Avebury Circle
With its 11.5 hectares (28.5 acres) enclosed by a ditch 9 m deep and an outer circle 338 m in diameter, Avebury is Europe's largest megalithic henge monument. Built in phases between ~2850 and ~2200 BC, it holds around a hundred sarsens, exact count still debated, — many toppled or buried in the Middle Ages — two inner circles and a 2.4 km avenue.
- Location
- United Kingdom · Europe
- Civilisation
- British Neolithic
- Period
- ~−2850 to −2200
- Technique
- Largest cromlech in Europe (338 m), outer circle of 98–105 local sarsens weighing several dozen tonnes, chalk bank and ditch
- Studies
the state of research converges — open to revision. A revisable snapshot of the state of research, never a judgement.
→ Show on the mapThe elements of the site
Where the site is
51.428° N, 1.854° W · satellite view
What science says
Radiocarbon dating places the ditch and bank between ~2900 and 2600 cal BC; the stone circles between ~2870 and 2200 BC. Gillings, Pollard & Strutt (Antiquity, 2019) argue for incremental development, from an early Neolithic house (~3500 BC) through to the early Bronze Age.
Harold St George Gray (excavations 1908–1922) uncovered deer antlers in an 11 m-deep ditch cut into the chalk, confirming the Neolithic attribution. Alexander Keiller (1934–1939) re-erected the fallen stones and discovered, beneath the 'Barber Stone', the skeleton of a man buried during a stone-burying campaign dated to around 1320–1325 AD.
The sarsens come from the Marlborough Downs, a few kilometres away — a distance far shorter than the ~30 km for Stonehenge. Geochemical analysis of the Stonehenge sarsens (Nash et al., Science Advances, 2020) confirmed West Woods as the main source, a likely source shared by both monuments.
In 2017, a resistivity and ground-penetrating radar survey (Gillings, Pollard & Strutt) detected a square structure ~30 m per side made of buried megaliths at the heart of the south circle, as well as an early Neolithic house — the first identified in Wessex (Antiquity, 2019).
What remains unexplained
Related to
Studies & sources
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