Mick Aston Annual Lecture 2024: "Avebury: Rethinking a Henge and its Landscape"

Avebury is one of the great monuments of prehistoric Europe. It is often overshadowed by its more famous cousin, Stonehenge, and has not received the same level of archaeological attention, with the last major excavations at Avebury taking place during the 1930s. However, work within the wider landscape has been ongoing and the results of some of that fieldwork are presented here, with particularly the ‘Living with Monuments Project’ that has sought to understand the relationship between settlement and monument creation during the region’s Neolithic. Seeing Avebury through the lens of settlement offers new insights, as does analogy with events at other major Neolithic monument complexes. Emphasis is placed on how Avebury came into being, on its connections (local and long-distance), and on the curious character of Neolithic monumental metamorphosis.
Joshua Pollard is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. He has a particular research interest in the Neolithic of the British isles, and over the last two decades has been actively involved in fieldwork in the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Following completion of his PhD at Cardiff, he worked for the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, as a Sir James Knott Research Follow at Newcastle, and as a Temporary Lecturer at Queen’s, Belfast. In 1998 he took up a permanent post as a Lecturer at the University of Wales, Newport, before moving to Bristol and thence to Southampton in 2011.
Cotswold Archaeology holds its ‘Mick Aston Annual Lecture’ in memory of former Trustee, Mick Aston, and his lifelong contribution to archaeology. Each year the lecture celebrates recent discoveries in the field of archaeology for attendees both in the Cotswolds and digitally from all over the world: this lecture is available both in person at the Corinium Museum and online as one of Cotswold Archaeology’s webinar series.