Luke is a placement student with the Avebury Papers for the 2025 Spring term. This is the first of three blog posts for the project. Read his read his review of digital Aveburys here, and his reflections on a focus group that tested his virtual Avebury here.
By Luke Ashworth
I’m Luke and I am currently studying for an MSc in Digital Archaeology at the University of York. Since September, my course has been highly integrated with the Avebury Papers Project, as I studied Dr Colleen Morgan’s module on Digital Creativity. For my assessment, I was tasked with creating a visualisation of Avebury using digital methods. In the end, I created an AR representation of both the Avebury Beech Trees and a Stone from the site using Blender and Adobe Aero which turned out quite well! A screen grab of the result is below.
For the 2025 Spring semester, I am officially on placement with the project. I have started out by creating transcriptions of some of the material created by Denis Grant King which has been fascinating. I am particularly interested in the illustrations such as the one shown below depicting a “roofed sanctuary” at the nearby site on Overton Hill. Drawings like this give insight into the imagination of the 1930s archaeologists as they were formulating ideas of what could have been during the neolithic period.
I am interested in historical reconstruction and I am keen to use my digital background to further this passion. I plan to use this placement to create interesting interpretations of what is at the site today and what could have been – both in the neolithic, and during more recent histories as medieval and modern people made changes to Avebury and surrounding sites – using what I learn from the Avebury Archive.
[Editor’s note from Fran Allfrey: What are your favourite visual representations of Avebury? What do you think a virtual Avebury can offer that enhances the physical site, or enables people living far away to experience? Let us know in the comments!]