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The Avebury Papers: Artist brief

We are pleased to announce the launch of our artist brief for the Avebury Papers. Please find the full brief below, with details of how to apply. You may also access the same information via this Google doc. This opportunity is for UK-based artists. We are holding an online information morning on Monday 30 October […]

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The curious case of Mrs St. George Gray and the West Kennet Avenue Axe (Part 1)

The inspiration for writing this blog came from finding an axe whilst trawling through the archive of weird and wonderful objects held in the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury. Most of the objects in the museum were found during archaeological excavations and are boxed along with crucial information on which excavation they were uncovered by, […]

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A witch visits Avebury?

One of the reasons I got involved with the Avebury project was because I am a Wiccan/Pagan, and the stones are an important spiritual site for those people following a similar spiritual path. I am particularly interested to learn when the site became a popular place for like-minded “Witchy folk” to visit. I am currently […]

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Surveying Avebury’s Stones (with poles!)

Visitors to Avebury recently may have witnessed the odd sight of two people walking around with cameras on the end of long poles. Certainly, many people came up to ask what we were doing, and no, it wasn’t part of a mysterious mid-summer ritual! The truth is sadly more mundane. Adam Stanford of SUMO GeoSurveys […]

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Cool Finds of the Month

*Content warning: drawings of a human skull at the end of the post* Whilst organising the stables archive there have been some interesting discoveries, here are some of them: These mounted pictures of dinosaurs were used as a museum display piece! From left to right we have a styracosaurus, an iguanodon, and a ceratosaurus. During […]

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Getting the Stables Archive Ready for Photography

Here in the archive, we are gearing up for round two of photography. We are moving the photography equipment to the stables archive where we have a lot of our larger maps and plans stored. But before we make the move we have to make sure everything is in order. To make sure photography at […]

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Psychometry and the Giants of Archaeology

“I was glad to note that you made some protest against the vapours that have befouled the ether […] it is monstrous that the only prehistory broadcast should be this nonsense.” – V Gordon Childe to Alexander Keiller, 10 October 1937 On Friday 17 September, 1937, BBC Radio aired one of a three-part series titled, […]

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Avebury Papers on Outside the Box podcast

Just in time for Volunteers’ Week, 1-7 June in the UK, the Archives and Records Association (ARA) invited us to take part in their Outside the Box podcast! Ros Cleal (Curator at AKM), Ros Preuss, Bev Stapleton, Prue Saunders (all volunteers with the digitisation project), and I chatted about how the project has been progressing, […]

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Avebury People

Can you help us to identify the people who made the modern Avebury? The Alexander Keiller Museum archive holds hundreds of photographs of people. The photographs span several archaeological campaigns across the decades, including excavations run by Harold St George Gray in Avebury Henge in the 1900-10s, and the Alexander Keiller-led work at Avebury and […]

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Digitisation in progress: photography

Header image: Denis Grant King’s diary, Accession Number 1732623-002. In the ‘archive scoping’ blog post I talked about our ambitions for the archive, and how we hope to embed reminders that, behind the digital files we create, there are real objects. We’ve now been photographing for 4 months, and making good progress. Our wonderful volunteers […]