Aperçu
Avebury lies in Wiltshire, England, 32 km north of Stonehenge, surrounded by a chalk downland landscape dense with Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. The henge itself — the largest in the world by circumference — consists of a roughly circular earthwork enclosure of 1.3 km circumference with a ditch and outer bank, inside which stand three stone circles: the massive Outer Circle (originally 98 stones, many now missing), and two smaller inner circles of approximately 30 stones each. The surviving stones are undressed sarsen blocks weighing up to 40 tonnes, quarried from the Marlborough Downs 1.5 km away.
Construction began around 2850 BCE and continued in phases for perhaps six centuries, overlapping with the construction of Silbury Hill (the tallest prehistoric mound in Europe, 37 m high, still without a clear purpose) and the West Kennet long barrow (a collective tomb used for over a millennium). The entire Avebury landscape is crossed by two prehistoric stone avenues: the West Kennet Avenue, leading 2.4 km south toward a smaller circle called the Sanctuary; and the Beckhampton Avenue, leading southwest. Together these form a processional sacred landscape covering several square kilometres.
The village of Avebury was built inside the henge in the medieval period — a settlement inside a monument. Many stones were deliberately buried in the 14th century (possibly on religious grounds, the pagan stones being considered dangerous) and others were broken up for building material in the 18th century, reducing the original 98 outer stones to 27. The antiquary John Aubrey first described the site to Charles II in 1663. William Stukeley's meticulous surveys in the 1720s–1740s recorded stones that have since been lost. Alexander Keiller excavated and partially restored the site between 1934 and 1939, re-erecting fallen stones and marking buried ones with concrete pillars.