Avebury excavations: evidence emerges of hidden lives of people who built Avebury

 

The team of archaeologists who have been excavating in Avebury’s West Kennet Avenue for the past three years, are back again and they are making some astonishing finds.

This large portion of a polished stone mace head (right – with details at left) is being held by Dr Nick Snashall, the National Trust’s Archaeologist for Stonehenge and Avebury.  The outside is highly polished  – and still, after some 5,000 years, has a surface that feels like silk.  

It would have been mounted on a wooden shaft – much like a sceptre – and used in ceremonies or as a status symbol.  The hole through the middle would probably have been made by a bow drill using an abrasive like sand.

‘Dr Nick’ tells how it was found: “We were all trowelling away happily when Josh [Dr Josh Pollard of Southampton University] suddenly whooped, then made a wailing sound, followed by a good thirty seconds of hysterial laughter – which isn’t normal even for Josh.”

“There was a long pause, before he announced he’d found a large part of a polished stone mace head. Josh, Mark [Dr Mark Gillings of Leicester University] and I are well on our way to our century if you tot up our digging experience and have spent a good part of our lives digging on Neolithic sites – but none of us have ever found one of these beauties before.”

The site being dug, in Avebury’s West Kennet Avenue, was first discovered by millionaire archaeologist Alexander Keiller eighty years ago and is crammed with Neolithic stone tools and pottery lying just inches below the turf.

They have found arrow heads, clusters of carefully worked flint scrapers, miniature flint saw and pottery: “It’s as if the people were sitting here working away making arrowheads, scraping skins and carrying out their daily tasks and then they just got up and walked away.”

Currently in the middle of a three-week dig, the team of experts from the National Trust, Southampton and Leicester Universities and Allen Environmental Archaeology (Dr Mike Allen) have spent the last three years investigating the site which is finally beginning to give up the secrets of Avebury’s prehistoric inhabitants.

The Between the Monuments Project is aiming to put the people back into Avebury – which has been famous for four hundred years for its marvellous but inanimate stones.  There have been a series of excavations and geophysical explorations, but this dig is turning up the most exciting evidence.

They are uncovering a series of post holes – the remains of a structure which may well have formed a house. These holes may not look much to the untrained eye and are often filled with top soil that has worked into the hole in the chalk – but they are very significant.

“If this does turn out to be a house we’ll have hit the jackpot. I could count the number of middle Neolithic houses that have been found on the fingers of one hand.”

“This site dates from a time when people are just starting to build the earliest parts of Avebury’s earthworks, so we could be looking at the home and workplace of the people who saw that happening.”

One of the signs that this may have been a dwelling of some kind is that the finds of arrow heads and flint scrapers are being found outside its limits – leaving the ‘interior’ free of sharp objects and clutter.

Dr Nick Snashall says the question she is most often asked by visitors to Avebury is “Where did the people who built Avebury live?”  She may soon be able to show them.