http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Return to the Sanctuary In a tale of espionage, forgotten diaries and missed evidence from earlier excavations, Mike Pitts offers a new interpretation of the mysterious Sanctuary at Avebury If you have visited the Sanctuary, a small double stone circle near Avebury in Wiltshire, you will know there's not much to see. It is Avebury's Stonehenge - a bleak field beside a fast road, with free parking for resting lorry drivers and lost sales reps. It's easy to forget it wasn't always thus. This was the scene of bitter rivalry and espionage, of visionary quests and the tragic myopia of social class - and of a hastily concealed body: a cruel world played out in microcosm. And that was just the archaeologists. The Sanctuary stands at the end of the West Kennet Avenue, two parallel rows of megaliths that meander between chalk hills, reaching the great stone circles at Avebury nearly two miles to the north. William Stukeley, the 18th century antiquary who named the Sanctuary, described the total demolition of its stones in 1723 and 1724. Local archaeologists Maud and Ben Cunnington, excavating for the stone circles in 1930, found also six concentric rings of post holes, a collection of artefacts and animal bones, and the remains of an adolescent buried with a Beaker pot against a small megalith. They refilled the site, laying out the plan in concrete stumps. The archaeology was done. Well, not quite. What exactly were the holes for? Maud herself imagined a ceremonial arrangement of poles, a little Stonehenge in wood. 'It is not necessary to picture these timbers as merely bare posts', she said in a public lecture soon after the dig. 'They could have been coloured and adorned in many ways, perhaps even carved into various forms'. Only a year later her nephew Robert Cunnington, a Royal Engineers-trained surveyor who prepared the excavation plan, suggested instead that a giant roof spanned the whole site. But it was the great archaeologist Stuart Piggott who turned opinion round. Fresh from the excavation of an Iron Age village at Little Woodbury in Wiltshire in 1939, where he had worked on the uncovering of a massive post-built round house, Piggott looked at the Sanctuary with new eyes. Instead of a confusion of standing posts, he saw three successive roofed buildings, each of the second two larger than the one that came before. The third building contained the inner stone circle within its walls. Sites comparable to the Sanctuary have since been discovered (most recently by English Heritage at Stanton Drew in Somerset), but the arguments about what they all looked like continue. And we keep going back for inspiration to two originals, the Sanctuary itself, and Woodhenge near Stonehenge (which the Cunningtons had dug just before). If only we could get more information on them - both were rapidly published, but both have no archive. Except the Sanctuary does have an archive - we just didn't know it. The foreman, Willy Young, was a prolific diarist. In February last year, at the suggestion of Ros Cleal, the curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury, I looked at his diaries in the library of Devizes Museum. This astonishing collection of anecdotes, archaeological information, and the heavily edited version of one man's life is spread over 88 volumes. Like any personal record, it needs handling with care. But Young's little known scrapbook autobiography will, I believe, come to be appreciated as a key document in the history of English archaeology. It is one of the most valuable items on the shelves of Devizes Museum. The diaries begin (with the words 'Rain prevented us from digging') in 1930, the year of the Sanctuary excavation. There are 50 pages of detailed site notes. There is no immediate relationship between Young's numbering of the 162 excavated pits and the labels on the published plan. The key to unravelling this is a single decorated pot sherd. We know where it came from, and Young drew it in his diary. In time, I was able to establish which pits Young describes. Unfortunately, many are not represented in his diary. To save on wages, he was not brought to site until labourers had found stone holes, and much was already gone when he started work. He only described features he excavated himself. Yet this newly discovered record is astonishingly informative. Here we find more detail on pit fills and finds (including a possible jet bead), insights into how the site was dug, lists of visitors, and so on. On one occasion, the Wiltshire Archaeological Society came on a tour. The skeleton had just been found. So as not to distract from the serious business of archaeology, Maud ordered the bones covered, and they were quietly excavated the next day. Correspondence between Young and Alexander Keiller, living in London before his purchase of Avebury Manor, adds to the picture. Keiller had not yet begun his famous excavations at Avebury, but had previously dug at nearby Windmill Hill - with Young as his site foreman. He was dismayed that he was not digging the Sanctuary himself, and in some particularly unpleasant letters, left Young in no doubt about his feelings. Of course, Keiller wanted to know everything. At Windmill Hill, he had for various reasons incurred the wrath of the Cunningtons, and they now forbade him from visiting their site at the Sanctuary. We know that by the end of 1930, at the latest, Keiller was paying Young to write the diaries, and he also paid later to have them expensively bound. Annotations in the diaries in Keiller's handwriting show that he had full access to their