Bournemouth University Joins The Project To Digitize Avebury World Heritage
A project is underway to bring 5,000 years of history to life at Avebury World Heritage site.
The team of experts from Bournemouth University, the University of York, the National Trust, and Archaeology Data Service, with support from Historic England and English Heritage, are creating a public, open access digital archive of Avebury, and the archaeological discoveries made there.
Avebury Stone circle at dusk
Currently dated to the first half of the 3rd Millennium BCE, the megalithic monuments at Avebury, North Wiltshire, form part of the UNESCO Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Avebury comprises one of the UK’s largest Henge monuments, containing the world’s largest stone circle at almost 350m in diameter, with avenues of paired standing stones that extend out into the landscape for 3.5km to link Avebury to a host of other important prehistoric structures.
Professor Mark Gillings, Head of Department for Archaeology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University, said: “Despite its international importance, the only large-scale archaeological excavations to take place at Avebury were concluded just before the outbreak of WWII. Whilst a masterful summary of the results of this work was produced in the 1960s, the incredible detail they revealed has remained unstudied and unpublished”.
A photograph of the original Avebury research team
The Avebury Papers project will add to the archaeological work that was ended abruptly by the outbreak of war, bringing together and contextualising not only the findings from the 1930s work and other 20th century interventions, but also exploring the lives of the people and organisations that made the work possible. Importantly, the entire archive will be made available online on an ‘open access’ basis for anyone to use for research, enjoyment, and creative projects.
The Avebury estate was sold to the National Trust by Alexander Keiller and the monument placed in the Guardianship of the state in 1944. Some years later in 1966, the collection of the Alexander Keiller Museum was given to the nation by Gabrielle Keiller, Alexander Keiller’s widow. Overarching responsibility for the collection and the paper archives now lies with Historic England, on behalf of the nation. Historic England’s national collection of historic sites and artefacts is managed by the English Heritage Trust and at Avebury the Alexander Keiller collection is on loan from English Heritage to the National Trust, who own and operate the site.
Original researcher sketching the landscape
Avebury’s significance extends far beyond the British Isles, informing research on a range of fundamental questions concerning the European Neolithic, such as why and how people went to the trouble of building such vast monuments. By providing a fuller understanding of the history of this World Heritage Site, this research and the multimedia digital archive it will generate will enable more effective heritage management, education, and tourism programmes. The project will therefore bring enormous benefit to visitors, enthusiasts and students of prehistory, artists, and heritage organisations, telling the full story of the origins and re-use of Avebury across over 5,000 years.