Avebury Monumental Complex

Avebury, a vast henge monument discussed last week, was developed into a far more elaborate complex during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. This is probably linked to the influx of a new people and culture from Europe who brought with them bronze-working technology and a vastly different way of life. It’s most likely the two cultures blended to form a new way of life and spiritual tradition. In this new world, individual wealth and power were becoming paramount.

Avebury’s two avenues, running from the south and west entrances, were built between 2600-2300BC; the early Bronze Age. There is no evidence for corresponding avenues for the other entrances.

The Beckhampton Avenue, now comprising only two stones, ran westwards along what is now Avebury High Street then curved southwest to the Longstones Enclosure, a causewayed enclosure created 600-800 years before the avenue itself. The enclosure had been long destroyed but its significance had remained in folk memory. Two long barrows, much earlier still, were also found nearby. Clearly the avenue’s builders were careful to include these ancient features built by their earliest ancestors.

The West Kennet Avenue runs southwards from Avebury to the Sanctuary, a stone and timber monument above the river Kennet. The serpentine route has been suggested to reflect the sinuous flow of a river, and it crosses the low-lying and once marshy ground around the Kennet before climbing the hillside to the Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is visible from almost all parts of the avenue, but Avebury itself is almost entirely hidden, suggesting the avenue may have been a processional path leading from Avebury to the Sanctuary rather than the other way around.

The West Kennet Avenue looking towards the Sanctuary.

Some of the stones had pottery, flint-working debris, human bones and sometimes entire burials at their base. People used the stones to mark graves, or to safeguard memories of lives or key events. Did individual families or settlements bring a stone from a place meaningful to them and raise it in the avenue, then leave gifts or loved ones’ remains at its base? The monument as a whole would then form a unified meld between all families and communities, strengthening relationships in a world where increasingly every person was for themselves.

Around this time, an unusual amount of human bones was deposited in Avebury’s ditches. This may have been ancestral remains from the now-ancient long barrows, which were closed for good around this time. Perhaps Avebury was a last haven for the old culture. Or perhaps people were sealing the memories of their past into its confines, so the land itself would remember them.

A nearby sarsen field. Stones with particular significance were taken to Avebury and incorporated into the monument.

Avebury now seems to be about memory and story. The avenues link several ancient features, including an ancient feasting site incorporated through a bend in the West Kennet Avenue, to tell a narrative history. I imagine people came to Avebury and processed from stone to stone in a communal remembrance of people and events, a commemoration of the histories of the places they passed, and their myths and legends of their existence.