Hidden Secrets Of West Kennet's Ancient Tomb

In 2007 a team of archaeologists upended everything we thought we knew about the structure at the top of this hill. West Kennet Longbarrow had collapsed perhaps even as quickly as within a lifetime of its first use and this well this flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about this monument. Interestingly though that collapse certainly wouldn't be the last time West Kennet Longbarrow was changed significantly in some way, modified, defaced, robbed and eroded over thousands of years. Well for me this changes how I see this Longbarrow completely because if it was falling after a generation or two after it was first used then it wasn't necessarily built to last forever and yet it's still here. Now when I come here and enjoy this place West Kennet Longbarrow well I see a static tomb built by a group of people set there to last forever but the truth behind this place the truth behind West Kennet Longbarrow is so much deeper. See what we see here today in this Longbarrow isn't necessarily what we look like in the first instance almost certainly not what we see here today as a result of change sometimes unnoticeable sometimes monumental. Now when we start to look at those changes in a little bit of detail well all of a sudden we lose that image of a static tomb that I envisaged and instead we're looking at a rather unhinged time capsule. Now in a time long before predominantly the landscape would have looked a lot like this predominantly heavily forested and the people that lived here they would have been considered the hunter-gatherers of the day leading a nomadic lifestyle. We have very little evidence for their rituals their religions and even their homes however temporary however things were about to change from this to something very different from what is now mainland Europe we start to see a fairly quick movement of the new stone age people the Neolithic. Now ancient DNA does show limited genetic continuity between the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the incoming Neolithic farmers the hunter-gatherers were almost certainly completely replaced by the Neolithic people and with that movement of people we start to see one of the biggest changes in the British landscape we start to farm we start to see agriculture growing crops we start to domesticate animals cattle sheep goats we start to see permanent settlements and we start to see with that something else monuments monuments of place. This is West Kennet long barrow it's 100 meters long and maybe 15 to 20 meters wide it's huge this construction is directly associated with the movement of people from the continent the Neolithic around 3800 BC we start to see these erected a lot of these we do have thousands remaining today although many have been lost over the years eroded damage robbed out or simply lost to the plow they come in many different forms built from stone timber earth some chambered some not some very rectangular some more tail-shaped today's story though is specifically about this one West Kennet long barrow and so we have this long mound carefully shaped with stone chambers set into its eastern core and a formal forecourt this like so many other long barrows we see today required planning labor and a shared understanding of what it was meant to be all that effort it didn't behave in the way i once assumed these monuments did which is why what happens next how it was used and altered and eventually ended up like we see it today matters far more than the fact that was built at all okay so this part of the story is one that makes me and probably you to a degree feel a little bit uneasy because between the 17th and the 19th centuries people were fascinated by West Kennet they didn't yet know how to look after it this was an age of curiosity of digging without recording and removal without any consequence but then i guess without these people we know very little about this site at all it's a delicious double-edged sword of madness the first real glimpse comes from John Albury he sketches what he calls a barrow without a name and he notes stones on one side and describes it as half a yard high his drawing shows stones all the way around the mound which immediately raises a question was he even looking at West Kennet long barrow at all because that doesn't add up with what we see today i can't see it's changed for the good since then John Albury gives us a fleeting but really frustrating glimpse into what he saw 1685 and we know people are now digging into this one of those culprits is Dr Toop from Marlborough later known as Dr Took and he finds some bones and what do you think he exactly does with those bones he turns them into medicine i stored myself with many bushels he wrote of which i made a noble medicine that relieved many of my distressed neighbours that single sentence seems to sum up the era perfectly for me bones as a remedy archaeology here acting basically as a quarry so whatever information those remains held well it's now gone forever but in steps William Stookley and we always have mixed feelings about him however first of all he condemns what's been done here before and the he writes that farmer green the same doctor took has miserably defaced the barrow by digging halfway into it in 1725 he sketched the monument again calling it the south long barrow because of how it sits within the Avebury landscape and you can see why he condemns what has been done look at this southern side here Stookley estimates its length at 320 feet and he describes the stones at the eastern end and of course he then says well actually this was druids unequivocally and he gets that interpretation wrong but that's okay because Stookley records it he documents it he draws it and he cares for it he does very Stookley stuff by 1814 Sir Richard Colt Hall was trying to make sense of what remained he was searching for meaning and what strikes him the most about West Kennet is the total absence of bronze weapons especially telling compared to the round barrows he was excavating elsewhere he doesn't solve the puzzle but he's starting to notice a pattern the shape here may well matter by the mid 19th century where the damage continued and Dr Mayweather well he concludes that there hasn't been much damage to this beautiful monument the southern barrow which it was referred to tenants had stripped off turf a wagon road had been cut straight through it the sides were dug for flint and chalk rubble and then in 1859 John Furman tried to excavate properly but the landowner refused permission to remove or move the stones Furman is limited on what he can excavate he finds an infant skull five adult burials pottery flint and he knows there's more but he has to stop now this is a good place for this part of the journey to end because all of a sudden people are starting to ask the right questions and they actually realize how much of this has been lost already by the 1950s West Kennet Long Barrow had entered a very different phase of its story when Stuart Piggott working alongside Richard Atkinson excavates the barrow in 1955 and 56 the focus now shifts towards carefully recording and structure now for the first time the chambers were properly cleared the passageway was properly understood and for the first time we're now thinking that what's inside these needs to be analyzed properly rather than just collected as trophies what Piggott uncovers is extraordinary five chambers a long stone-lined passage disordered human remains in every chamber representing men women children and infants pottery spanning different traditions