Toads turning time: verifying visualizations of the Sanctuary
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-05-13

The ‘Sanctuary’ structure in the late Neolithic Avebury monument complex has been visualized in turn as a four stage mainly roofed structure (Piggott 1940), a charnel house (Burl 2002), a maze (Thomas 1999) or as a place for the ritual marking of status and identity (Pollard and Reynolds 2002). As a subsidiary wood and stone structure between the mainly stone Avebury circle and the mainly wood West Kennet Palisades, like Woodhenge in the Stonehenge monument complex, it is anomalous for the materiality model’s (Parker Pearson 2012) expectation that wood and stone structures are categorically separated places of, respectively, life and death. These various visualizations of the Sanctuary will be interrogated by the evidence of archaeological site excavation, 3D modelling of the monument in its landscape integrated with planetarium software, archaeoastronomy, and myth analysis. The archaeological data provides detailed evidence of a complex syntax of material culture at the Sanctuary. The 3D modelling reveals tiered concentric lintelled post circles and stone arrangements. The archaeoastronomy reveals a full suite of lunar-solar alignments. These three dimensions are verified by the emerging convergence between Palaeolithic Continuity Theory and the phylogenetic analysis of myth (Witzel 2012) which predicts that proto-Indo-European myth will be one regional outcome from an earlier hunter-gatherer cultural substrate. The findings from all four disciplines can be integrated into another visualization of the Sanctuary in which combined materials and alignments were intended to ritually repair a cosmology perceived in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age to be threatened with stasis.
References
Burl, A., 2002. The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany. London: Yale UP.
Parker Pearson, M., 2012. Stonehenge. London: Simon and Schuster.
Piggott, S., 1940. ‘Timber circles: a re-examination’. Archaeological Journal 96, 193-222.
Pollard, J. and Reynolds, A., 2002. Avebury: The biography of a landscape. Stroud: Tempus.
Thomas, J., 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. London: Routledge.
Witzel, E.J.M., 2012. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford: UP

Lionel Sims, Emeritus, University of East London