The origins of Avebury by Mark Gillings, Joshua Pollard and Kristian Strutt
Antiquity, Volume 93, Issue 368, April 2019
Published online: 10 April 2019
The Avebury henge is one of the famous megalithic monuments of the European Neolithic, yet much remains unknown about the detail and chronology of its construction. Here, the results of a new geophysical survey and re-examination of earlier excavation records illuminate the earliest beginnings of the monument. The authors suggest that Avebury's Southern Inner Circle was constructed to memorialise and monumentalise the site of a much earlier ‘foundational’ house. The significance here resides in the way that traces of habitation may take on special social and historical value, leading to their marking and commemoration through major acts of monument building.
If our new interpretation of the structure within the Southern Inner Circle as an Early Neolithic house is correct, the implications for understanding Avebury's origins are profound: the ancestry of one of Europe's great megalithic monuments can be traced back to the monumentalisation of a relatively modest dwelling. This supports Julian Thomas's view that fourth-millennium BC tombs and houses/halls played an active role in the creation and commemoration of foundational social groups.
Since its unexpected discovery in 1939, the Z-feature at Avebury has presented an interpretative conundrum. Smith (1965: 251) came close to our preferred explanation when she proposed a link with Early Neolithic funerary architecture, in that the settings within the Southern Inner Circle deliberately echo elements of a long barrow, with the Obelisk representing a burial deposit. Instead of a tomb, however, the Z-feature settings can now be considered to commemorate a form of domestic architecture.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/origins-of-avebury/DB43C9DCF03F2F2B75E487DE0D312B75/core-reader#
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