Digitisation, exploration and creative re-use of a uniquely important archaeological archive
Author: Fran
Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Avebury Papers project. I’m responsible for coordinating the digitisation process of the multi-media Avebury archive, building narrative pathways into the digital collection, and facilitating the creative reuse of archival materials.
Thank you to PAST magazine for printing a two years in progress report for the Avebury Papers! You can read the full report as a PDF at this link.
The report finishes with a call for action!
“YOU can also help shape the look and feel of the online archive! We want to hear from you if you have ever used the Avebury archive (and you have ideas of which objects to highlight; or ways that we can organise the digital archive in ways which will facilitate your research or teaching); or if you have an interest in exploring materials (artefacts or paper documentation) from the Harold St George Gray (1908-1922) excavations of the Avebury bank and ditch, and Alexander Keiller’s (1934-1939) work on West Kennet Avenue and Avebury stone circles.
Please be in touch with Fran Allfrey (via our contact page) to register your interest in participating in user research.”
The Avebury Papers project is mentioned by Joe Flatman in the 2 July 2024 instalment of his “Excavating the CA archive” column for The Past (the online home of Current Archaeology and other magazines):
“For many people, Avebury means the Neolithic stone circle located in the Wiltshire village, and as such I commence there and work my way outwards. Alexander Keiller, the ‘Marmalade Millionaire’, was an influential landowner and field archaeologist across the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. He used his wealth to buy a large amount of the land in Avebury, but the National Trust gradually became the majority landowner of the village and the wider prehistoric landscape through a series of gifts and acquisitions, commencing in 1943 and concluding with the purchase of Avebury Manor in 1991. This complex history is told in an excellent series of museums, and there is currently a project digitising and exploring its archaeological archive (see http://www.aveburypapers.org). As they explain: ‘the only large-scale archaeological excavations to take place at Avebury were conducted just before the outbreak of WWII. Materials and objects collected and made at this time were left under-analysed for decades. As a result, we have – until now – only had a partial understanding of Avebury’s past and present’. This absence of fieldwork also explains the modest interest of Current Archaeology in the henge, with only five visits of note in over 50 years – CA 97 (June 1985), CA 225 (December 2008), CA 330 (September 2017), CA 332 (November 2017), and CA 351 (June 2019). Of these, the most significant news came in CA 330, when a square monument was unexpectedly identified within one of the stone circles, proving to be among the earlier structures on the site, although its use remains unknown.”
On 1 June 2024, I was joined by Prue Saunders and Bev Stapleton, research volunteers for the Avebury Papers Project, to discuss how the project is revealing the stories of the people who made Avebury what it is today.
The Wiltshire Museum are very generously supporting the project by lending diaries written by William E V Young to be transcribed and photographed. They also happily invited us to give a public talk.
William Young, or ‘WEVY’, not only kept meticulous notes about excavations at Avebury from 1934 to 1940, he also wrote astonishingly evocative memories of daily life across Wiltshire, especially his home in Ebbesbourne Wake, and visits to other archaeological sites.
By bringing together WEVY’s material with diaries kept by Alexander Keiller and Denis Grant King held at the Avebury Museum, the full extent of the human effort of the 1930s excavations is made clear.
WEVY’s diaries are a vital resource for understanding the social, political and cultural contexts of early 20th century archaeology, providing a window into life 100 years ago.
You can listen to a recording of the talk, and find the event details on the Wiltshire Museum website.
I’m Georgia, an undergraduate student at the University of York, currently completing my dissertation on communicating archaeological techniques to children.
Georgia welcoming the young archaeologists to Avebury.
Back in December 2023 I welcomed a branch of the Young Archaeologists’ Club (YAC) to Avebury, to explore the henge, discover how the Avebury Papers team goes about transcribing diary entries, and explore the ways that archaeologists have historically made records.
Walking around the South West sector at Avebury.
The session began with a short walk through the henge, where we talked about Keiller’s method of excavation and restoration at Avebury.
