Escherichia coli

The stones at Avebury were visited over the course of several days in December 2016.

Conditions were dry, cold, and clear, though dusk fell early and daylight was noticeably poorer after 2pm on each day. Lichen cover is a challenge, as very public nature makes it difficult to clean – natural clefts in rock with as little coverage as possible chosen.

Avebury is the kind of monument and ritual landscape that would sound like a work of fantasy if it were being described to you for the first time without you knowing it truly existed:

a grand circle made of massive, multi-tonne sarsen blocks transported across the plain from Marlborough Down and possibly further, its enormous ditch and bank dug by hand with antler and bone tools, containing multiple (and many since disappeared) smaller satellite circles and stone features, all sitting in a landscape riddled with similarly massive

monumental structures including a massive artificial hill, a stone-lined avenue of several miles, and great mounds to the dead. To those growing up in the pastoral idyll of Avebury village as it was up until the latter half of the twentieth century, this was an everyday kind of landscape: from Saxon settlers the village grew inside the great circle, and in the midst of religious fervour and profiteering the stones were burnt and broken to build new homes, livestock sheltered in the lea of surviving stones, and the surrounding pastures were

ploughed and planted. It took until the 1870s and John Lubbock’s passion for prehistory (and deep pockets) to attempt to halt the burying, burning, and general vandalism by buying up land to rescue it, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that Alexander Keiller was able to use his marmalade fortune to purchase the entire site and begin the work of excavating, reinstating, and reinvigorating the stones and landscape. Keiller may have tried to recapture some kind of prehistoric golden age by removing “modern” buildings from the circle, but his efforts were thwarted and it still inhabits the circle today, in a sometimes uneasy peace brokered

between villagers, heritage organisations, spiritual journeyers, and millions of curious tourists.

The site has been subject to many different archaeological investigations, from the passionate curiosity and druidical leanings of Stukeley to Keiller’s ambitious land-clearing and excavations of the 1930s, to recent geophysical surveys on behalf of the National Trust locating and measuring previously unrecorded buried stones. It has been the subject of

145 several recent studies, re-analysing the circle and its missing stones, and looking at the social phenomena behind the sheer scale and relish behind the destruction of stones, a very Avebury phenomenon compared with more mundane stone theft and petty vandalism at other Neolithic sites (Gillings and Pollard 2009). The stones themselves are a matter of scholarship in disciplines outside of traditional academia, being subject to significant attention from spiritualists, pagans, and new age travellers, whose output is often sniffily dismissed as “pseudoarchaeology” but often contains new, imaginative, and innovative ideas about landscape and the experience of being in it at sites such as Avebury.

There is some noticeable variation in colour and some stones are not uniform, displaying slightly pink-tinged or pale surfaces on one side of the stone. As noted in 5.3.3, sarsen, as a sedimentary rock, is very variable in texture from fine-grained to more rough and craggy, sometimes within the same rock. Texture alongside colour seems to be an important focus, many stones having natural fossilised tree root holes on one side but not the other, and natural crags and clefts in the rock. Several have a gully or cleft down the right hand side of the stone, which then features rough surface to one side and smoother surface to the other.

This pattern sometimes reversed – deliberate on part of the builders, or have they been put back wrong in restoration? Pale stones seem often to be co-selected to display a smooth surface texture (despite the fact that pale colouring is evident in less smooth stone, and not all smooth sarsen is pale in colour) – perhaps this acts to amplify the effect of their paleness in different light levels.

One popular interpretation of the differing stone shapes within Avebury’s circles and the Avenue is that the stones represent male and female forms - along similar lines to the idea that the different shape of passage portal stones at long barrows and chambered tombs, one pointed and one rounded, represents male and female figures (Pollard and Gillings 1998).

Although judging the shape of stones to ascribe gendered characteristics is subjective, there does seem to be some tentative patterning of colour and shape. “Male” (if interpreted to be represented by pointed and square stones) seem to be almost always pale or very pale - compare this to the often phallically interpreted pillar within the chamber of Bryn Celli Ddu, Anglesey, and the persistent interpretation of the tall sarsens of Stonehenge’s trilithons as phallic symbology (Meaden 2017).

“Female” stones, (those having the “lozenge” or diamond shape typical of stone selected for use at many Neolithic monuments) seem roughly 50% pale and 50% darker tones, but, where stones have dual aspect (ie point AND lozenge), then point is pale round is darker.

More “female” shaped stones are represented in the surviving assemblage. The matter of

146 Avebury’s history as a site of stone destruction must be considered - were more “male”

stones destroyed, or is the high percentage of female stones significant?

An obvious caveat is that some of the stones are so massive that cannot say that they are uniform in colour, or see clearly variations in colour towards the upper reaches, or take readings above head height. A limitation that must be accepted, and that those

building/using the site would have faced similar limitations once the monument was

constructed: during selection colours may have been noticed and selected for, but probably only on surfaces that could be seen by the “users”.

Table 30. Avebury data

147

Fig 48. Avebury site plan in colour

148 Though very dense and difficult to shape, the Sarsens at Avebury are still a sedimentary rock, and therefore are subject to various natural weathering and erosion effects that can be easily confused with deliberate human acts of alteration. There are many holes and

markings in the surface of the sarsens, and the vast majority are interpreted to be natural, generally representing tree root and other faunal activity during the time the sediments were hardening into stone. However, that is not to say that natural markings are not without significance or attraction to the monument builders. Stone 34 has a marking in the centre closely resembling a cupmark, while 106 is known as the vulva stone for its deep and suggestive cleft. Some markings, as on the smoothed southern entrance stones, were probably caused by axe polishing. Even if not the result of direct human interference, selection on the basis of these natural formations is likely, especially when looking at the pattern of their placement within the monument.

149

Table 31. Avebury stones texture notes

150 As figure 5.60 shows, the rough, pitted, holed texture is most frequently found on the outer surface of the stones, and smoother, sometimes polished, flatter sides are placed on the inner side. For the outlying stones that do not conform to this pattern, there is likely either a significant reason on the part of the builders to place them this way (perhaps significant patterns on the surface, or some significance in the way the rock was lying when it was found or even something to do with the place it came from originally), or they have been re-erected inaccurately. When compared to the correlations between colour and shape, the complex nature of stone selection and deposition becomes clearer - their placement was not a random act, and is in fact the visible extant evidence of the nature of intersection between aesthetic and cosmology in the Neolithic peoples of this region.

The Z feature

Now surviving as a row of stones within the southern stone circle, this smaller monument is made from stone of interesting shapes and stature in comparison with other monuments in the locality. These stones are strikingly different in colour and texture to their nearby massive neighbours - all feature a red surface to some degree, due to small percentage of iron

content in the rock. Boulders of this colour do occur in the Sarsen bearing plains of Wessex but are very unusual; stones are usually much smaller, so to choose this colour and make the effort to find boulders of a sufficient size is clearly significant.

The feature sits on a roughly NNW - SSE alignment, and the location of the southernmost stone (now represented by a concrete bollard) makes an interesting alignment with the location of a further stone within the southern circle, a stone in the great circle, and to the flat peak of Silbury Hill to the south. Although interpretation is rendered difficult by the loss of stone and alteration in height of landscape features since construction, it does appear to have facilitated some kind of performative landscape interaction.