and eras animal bones mixed with human bone signs of bodies were placed moved rearranged and crucially thick Piggott realized this place wasn't used just once and then forgotten it had a really complicated internal history but here's the problem because Piggott wasn't just excavating this place in the end he would be putting it back together but with what knowledge well you don't necessarily know perhaps his knowledge of others in the area but it was just being put back together cement here reconstructed here this is maybe how it would have looked and while this saved the monument it also froze one particular version of West Kennet in place a necessary decision perhaps but one that removed evidence of collapse for now Piggott even imported sarsens from the local downs and put them here so a lot of what you see today isn't even the original that would have been here working with dating methods of the time Piggott concluded that West Kennet long barrow had been in use for centuries the disorder of the bones made sense within that framework long-term use and repeated visits it was careful interpretation built on honesty from what he could see and what the science of the time allowed all this relied on this assumption that would later prove perhaps a little bit flimsy the assumption that this monument had survived pretty well intact for significant part of its early life those 1950s excavations were hugely important Stuart Piggott had pushed the understanding of this place forward more than anybody had done so before the success of those excavations though was based on that story that one of the stable monument long use and slow change it would take another half century and a completely different way of reading time to realize that some of those foundations weren't as solid as the stones put and that is where the story turns once again so along comes 2007 and something quite important happens we start to consider in a dating sense what has already been removed from the site bone charcoal the fragments that had been boxed labeled an archive since 1950s radiocarbon dating and the modeling thereafter allowed those samples to be placed into a sequence with far greater precision than Piggott had ever had available to him not just dates but duration how long activity lasted for how clustered together events are actions that were once thought to be centuries well they now began to shrink down the dated material from west kennett clusters the primary human remains fell consistently within the later 37th century bc most likely beginning around 3670 individuals from different parts of these chambers all sit within overlapping date ranges men women children infants repeated use all within the same span some chambers may have been active at roughly the same time some ever so slightly offset but we are measuring now in decades not in centuries whatever was happening here was shared coordinated and remembered by people who likely knew one another sites like hazleton north and ascot under which would show similar patterns tightly dated primary burial phases that did not last long then come later dates after this initial collapse and material associated with this sort of infilling and sealing of that first phase well that comes a generation or two later perhaps in the mid 36th century bc these dates are no longer tied to complete bodies laid out in chambers but to disarticulated bone charcoal and material caught within chalk rubble at this point new burials appear to stop we're now talking about people dealing with what is already there the collapse after this first phase and the infill became part of the same story access became more restricted and chambers were stabilized sealed or simply made unusable what's striking for me is how short this whole arc appears to be the construction the use and then the structural failure all sit within a time frame perhaps of no more than 50 to 100 years after that later material does exist beaker pottery in secondary context scattered artifacts but it no longer belongs to the same sequence west kinnett longbow was built and constructed and used with a very tight time frame for its original purpose we have this family of people in there like we see it perhaps not grove a whole family tree revealed to us by dna and then it stopped and it stopped being used for that original purpose what follows is an aftermath of interaction only really rather than a burial i'm not suggesting for a second that this is this story with every long barrel we see of course we don't know until we do more dna tests and more excavations in a very careful and obviously archaeological way we're simply never going to know if this was the case but i've got a funny feeling this might not be unique just under a decade on west kennett longbow is approached once again nothing invasive no digs just a watching brief this is a hugely important document for me because not only does it summarize the antiquarian madness but also gives us huge insight into how archaeology works today for me this place is a honeypot site for sure it gathers hundreds of people per day and maybe thousands at the weekend it's great stuart piggott we have probably to thank for that but perhaps not in the way we would like the watching brief is brutal just have a look at some of these paragraphs it doesn't dispute piggott's excavation record but it does highlight its limits in quite a harsh way the 1950s work was described as having permanently altered this monument collapses rebuilt stones reset and the mound remodeled evidence for slumping and collapse and later disturbance can no longer be seen because it was removed stabilized and just tidied away now the layers here that might once have helped us untangle the sequence is gone the report makes it clear that what survives now is a monument filtered through restoration and that many of piggott's conclusions were formed without dating methods capable of testing duration or pace and in that sense the watch and brief probably really does the job perfectly it acknowledges that sometimes the best responsibility the best actions that we can take are simply to record monitor and then step away when i stand at west kennett longborough what strikes me most is how absurd its history really is the place is just one among thousands built early and changed very early to guess that quarried restored argued over you name it it has absorbed centuries of attention and interference and there's very real chance that it has now given up pretty much every secret it ever will do i don't think any technology we discover in the next hundred years or so in my opinion is going to coax any more secrets out of this place just yet and yet i don't feel disappointed by that west kennett longborough doesn't need to keep revealing itself to be important in the landscape it doesn't even need to look exactly how it once did picket didn't put it back as it was we'd know that but what stands here now is a version that first pulled me in the shape the size the invitation to be able to step inside this place and ask questions i've been coming here for decades and it's not perfect and perhaps that's the whole point it didn't need to be perfect it still drew me in so in the end this longbow changes things in two ways its early collapse tells us how brief and fragile the first phase may well have been and everything that followed the dig in the mistakes the care the restoration the complete madness shows how archaeology itself has grown up around places like this west kennett didn't just shape the past but it helped shape how we try and understand places like this