Failure is not Fatal: It’s the silicosis that will kill you
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 10/04/2019

Millions of words have been expended on the archaeology of the north Wiltshire landscape ever since John Aubrey first stumbled across the henge monument and stone settings of Avebury in 1649. New discoveries in old contexts are even now being made – such as the square stone setting inside Avebury’s southern circle (Barker et al 2017). But this whole landscape is covered in archaeological evidence for failure that, to date, has gone unremarked. This paper describes the mass evidence for failure in north Wiltshire’s extensive nineteenth-century sarsen stone quarry. This has been ignored in previous accounts of the stone trade that focus on the family history, and distributed end products, of the business (Crook and Free 2011, Free 1948, 1950, King 1968). Yet the field remains themselves speak almost entirely to failed attempts to extract and cut the stone. As a work-in- progress, this paper illustrates the nature and (partial) extent of this failure: and tentatively suggests that it has implications for both the long-standing narrative of a successful trade developed from small yet enterprising origins, and also for understanding prehistoric sarsen extraction for the construction of those monuments that have enjoyed the lion’s share of archaeological attention. 

Katy Whitaker (University of Reading)