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the avery world heritage site is a
unique
complex of prehistoric monuments today
we're going to be visiting some of the
lesser-known prehistoric monuments in
the afb landscape
most of these monuments are accessible
and you can walk between them
and that gives you a really good sense
of the whole landscape
and how these monuments are connected
together and the different fascinating
stories that each monument has to tell
silvery hill is the largest prehistoric
monument in the whole of europe
and it's a pretty dominant place here in
the avery landscape you can't really
miss it when you drive past on the a4
many people have thought what on earth
is inside this enormous mound is it a
burial mound is there somebody rich
inside buried with grave goods and in
the past people have been
tunneling into the mound to find out
what was inside and although they found
out a lot about the different phases of
the mound and how it had been
constructed
there is no central burial it's not a
burial mound it's a mound built for
other purposes
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silvery hill is one of the final
monuments to be built in this landscape
in the neolithic period
and it's built in this cluster of
already existing monuments but it's
located in a really interesting place
it's located just at the point where the
river kenneth springs out
and we think that the mound was perhaps
built at the head of the river because
this was a really important and perhaps
sacred place
we've just walked up to west kennett
longborough which is one of the earliest
monuments in the afb landscape
it's a long barrow which is a funerary
monument it's where people buried their
dead and it's been fully excavated
which means it's been restored and that
you can go inside it and see the
chambers today
when archaeologists excavated the long
barrow they found the remains of about
36 individuals in here a whole community
of people but they seem to have been
brought into the space and then moved
around
sometimes some of the skulls have been
moved over to one side of the chamber
or the long bones all put together and
there seem to have been different people
placed in the different chambers
some of them seem to be especially for
older people some of them especially for
children
so there's some sort of division based
on age and gender
inside the space
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the long barrier that we see today has
this really impressive stone facade at
the front
but it's actually slightly misleading
the largest stones that stand in the
middle of that facade
are blocking stones so these were added
to the monument right at the end of its
use when the chambers had been filled up
around about a thousand years after it
was first constructed
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this big windswept grassy hill
is called windmill hill and it might not
look very much today
but it's actually the site of one of the
most important monuments and earliest
monuments in the afb landscape
it's the site of what we call a
causewayed enclosure
there are three circuits of ditches
creating a special space
and we think that these monuments were
places where people gathered together in
large numbers
at this time people were probably quite
dispersed in the landscape
and they may have come here to exchange
goods to find marriage partners
to exchange cattle perhaps to conduct
rituals and ceremonies including some
funerary rituals
so it's a really important site for us
understanding early neolithic
life and also understanding how
archaeological ideas have changed
over the 20th century to fully
understand the monument it's a really
good idea to go and visit the alexander
keeler museum in the middle of avery
where they have
quite a lot of the finds from this site
on display including the windmill hill
pottery
we're standing at the sanctuary which is
a really lovely little monument that not
many people know about
originally the sanctuary would have been
two stone circles
one set within the other and then around
them and inside them
were standing timber posts we don't know
exactly what those posts would have
looked like because of course they've
rotted away
but we think they may have been standing
quite tall and possibly with a lintelled
linked top so horizontal timbers linking
the circular
settings of posts after the site was
excavated in 1930 they marked out the
post holes in the stone holes with these
concrete blocks
the red ones show timber posts and the
blue rectangular ones show where stones
once stood
and in the middle of the monument it's
quite a complicated layout but it almost
looks like there are four
avenues of posts basically directed on
the cardinal directions
so they're almost spaces that people
were coming into and processing into the
centre of the monument
and it would have been quite a special
inner sanctuary
from the wider landscape
we think that the sanctuary was built at
around the same time as avery henge and
stone circles
and it's actually linked to that
monument by an avenue
the avenue is made up of two parallel
rows of stones
which lead off down into the valley
behind me and skirt around waden hill
and approach the henge about a mile and
a half away
so we think this monument was part of
the ceremonial complex of avery and
people might have processed
up and down the avenue to reach it
all of the sites we've explored today
are free and publicly accessible
so it's worth spending a bit of time and
coming out and exploring some of the
lesser-known prehistoric monuments
in the ap world heritage site
you