As Avebury excavations close – a new and earlier monument is identified

At Avebury on Friday (August 7), they were putting the carefully sifted soil back into the trenches – the end of the third year of excavations near where Alexander Keiller dug in the 1930s and found a wealth of Neolithic evidence.  

A few days before this year’s dig ended, the archaeologists found clear evidence that an earth bank made by humans – perhaps constructed using turves – existed before the stones of Avebury’s West Kennett Avenue were raised.  

It is now possible that the Avenue’s stones were – sometime later – placed on either side of this bank, which has now vanished leaving only traces in the soil structure – traces which it is impossible to date.

Like the Neolithic mound at nearby Marden, this bank has been largely levelled by later human activity and by worms – leaving behind a great number of uncertainties.  

The bank is just one of several surprising discoveries made during this year’s excavations in Avebury’s West Kennett Avenue by the team of experts from Southampton and Leicester Universities, Allen Environmental Archaeology and the National Trust,.  

The dig is part of the Between the Monuments programme, which aims to find out much more about the people who built Avebury’s monuments and used them.   But many of the Neolithic finds revealed in the last three weeks are thought to date from about 3000-3100 BC – hundreds of years before Avebury and Silbury Hill were built.

The dig is revealing many secrets about Avebury’s prehistoric inhabitants.  It is also raising big new questions – not least of which is why the bank was built there.  Talking to local visitors to the dig, Dr Mark Gillings referred to this discovery as the ‘enigmatic bank’.

Among other discoveries made in the later stages of the dig are, in one of the two trenches, a huge posthole and, in the other trench, a pit that had been filled in and then reopened as a hiding place for a cache of arrow heads and flint scrapers and covered again.

One of the most intriguing discoveries is that among the large amount of local flint in the Avenue’s soil, there are flints from other parts of Britain.  One of these flints, a Bullhead Flint, is only found in Kent – it has very distinctive orange coloured markings.  

Other flints are also from east of Avebury – from the lower Thames valley.  Were they brought to Avebury as part of some ritual – or were they just dropped as people moved about the country?

One of the theories about the creation of Silbury Hill is that over a long period of time people brought soil and stones from their own areas to add to the structure – perhaps as a way to mark the significance of their own home areas.

The large posthole had good-sized sarsen stones and chalk packed around the post. The wooden post itself has, of course, decayed completely into the earth.  But from the size and depth of the hole, it is thought the pole could have been five or six metres tall.

The pole, somebody said, could have been about the height and girth of a totem pole – and then probably wished he had not made the comparison: think of the headlines.  The key to this find will be dating the posthole from any organic traces left there – though the initial thought of the archaeologists is that it is late Neolithic.

Very close to the posthole is a very large ‘tree-throw hole’ – these are left beneath the surface when a tree topples over and eventually even its roots decay away.  It has been tempting to imagine that the tall pole in the posthole may have been raised to commemorate this veteran or simply treasured tree that had succumbed to old age.

The dig has produced material for a good year’s worth of laboratory work.  And one of the key dating exercises will be for the double pit with its cache of valued flints and arrow heads.  

This year’s work on the site has revealed 32 arrow heads – with more turning up as flints are washed an cleaned.  There is more about the dig and its finds in our earlier report.

One thing is certain – there is a huge amount of Neolithic activity still to be uncovered in the Avebury area.