial or ritual we don't find the remains of everyday life inside the henge and stone circles except for in much later period so in the medieval period you know people were living partially inside the engine bits of the village not during the neolithic when they built this not the early farmers so it's a clean monument and then outside of it of course we have that enormous ditch with a bank now if this were defensive and you had a sort of settlement or a fault-like thing you would expect the ditch to be outside of the bank so what they seem to be doing instead is zoning off this special area and why do you need a 10 meter deep ditch to do that well that suggests uh to me at least that what you've got is a very what is seen as a very powerful space in here where possibly there are rituals and ceremonies going on and maybe maybe some of these stones were felt to be you know to contain who knows the spirits of the ancestors the gods or at least that there were special activities that were carried out here that needed to be contained so one of the reasons we're also here in this absolutely incredible landscape is that it is the 35th anniversary of the world heritage site and you've been digging here for around 17 years so how does that anniversary make you feel so world heritage sites are important for what's called their outstanding universal value and what that really means is that they're special to all people for all time and so that kind of gives you a sense of just exactly why these monuments these landscapes are so important so i feel actually very privileged to work here and to help explore but also to care for this place and hope it will be here for many many generations to come [Music] can you tell me a little bit about where we are now we're just standing within the remains of what's known as the southern inner circle and this was one of the two inner circles that sat within the great outer circle which in its turn sat within the huge ditch and bank and what we can see today some of these stones were re-erected by alexander keeler in the 1930s when he excavated here there were a few stones still standing but he found some that had been buried in the medieval period as well and where he found those he re-erected them and put them back into the position that they'd originally stood because he did quite a lot of furious kind of research didn't need to to really get the right location he did he was he was an amazing guy actually kela he was very particular and he sort of gathered a team around him who comprised some of what came to be some of the greatest archaeologists of their day tequila excavated here in the 1930s right up until the outbreak of war in september 1939 and one of the things that he did when he was digging here is he had a very strong sense that he wanted other people to understand the site so when he found a place where a stone had once stood but had been broken up and taken away what he did was erect one of these small markers that you can see here and you can see they're almost like little pyramids and he is of course doing this in the 1930s and in 39 when he's putting these ones up here you're only what 17 years after the discovery of two carmen's tomb so you've got that whole kind of slightly egyptian deco vibe going on as well but he seems to have put quite a lot of thought in to what the markers should be like and he wanted to consider very carefully something that people wouldn't mistake for a stone but they wouldn't miss either and they could see that it's man-made but it would give them an indication an impression of what the site would once have been like and one of the other phases that we spoke about earlier is are these two stones here can you tell me more about them well the two large ones that we see beyond the southern inner circle are what we call the portal stones so essentially these are gateway stones into the huge henge bank and into the stone circles and originally there would have been four entrances a number of the stones survived today some of them fallen and these are are the only two that are still standing if you look beyond that then that leads down through the entrance of the through the banks and on to the west kenneth avenue and all these phones here are these ones that alexander keeler found or did he put them back well summon some so there were some stones still standing here in the avenue when he came here but he also reacted re-erected quite a number including uh placing his little markers here as well tomorrow west homes have once stood it's amazing you see as you walk up here as we look up towards top of the hill we can see some of uh keeler's stones that he's put in but we can't actually see every henge at all now can we no it's really interesting when you look at this avenue it leads all the way from the sanctuary it's almost two miles long but it weaves its way here so it weaves um throughout the landscape and it just kinks round to the left as it comes over the top of the hill and then kinks back again so it takes in other monuments along the way so we've got as you come over to the top of the hill you've got windmill hill a much older enclosure site right in front of you framed and then it turns you back towards the massive banks of avery henge with the stone circles inside it and is that a deliberate movement is it to kind of help tell a story of what's around you very much so i think so you're looking at societies that relied on oral tradition to pass on information and memory so moving through the landscape and referencing monuments along the way that might tell stories about people's ancestors or things that have happened in the past would have been a really important way of maintaining that information from generation to generation i hated some excavations recently just down there could you tell me more about them yes just a few years ago we were excavating if you can see where the gap with the small markers is between the stones we were excavating in that area and the reason we've chosen that was because it was an area that killer had explored in the 30s and he'd had some really interesting findings when we were there what we discovered was that what we appear to have there is an occupation site a place where people were coming hundreds of years before these stones were put up but probably at the same time when a much smaller monument is being erected on the footprint of the large henge bank so sitting on the footprint that's there today but much smaller in scale so we're talking about the middle neolithic so several hundred years after the first farmers arrived here and we found a thing or two while we were there what's in your pocket well this rather wonderful thing um is part of a ceremonial mace head i say part because it's been deliberately broken in two so what we can see here is incredibly smooth on the outside but on the inside we can see the remains where it would have been halved it so you would have had if you imagine my finger is is a wooden shaft going through the middle and you can see it's highly polished and that's because the way it was made with abrasives to make the hole to put the shaft in and these things we know from other contexts are often deliberately broken in mortuary contexts so in other words maybe to mark the death of an important individual or part of a ceremony and it may be that when people are coming here during the middle neolithic either somebody important has died here or maybe they've brought the ashes of someone with them to be scattered in the wider landscape so what would it mean to to find