contents. I believe that Keiller commissioned the diaries, as a result of his rancour over the Sanctuary excavation. We owe this record, then, to a bitter dispute between rival archaeologists. Several aspects of the 1930 excavation were confusing. I couldn't reconcile the layout of the post holes in the centre of the site as mapped by the Cunningtons, and as described by Young. There were other contradictions. The diary had several more post pipes - dark, circular features marking the positions of decayed posts - than appeared in the publication. Sometimes it even implied the existence of extra holes. And then there was the time that Young went to London to hear Stuart Piggott talk. On 7 February 1940, Young and fellow amateur archaeologist Denis Grant King took the train from Swindon to Paddington, to hear Piggott deliver his famous paper on timber circles. It had been a particularly cold spring, and somewhere near Reading, the two friends saw army lorries massed in the snow. 'There must have been literally thousands of them', wrote Young, 'parked together in long rows'. They later arrived at the Society of Antiquaries in a blacked-out London. After Piggott's lengthy delivery, Young was asked by the Chair to open the discussion. He stood up, commended Piggott for his scholarship, and sat down. But inside he was seething. 'One point in particular', he later wrote, 'I totally disagreed with. This was his maintaining that the double post holes at the Sanctuary [which occurred in two of the rings] were the result of re-placements carried out during the gradual growth of the hut, thus flatly contradicting the evidence which came to light when those post holes were excavated'. They had thought of this at the time, he said, and cut longitudinal sections. These 'proved that the two posts in each particular case had been erected at one and the same time'. This was completely new evidence, of key significance for the interpretation of the site. Who was right? And how could we make sense of the contradictions between Young's plan and that in the published report? There was only one way to move forward. We'd been arguing about the Sanctuary at our desks for too long. We needed to get out and dig. My own small excavation at the Sanctuary last summer was in many ways a magical event. The day I turned up to backfill, when it was all over, there were two women seated in the grass outside our security fence. They had thrown some herbs over the top, and one bunch had fallen into an excavated pit. We talked, and I brought them inside to show them what we had found. I offered to split the herbs, and put a piece at the bottom of each pit. So my final poking about was done with a strong smell of lavender filling the Neolithic post holes. Excavating a small square in the centre of the Sanctuary has transformed the site for me. For those of us who worked there, there was an inevitable sense of drama. Some of us had known about this place for all of our careers. Its status was iconic. For visitors, too, the chance to see what lay under the turf was sometimes a source of excitement. And not just for the many archaeologists who came. From the local Druid-cum-antique-motorbike-mechanic who arranged a blessing for us at the start, to the two women at the end, the excavation brought something new and enchanting to what was already a place of meaning. Anyone who has worked on a dig, however small, will know what I mean. It doesn't have to be a World Heritage Site; just as much a hole in a back street. The earthy smells, the movement, the noise, the sense of touching other people's lives as the ground opens up. Such things are what draw people to archaeology. The challenge is to reconcile that pull with academic ways of telling the past. There are actually two sets of diaries in Devizes Museum. One is longer than the other, and the shorter seems to be a digest which Young wrote in parallel. There are also scraps of a third set of diaries in Avebury Museum - the original draft that I had imagined must have once existed. Written in pencil on pieces of loose paper, are a few days' notes that, by good luck, include the single post hole section drawing that appears in the longer fair copy. This draft has something that the other versions do not - a plan of the sectioned post hole. At first we thought that it held the key to the contradictions between Young's plan and Cunnington's. But when we finally dug out the holes, we found something different again. These post holes had a life of their own. The published report gives no hint that features had cut through each other, with an implied sequence. We saw above how Young contradicted Piggott on this point, and Avebury Museum has further evidence that Maud Cunnington herself believed the 'double post holes' to be single phase pits. A copy of the journal in which the report appeared, and which had once belonged to Robert Newall, is in Avebury Museum. (Newall was William Hawley's assistant at the important Stonehenge excavations in the 1920s.) He wrote a comment in the margin, quoting Maud in a letter sent to him in 1931. Someone had suggested to her that the oval post holes held two posts supporting lintels. 'It seems quite a good idea', she wrote. 