There were two activities, separated by a ten-minute break where the children had a snack and a drink. The first activity was based on transcription, where the children were given a range of extracts to try to detangle. The diary pages that were used in the session were taken from Denis Grant King’s 1938 account of his time at the site, as well as the 1934 excavation log written mostly by Alexander Keiller himself, with some entries penned by Stuart Piggott when he was absent.
These diaries represent a range from most complex handwriting (Keiller) to least difficult (Piggott). While I was researching and planning this session in August 2023, I visited the Avebury Papers volunteer team who were in the process of transcribing the excavation logs, which prompted conversation surrounding Alexander Keiller’s slightly illegible penmanship and inspired this activity.
Young archaeologists have a go at transcribing handwriting from copies of archival materials.
As they had a go with transcription, a few of the kids asked about what the “answers” were for unfamiliar or indiscernible words. This began a discussion about what the Avebury Papers volunteers do when a word is unidentifiable, such as leaving a blank space or inserting their best guess between square brackets to show their uncertainty. Some of the children incorporated this methodology successfully into their own transcriptions.
The second activity asked the children to attempt to write their own diary entries, imagining that they had spent a day excavating on site.
The influence of the sources from the previous task was evident in some of the children’s diary entries. An example of this is in the picture below, in which it is clear that the child noticed and incorporated some of the style of Keiller’s excavation log, such as the abbreviation of names (e.g. Alexander Keiller becomes AK), the description of the weather, and his brief sentences. Although I’m glad they didn’t incorporate his indecipherable handwriting!
An entry for ‘July 1924’ by one of the young archaeologists.
To end, I want to give a big thank you to the YAC members for being so enthusiastic, and to the YAC leaders for all their help throughout the planning process and the session itself.
You may freely view, download, and reuse the diary extracts (images and transcriptions) below. Right click to save images.
West Kennet Avenue 1934 excavation diary, accession number 78510467
78510467: 19-20 April, written by Alexander Keiller, spread 71a-71b
We are delighted to announce our two Artist Commissions for the Avebury Papers.
Gayle Chong Kwan and Kialy Tihngang will be exploring the Avebury archive in the coming year, and we are excited to see what they make of the archive’s varied materials and stories.
Our artist commission began with an open call in September, and we were overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of proposals. Avebury clearly inspires creativity, and we look forward to seeing the new works, and ways of understanding Avebury, emerge through this commission.
Gayle Chong Kwan’s and Kialy Tihngang’s proposals caught our attention for their serious attention to the complexities of archives and archive practices. Their practices are varied, but what both artists have in common is an open and expansive approach to mixed materials.
A portrait of Gayle Chong Kwan, photograph courtesy of the artist.
Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and academic, of Chinese /Mauritian and Scottish heritage, whose work is exhibited internationally in galleries and the public realm. Her large-scale photographic and video work, immersive installations, and sensory ritual events act within and against histories of oppression and positions the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social and ecological. She has a PhD in Fine Art on ‘Imaginal Travel’ from the Royal College of Art, UK (2023) and has been Artist Fellow at Compton Verney (2024), the British Museum (2023), V&A Museum (2021), Ca’ Foscari University Venice (2020).
A portrait of Kialy Tihngang holding ‘Untitled (‘Useless Machines’), 2021, photograph courtesy of the artist.
Kialy Tihngang is a multidisciplinary Glasgow-based visual artist, working in sculpture, video, textiles, animation and photomontage, often in collaboration with performers and musicians, involving elaborate handmade sets, costumes and props. As a first-generation British-Cameroonian, she is particularly interested in the constructed (and therefore inherently deconstructable) nature of British national identity.
Join Dr Ben Chan, lithics expert and postdoctoral researcher for the Avebury Papers project for this community update and feedback session.
This event will explore assemblages of objects. Assemblages are simply groups of things that we give meaning to. Archaeologists are constantly in the process of gathering things into one type of group or other, and the same was indeed true of people in prehistory. This talk details how the Avebury Papers team set out to capture the material qualities of some of Avebury’s assemblages through photography. The results provide representations of people’s attempts to assemble together parts of Avebury in both the past and present.
We’d like to invite your thoughts on these photographs, and explore the questions that they raise for you! We’ll be making notes during this event so that your feedback can shape the future design of the digital archive.
