Avebury, Europe's largest stone circle, and its riddles

About thirty kilometres north of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, an entire English village stands inside a prehistoric monument. At Avebury the houses, the church and even the pub lie within an enormous circular ditch, along which great rough stones are lined up. It is the largest stone circle known in Europe, and the landscape around it, with burial mounds, avenues and artificial hills, forms one of the most impressive ritual complexes of the European Neolithic.

The great henge

The monument was built in phases, roughly between 2850 and 2200 BC. It consists of a deep ditch and a high outer bank, enclosing an area of more than eleven hectares. Along the inner edge ran a circle of about a hundred stones, and in the centre were two smaller circles, each with its own particular structures. The ditch, dug with red-deer antler picks, was originally of considerable depth.

From the circle ran the West Kennet Avenue, a path lined with pairs of stones about two and a half kilometres long, leading to another monument known as the Sanctuary. The avenue stones have often been described as alternating between tall, narrow shapes and broad, lozenge-like ones, which some have interpreted as male and female symbols, an attractive hypothesis but an unproven one.

Buried stones and a barber-surgeon

In the Middle Ages many stones were toppled and buried in pits dug beside them, perhaps to clear land for farming, perhaps out of religious rejection of these pagan signs. In the 1930s, during excavations directed by Alexander Keiller, the skeleton of a man was found under one of the stones together with a pair of scissors, a medical instrument and some coins from the early decades of the fourteenth century.

The man, nicknamed the barber-surgeon, was thought to have been crushed while helping to topple the stone. More recent research has questioned the exact circumstances of his death, but the discovery remains eloquent evidence of the ambivalent relationship between medieval communities and the monuments of their ancestors. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries other stones were broken up with fire to provide building material.

Aubrey, Stukeley and the serpent temple

The first to describe Avebury carefully was the antiquarian John Aubrey, who saw it in 1649 and grasped its greatness, judging it superior to Stonehenge. In the eighteenth century William Stukeley drew accurate plans of it, now precious because they record stones later destroyed. Stukeley interpreted the whole complex as a serpent-shaped temple of the druids, an idea set out in his book of 1743, which enjoyed great success but has no archaeological basis.

Not far away stands Silbury Hill, about thirty metres high, the largest artificial mound of prehistoric Europe, built around 2400 BC. Excavations have found neither burials nor treasures in it, and its function remains unknown. Nearby is also the West Kennet Long Barrow, an older burial mound, used from the middle of the fourth millennium BC.

Today Avebury, together with Stonehenge, forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visitors can walk freely among the stones, touch the antiquity of the place with their own hands and let themselves be questioned by a landscape that, millennia later, still guards many of its secrets. In the village, the museum named after Alexander Keiller holds the finds from the excavations and tells the story of the research.