'I can't think why none of us hit on it before?' But when we found the tops of the pits at the start of the excavation, it was difficult to believe that each had held a post simultaneously. Some undoubtedly had been dug across others. And according to a virtual reality model of the Sanctuary by Jennifer Garofalini of Southampton University, which contains structural suggestions based on my reading of Young's records, a forest of posts was portrayed so close together that physical movement among them - important in recent reconstructions - would have been almost impossible. Cunnington and Young, it seems, cannot then have been completely right. I hoped that there might still be some Neolithic fill in the pits, mistaken for rock in 1930. I was right. One of the double post holes had a step on the bottom, 50cm high. Like Young and Maud Cunnington, initially we thought it was natural. But we were all wrong. This step turned out to be Neolithic pit fill, almost pure, hard-packed chalk. When I dug it out, there was still a step, half the height of the original. The next day I found that this too was in fact prehistoric packing. My fellow director Josh Pollard, of the University of Wales in Newport, and I have thought hard about this. What does it mean? I suggest that to create the recorded evidence, a series of pits - at least five altogether - must have been excavated and refilled in this one double post hole. Were all these dug to hold posts? Only the deepest pit at the eastern end of the hole had evidence for a timber, in the form of a dark pipe 25cm across. And how do we reconcile Young's conviction that the entire filling of this hole was in fact simultaneous? Perhaps a series of circular pits was dug and refilled in rapid succession - so fast that the clean chalk thrown back in left little sign of this repeated excavation. If each pit held a post, these were later removed. Only the last timber was left to rot in place. This could hardly have occurred beneath a heavy thatched roof (so Stuart Piggott was wrong, then, too), confirming the growing feeling amongst archaeologists that these sites were displays of free-standing posts. But more than that, this extraordinary process of pit regeneration forces us to look at the Sanctuary in a completely new light. It suggests that the old way of seeking 'phases' misses the point. There were many phases, there was one phase. This was not a building like a cathedral, architectural styles succeeding one another over centuries. It was not a monument at all - it was a process. The important thing was the ceremony, the activity. Going out into the wildwood to find the trees, felling them, dragging them to site, carving them, digging the pits, hauling the things into place. And this process was so important that to allow it to continue, the posts had to be removed and the pits filled. Then the cycle could begin again. Maybe the confusion of a near continuous reworking of pits and posts - perhaps over no more than a generation - lies behind the discrepancies between different records. At the end of a huge processional way - the West Kennet Avenue - what could be more appropriate than a place of ritual, movement and effort? Perhaps the present state of the Sanctuary, an airy waste populated by eccentrics, visionaries, past spirits, and the occasional excavator, is nearer an ancient truth than any of us imagined? Mike Pitts, former curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury, is an archaeologist and author. More information on the Sanctuary and other new research at Stonehenge and Avebury will appear in his book 'Hengeworld', to be published later this year by Century ast five altogether - must have been excavated and refilled in this one double post hole. Were all these dug to hold posts? Only the deepest pit at the eastern end of the hole had evidence for a timber, in the form of a dark pipe 25cm across. And how do we reconcile Young's conviction that the entire filling of this hole was in fact simultaneous? Perhaps a series of circular pits was dug and refilled in rapid succession - so fast that the clean chalk thrown back in left little sign of this repeated excavation. If each pit held a post, these were later removed. Only the last timber was left to rot in place. This could hardly have occurred beneath a heavy thatched roof (so Stuart Piggott was wrong, then, too), confirming the growing feeling amongst archaeologists that these sites were displays of free-standing posts. But more than that, this extraordinary process of pit regeneration forces us to look at the Sanctuary in a completely new light. It suggests that the old way of seeking 'phases' misses the point. There were many phases, there was one phase. This was not a building like a cathedral, architectural styles succeeding one another over centuries. It was not a monument at all - it was a process. The important thing was the ceremony, the activity. Going out into the wildwood to find the trees, felling them, dragging them to site, carving them, digging the pits, hauling the things into place. And this process was so important that to allow it to continue, the posts had to be removed and the pits filled. Then the cycle could begin again. Maybe the confusion of a near continuous reworking of pits and posts - perhaps over no more than a generation - lies behind the discrepancies between different records. At the end of a huge processional way - the West Kennet Avenue - what could be more appropriate than a place of ritual, movement and effort? Perhaps the present state of the Sanctuary, an airy waste populated by eccentrics, visionaries, past spirits, and the occasional excavator, is nearer an ancient truth than any of us imagined? Mike Pitts, former curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury, is an archaeologist and author. More information on the Sanctuary and other new research at Stonehenge and Avebury will appear in his book 'Hengeworld', to be published later this year by Century from British Archeology Issue no 51, February 2000