Dr Ben Chan arranges arrowheads from West Kennet Avenue, Alexander Keiller Museum, photograph by the Avebury Papers.
By Dushyant Naresh(MSc Digital Archaeology, University of York)
I’ve never really believed in magic, or the supernatural, or a higher power. But I have to admit that there is something undoubtedly magical about Avebury and the prehistoric landscape it is nestled in.
Maybe it’s the size of the stones, or how large the circles are, or the fact that you can walk right up to them and touch them knowing that thousands of years ago, another human being was probably doing the exact same thing, thinking the same thoughts, and feeling this same sense of wonderment. It’s this blurred line between archaeology and emotion that gets the hairs on the back of my neck tingling.
Coincidentally, one core exercise of The Avebury Papers project is to translate some of these emotions into another medium – a “creative intervention” – be it poetry, prose, or something else. I guess you’d call that “art”.
I am the worst artist of all time.
However, I know how to make videos, and I like experimentation. So, for my Master’s dissertation, I went to Avebury with a dodgy microphone and a 360° camera to try and capture a mixture of both archaeology and emotion. I then created a “choose your own adventure” style immersive story using the videos I shot, allowing viewers to pick what kind of anecdote or theme they were interested in experiencing. This was all programmed and downloaded onto a VR headset for a full immersive experience, and tested with dozens of participants.
Some people liked the project, and many others didn’t. That’s the nature of any creative endeavour, and is what makes the whole process exciting. I hope to go back to Avebury soon to reignite that sense of curiosity and create something new, and hopefully, divisive.
If you haven’t visited Avebury, I highly recommend it. In the meantime, if you’d like to experience it virtually, you can watch/play An Avebury Story on YouTube.
On 13 October 2023, a news website decided to run with a rather scandalous headline about Avebury.
The headline reads: “Revealed: The World Heritage ancient stone circle at Avebury is FAKE – with photographs showing that the stones were actually erected in the 1930s… and some are upside down”.
Screengrab of a newspaper headline: “Revealed: The World Heritage ancient stone circle at Avebury is FAKE – with photographs showing that the stones were actually erected in the 1930s… and some are upside down”.
The cat is well and truly out of the bag! We’ve been found out!
But wait. Before panic sets in, it’s worth exploring this article a little further.
First of all, the article writer seems to have picked up month-old news about Historic England’s freshly digitised Avebury materials. You can explore the “Series of slides taken by Alexander Keiller showing the standing stones and excavations at Avebury and West Kennet Avenue” over on Historic England’s website. It’s lovely to see Avebury in the dreamy colours of almost 100-year-old slides.
Historic England tweet from 13 September 2023: “We’ve recently digitised a set of colour slides by Alexander Keiller showing the stones and excavations at Avebury and West Kennet Avenue in 1938-1939 [sic], including this view of Stone 9.”
For those of us familiar with Avebury, it’s easy to laugh or eye roll at the October newspaper headline. But, this article, and some of its comments, are actually very interesting as a case study of how histories are made and re-made over time.
The 1930s excavations have never been a secret. During the excavations Keiller and his team frequently showed visitors and journalists around. One scrapbook in the Alexander Keiller Museum collection includes pasted headlines and cuttings from 1938, describing a “new wonder of the world” being unearthed.
A headline from a 1938 newspaper pasted into a scrapbook, which reads “Britain Unearths a new Wonder of the World”. Alexander Keiller Museum Accession no. 20001000.Cuttings from a 1938 newspaper pasted into a scrapbook, for the story “Britain Unearths a new Wonder of the World”. Alexander Keiller Museum Accession no. 20001000.
Avebury has been in and out of the news ever since. However, with news cycles moving quickly, we might forgive people for missing stories, especially if they don’t live in the area, or just aren’t looking for archaeology stories. We can certainly understand that some folks can’t access the archive or up to date research (even 100 year old research), as so much information is behind pay walls or exists only in a physical location.
A screen grab from the news article, with a quotation “I had no idea the circle is a restoration!”.A screen grab from the news article, with a quotation “Oh no, this is such a shock… it will never feel the same now.”.
