The southern entrance to Avebury Henge. Picture by Diliff – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33014402
Today is the midsummer solstice, a time of much celebration at ancient sites up and down the British Isles; and so it is at virtual ancient sites too! For the past 18 months I’ve been working on a 3D virtual simulation of Avebury Henge in Wiltshire, the biggest known stone circle in Europe and one of the largest henge monuments in the U.K. The project has a particular focus on the learning affordances of these kinds of simulations for subjects such as archaeology and heritage studies, and also the uses of these kinds of approaches in encouraging wider public understanding of history and heritage.
A henge is a roughly circular earthwork with a ditch on the inside and a bank on the outside, and anyone who has been to Avebury will know what an impressive monument it is, even though today the ditches have partly filled and the banks have slipped and slumped since they were originally built, probably sometime between 2,800 – 2,500 BCE. It is approximately a kilometre in circumference, and today has a small village inside it (with a good pub!). Because of its size, and the presence of buildings, roads, fences and walls, it is difficult to get a sense of how the henge and the stone circles it contained may have looked in the various phases of its construction. This makes it a good candidate for experimentation in a virtual environment, where ideas about its origins and history can be simulated and tried out in a way that is impossible in the physical world.
Here is a video I recorded this morning when I was taking a walk at Virtual Avebury as the midsummer sun rose – a particular benefit of virtual sunrise is that I can make it happen at any time, so I didn’t have to be up at 03:30 to get to Avebury on time! If you would like to see more about the project, which formed the work for my dissertation for an Advanced Diploma in Archaeology at Cambridge University, my public blog is at https://lizfalconerblog.com, or just drop me an email (efalconer@bournemouth.ac.uk) and I’d be more than happy to meet up and talk the back legs off a donkey!
N.B. Here is the script for the video audio, and you can also see the closed captions in Youtube by clicking on the captions option. Avebury solstice June 2017 script.
Liz Falconer
