The Avebury World Heritage Site (WHS) mapping project, part of the National Mapping Programme (NMP), was undertaken with the aim of providing English Heritage, the National Trust and other organisations with detailed information on which to base future management of the area, and to help in framing future research priorities.
A summary of the results appeared in the 2001 Archaeological Research Agenda for the Avebury WHS.
Avebury WHS NMP
The area around Avebury has long been noted for its prehistoric remains, with many well-known sites still surviving as earthworks. The best known of these are the Avebury Henge itself, with its internal arrangements of standing stones, the associated West Kennet and Beckhampton Avenues, the West Kennet long barrow, the causewayed enclosure at Windmill Hill, and Silbury Hill.
However, the area is also home to many more sites either best appreciated or only visible from the air. Many were known before the NMP survey occurred, but the mapping project discovered plenty more, as well as providing a framework for obtaining a better understanding of the previously recorded monuments.
The survey covered an area of 225 sq km, allowing the sites recorded within the WHS to be seen in a broader landscape context. Prior to the survey 1,112 individual sites were recorded in the NMR database. The mapping project added 380 new ones, while new detail was recorded for around half of the existing records.
The bulk of the new sites belonged to the medieval and post-medieval periods, aspects of the area’s landscape that had seen considerably less attention than others. However, almost a quarter of the new sites belonged to the prehistoric or Roman periods, while the majority of the remainder cannot be dated from aerial photographs alone.
Avebury WHS: updating NMP
Many of the ‘new’ discoveries were made through the careful of analysis of historic aerial photographs dating back as far as the 1920s. However, some important finds were made through ongoing aerial reconnaissance. Since the NMP project ended, such discoveries have continued to be made.
An excellent example of this process is the Late Neolithic palisade enclosure site at West Kennet. Though first photographed in the 1950s by J K St Joseph, the significance of the cropmarks was not recognised until 1987. Excavations by Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University between 1987 and 1992 uncovered an extensive and previously unsuspected complex of Late Neolithic date.
Whittle’s site plan, published in 1997, was largely based on mapping from aerial photographs by RCHME in 1992. NMP added further detail from both historic and new photographs, while further cropmarks were recorded following reconnaissance in 2001. Since the most recent published plan (2003), even more detail has been photographed.
Avebury WHS and aerial reconnaissance
As the West Kennet story demonstrates, NMP is never the end of the story. Reconnaissance continues, and can add not just additional detail to known sites, but can reveal completely unexpected monuments in even the best explored area.
A recent example of this is a probable Neolithic long barrow, photographed by Damian Grady of English Heritage in the early summer of 2009. Lying just a few metres south of the Avebury henge, it was photographed as a soilmark. There appears to be no earthwork survival – no trace of the monument can be seen on available lidar, for example.
The images used on this page are copyright English Heritage unless specified otherwise. For further details of any photographs or other images and for copies of these, or the plans and reports related to the project please contact the NMR English Heritage's public archive.
For further information on a project or any other aspect of the work of the Aerial Survey team please contact us via email using the link above.