Comments quoted in the article are a good reminder not to take knowledge about Avebury for granted: apparently even members of a ‘specialist’ Avebury Facebook group and a ‘regular visitor’ were shocked at the news of Avebury’s 1930s restoration. (Although, it has to be said, a quick browse of the aforementioned Facebook group reveals many other members were quick to point out the article’s inaccuracies, and the “common knowledge” status of Avebury’s restoration).
These quotations bring me to thinking about how emotions and histories are linked together, and how places exist in people’s heads as much as the physical world.
Ask 100 people what “Avebury” is, and you could get 100 different answers. While Avebury is a very real place, it’s also a symbol, or concept, or idea. It exists in the imagination of everyone who has ever heard of it. Every visitor to Avebury also of course experiences it in a unique way.
So, a challenge that we’re thinking about as part of the Avebury Papers project is how to communicate Avebury’s complex stories to people who all have very different starting points.
Using a scandalous headline can arguably be an effective way to gain attention. But I’d be a bit nervous to use such an approach: it entrenches some negative views of archaeology which have repercussions at a wider scale. The reoccurring myth that archaeologists are keeping secrets from everyone perpetuates a pernicious distrust of expert knowledge, which often goes hand in hand with some damaging conspiracy theories that seek to fracture society.
Screengrab from the news article, including a quotation attributed to Historic England: “these fascinating photos show the extent that modern interpretation has contributed to their current appearance”.
The quotations from Historic England in the article are straightforward enough: “these fascinating photos show the extent that modern interpretation has contributed to their current appearance”.
But I’d like to dwell a little more with the language that people use to describe their reactions to the photographs. It seems like some people don’t want to know about Avebury’s modern interpretations. The journalist reported that people felt ‘shocked’ or ‘conned’ by the photographs. These are big emotions: more knowledge seems to ruin something about Avebury.
And they lead me to some questions which I’d like to explore more as the project progresses.
How do photos of 1930s Avebury make people feel about the site?
What role do such pictures have in people’s experience of Avebury?
What kinds of emotions should an archive project try and provoke?
How can we use archival material to tell multiple stories of Avebury?
Perhaps you’d like to offer your answers in the comments!
Photograph of workers re-erecting stones in the South East Sector at Avebury, 1939. Alexander Keiller Museum Accession Number 20004243-002.
[First posted 18 September 2023; edited 21 November 2023]
Our call for submissions closed at midnight, end of day Monday 20 November.
You can find an archive version of the artist brief via this Google doc.But please note that we will not be accepting further submissions.
To sign up to notifications regarding more Archaeology and Heritage Creative opportunities, fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/goFr4yNpFG7uYz487 The email volume is low, maximum 5-10 emails every six months.
Colleen and Fran
Creative Process Timescale
September 2023: Artist Brief Circulated
30 October 2023, 09:00-10:00 GMT: Online information session for interested applicants: a brief introduction to the Avebury archive and an opportunity to ask questions to the team. Please email Dr Colleen Morgan for the Zoom link.
20 November 2023: Deadline for artist proposals. Submissions due by midnight GMT, no late submissions may be accepted.
8 December 2023: Shortlist of artists will be contacted for interviews [UPDATE 23 November: due to a high volume of submissions, we anticipate contacting a shortlist later in December. Thank you for your patience, we cannot give a more certain date at present].
8 – 16 January 2024: Artists will be interviewed (online, via Zoom)
19 January 2024: Commissioned artists will be notified and briefing sessions will be arranged
January 2024 – October 2024: Commissioned artists work with the archive
October 2024 – April 2025: Commissioned artists share work with the Avebury Papers team, and discuss steps for archiving and exhibition
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, what it’s like volunteering at Avebury, and the kinds of stories we’ve started to explore.
You can listen to the interview on Spotify or via Libsyn.
A huge thanks to host Deborah for inviting us onto the show!
Outside the Box is a podcast about archives and the wonders they contain. Outside the Box is part of the Archives and Records Association’s Explore Your Archive campaign.