something like this on a site like that down there well finding something like this is an amazing experience you know whether it's this or an arrowhead you know or a simple piece of stoneworking waste from flint workers because these things scattered beneath the turf here they lie beneath people's feet for century upon century and millennia upon millennia and nobody knows they're there but to me what they are are the kind of last vestiges of the lives of those people they're what tell their story they can't speak they haven't left any books behind them so in many ways it's up to us to uncover those stories and to be able to share them with everybody it's just beautiful and i like to think that the way the way that we touch this and kind of revere this the smooth side the person who made this would have been proud that they'd made such a beautiful and tactile object so we can really connect to the past can't we by walking along these landscapes and thinking what lies beneath our feet and what who has lived here absolutely i think there's a very direct connection in in the world heritage site with the archaeology the stuff if you like both material objects like this beautiful mace head and arrowheads and actually literally the turf beneath our feet the landscape where these people have trodden before us [Music] alexander keeler's influence on avery henge is undeniable and i want to find out what drove this so-called amateur archaeologist so i'm catching up with dr roz cleo curator for the alexander keeley museum at the national trust we are at the alexander keilan museum who was he and how did he contribute to our understanding of archaeology in on this site he was a scotsman i was born in dundee and he came from the killers of dundee marmalade family we don't really know why he got into archaeology but he um it was it was an absolute passion and in those days there weren't really professional archaeologists um and so although you can call him an amateur really he did it in a professional way and he came to avebry in the mid-1920s to work at a site called windmill hill and and then he moved down into the village and he started work on the stone circle and he essentially spent several years excavating within avery on what we know as the west kenneth avenue and the avery henge when he first came to avery there were only 15 standing stones in the henge itself and there were now 42 so he found most of those couple were fallen but mostly he found them buried and he put them up so actually the way avery looks today although it's it you know he didn't make avery up um he did restore it in a way so because a lot of the stuff we know about the site is from here his diaries the way he recorded things do we get a sense of what he was like as a person like was this an obsession for him yeah yeah oh yes yes i think so reading his letters and his notebooks um he's very funny actually at times um but yes very obsessive and and he didn't do anything in a casual fun sort of way when it came to archaeology he was meticulous so you you mentioned that he actually erected some of this or returned some of the stones to their position how did he know where to put them well he absolutely agonized over it it's really interesting when you see his thinking and he he sort of writes it down in fact we know that he dictated um he had a dictating machine and we have a tiny scrap of his voice um and so he dictated and we have long detailed sort of agonizings over you know there's this tiny bit of a stone hole left but it's not complete and which direction it is and which way round was the stone he's he's thinking it through you know in the way that we would do nowadays if we were ever to do what he did which is unlikely but he was really thoughtful about it and i think he probably did his best can you talk me through this beautiful metal that we've got i'm just i'm just dying to hear more about this this is one of my favorite objects it's a beaker pot people may have heard of the beaker people and they can be traced across europe and they come to this country in about from about 4 400 years ago now this doesn't have a radiocarbon date so we don't know exactly how old this one is it's certainly over 4 000 years old and it was disturbed during agriculture so they were plowing so they came across a great sauce and stone and under it was a grave with about a five-year-old child in and this was the main thing that that the child had there were some flint sort of flint tools but this was the main thing and not everybody was buried with a pot at beaker pot at all and children are not that common um with beakers so obviously a child had some sort of status was well thought of was loved maybe you know i'm sure they were did they believe that they would need that in the afterlife it seems to suggest they did believe in an afterlife doesn't it i mean it's sort of we can't we can't know that but they're giving people things to take with them well and all these these little marks these patterns on there do we know how they were made they're mostly made with a little notched tool a sort of comb and they press it into the the clay when it's quite wet that sort of pattern that sort of shape is it's not particularly common to this part of the country it's possible that they came from somewhere else i mean we do have pots that have come from elsewhere so um yeah but it's just so it's just beautiful and the story behind it whoever gave them that pot they've got the loss of that child and the loss of this important vessel in their culture as well so it's now the 35th year of the world heritage site what does what does that significance mean for you i think it's wonderful we've had 35 years of being recognized you know as such an important site most people know stonehenge avery is much less well known so i think to be included in the wild heritage site in 1986 was um a fantastic thing to have happened and um i think people are more aware of they've now you know the complexity of the neolithic i think is very well illustrated at avery we don't have the the the central monument that is unique like stonehenges um but you know we have some pretty astounding monuments and also there's been such a lot of research i think that's been fostered by being part of that world heritage site so we were one of the first in the world to have a research agenda in 2001 and we've had there's hardly been a year now and there hasn't been important research happening in the afb area there are still projects being written up now and i'm not sure that that would have happened without it being a world heritage site people have been coming to this ancient landscape for millennia and we still revere this site even today more recent discoveries at sites like lark hill and bullford have helped shed new lights on the people and communities who helped shape this amazing ceremonial landscape but it's also down to the people now in the present people like the archaeologists the rangers the custodians stewards and even visitors of the stonehenge and avery world heritage site that'll help us protect it for another 6 000 years [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: wessexarchaeology

Views: 271,230

Keywords: History, Heritage, National Trust, Stonehenge, Stonehenge landscape, Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Prehistory, Amesbury Archer, Phil Harding, Wessex Archaeology, Archaeology, archeology, Jacqueline McKinley, Discovery, King, Neolithic, Beaker, Bronze Age

Id: YqTvFw-ggnk

Length: 60min 33sec (3633 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022