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"Communities" is a word you will have in mind throughout this narrative. Burl reminds us that Avebury's structures were built by normal people. They lived in the region, farmed, dug ditches, herded cattle and pigs, erected stones, traded with neighbours, and died. Life, he asserts frequently, was tenuous and brief. From this he derives their culture put much time and energy in dealing with the dead. Ancestor worship? Probably. Fertility rituals? Almost certainly. All this activity, however, was chiefly pragmatic. Neolithic society tried to propitiate spirits it could comprehend.
Burl scorns the modern mystical interpretations of Avebury and other sites. He lightly dismisses the astronomical alignments as overblown. The henges and stone circles may have marked some solar and lunar moon-rises and -sets, but only in a general way. These people had practical needs, he says. Precision alignments of stones or posts would be excessive effort. Much work went into just building these structures. Enough information to launch certain seasonal festivals or a reminder of births or deaths was sufficient. Burl has gleaned enough information to outline the growth and decline of prehistoric societies, with the Stonehenge ultimately supplanting Avebury in dominance of the area.
The text is enhanced with a finely balanced mixture of diagrams, old and new illustrations of people and places involved, topped off by a collection of excellent coloured photographs. One of the few shortcomings in this book is the selectivity of his Bibliography. Many works cited in the Notes are not listed there. Whether to keep the list short or to emphasise favoured works is obscure. A minor point, but a nuisance when delving further into the topic. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Burl starts by setting Avebury in context, not only geographically and historically, but culturally and academically. Throughout the book he sustains this broad-based approach, and his lucid, almost racy style helps a great deal of hard fact and erudite interpretation slip down without causing mental indigestion.
The whole of the Avebury complex is described and interpreted, including the Sanctuary, the two Avenues and Silbury Hill. The monument is explained in the context of a "ritual landscape", and compared with other monuments both in the area and elsewhere. There is a balanced and detached consideration of the theories about the use and construction of the monument, and Aubrey himself presents some tantalising speculation; however he is at pains to make it clear what is evidence and what supposition. Everything is illustrated with maps and diagrams, and there is a wealth of unusually beautiful photographs.
Published in 1979, this is one of the earliest popular books in the tone that Francis Pryor has since made popular. Anyone who liked "Britain BC" should read this. I have just bought Aubrey Burl's Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland and look forward to reading it.
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