Geoarchaeological research as part of the AHRC funded Living with Monuments (LwM) project investigated the upper Kennet river system across the Avebury World Heritage landscape. The results demonstrate that in the early–mid-Holocene (c. 9500–1000 bc) there was very low erosion of disturbed soils into the floodplain, with floodplain deposits confined to a naturally forming bedload fluvial deposit aggrading in a shallow channel of inter-linked deeper pools. At the time of the Neolithic monument building in the 4th–early 3rd millennium bc, the river was wide and shallow with areas of presumed braid plain. Between c. 4000 and 1000 bc, a human induced signature of soil erosion became a minor component of fluvial sedimentation in the Kennet palaeo-channel but it was small scale and localised. This strongly suggests that there is little evidence of widespread woodland removal associated with Neolithic farming and monument building, despite the evidently large timber requirements for Neolithic sites like the West Kennet palisade enclosures. Consequently, there was relatively light human disturbance of the hinterland and valley slopes over the longue durée until the later Bronze Age/Early Iron Age, with a predominance of pasture over arable land. Rather than large Neolithic monument complexes being constructed within woodland clearings, representing ancestral and sacred spaces, the substantially much more open landscape provided a suitable landscape with areas of sarsen spreads potentially easily visible. During the period c. 3000–1000 bc, the sediment load within the channel slowly increased with alluvial deposition of increasingly humic silty clays across the valley floor. However, this only represents small-scale landscape disturbance. It is from the Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age when the anthropogenic signal of human driven alluviation becomes dominant and overtakes the bedload fluvial signal across the floodplain, with localised colluvial deposits on the floodplain margins. Subsequently, the alluvial archive describes more extensive human impact across this landscape, including the disturbance of loessic-rich soils in the catchment. The deposition of floodplain wide alluvium continues throughout the Roman, medieval, and post-medieval periods, correlating with the development of a low-flow, single channel, with alluvial sediments describing a decreasing energy in the depositional environment.

Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling have provided precise new dating for the henge monument of Mount Pleasant in Dorset, excavated in 1970–1. A total of 59 radiocarbon dates are now available for the site and modelling of these has provided a revised sequence for the henge enclosure and its various constituent parts: the timber palisaded enclosure, the Conquer Barrow, and the ditch surrounding Site IV, a concentric timber and stone monument. This suggests that the henge was probably built in the 26th century cal bc, shortly followed by the timber palisade and Site IV ditch. These major construction events took place in the late Neolithic over a relatively short timespan, probably lasting 35–125 years. The principal results are discussed for each element of the site, including comparison with similar monument types elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, and wider implications for late Neolithic connections and later activity at the site associated with Beaker pottery are explored.

The Avebury henge is one of the famous megalithic monuments of the European Neolithic, yet much remains unknown about the detail and chronology of its construction. Here, the results of a new geophysical survey and re-examination of earlier excavation records illuminate the earliest beginnings of the monument. The authors suggest that Avebury's Southern Inner Circle was constructed to memorialise and monumentalise the site of a much earlier ‘foundational’ house. The significance here resides in the way that traces of habitation may take on special social and historical value, leading to their marking and commemoration through major acts of monument building.

The Uffington White Horse is a unique later prehistoric geoglyph worked onto the chalk hillside of the Berkshire Downs in southern England. This large figure has seen little new interpretation since the early twentieth century. Unable to explain the form satisfactorily, archaeologists have shied away from acknowledging the distinct nature of the horse and its probable importance to previous occupants of the land. By reviewing the image's context within the broader archaeological landscape, the argument can now be made that the Uffington carving is a representation of the sun-horse found in iconography throughout later prehistoric Europe.

Stonehenge is a site that continues to yield surprises. Excavation in 2009 added a new and unexpected feature: a smaller, dismantled stone circle on the banks of the River Avon, connected to Stonehenge itself by the Avenue. This new structure has been labelled ‘Bluestonehenge’ from the evidence that it once held a circle of bluestones that were later removed to Stonehenge. Investigation of the Avenue closer to Stonehenge revealed deep periglacial fissures within it. Their alignment on Stonehenge's solstitial axis (midwinter sunset–midsummer sunrise) raises questions about the early origins of this ritual landscape.

This paper focuses upon the web of practices and transformations bound up in the extraction and movement of megaliths during the Neolithic of southern Britain. The focus is on the Avebury landscape of Wiltshire, where over 700 individual megaliths were employed in the construction of ceremonial and funerary monuments. Locally sourced, little consideration has been given to the process of acquisition and movement of sarsen stones that make up key monuments such as the Avebury henge and its avenues, attention instead focusing on the middle-distance transportation of sarsen out of this region to Stonehenge. Though stone movements were local, we argue they were far from lacking in significance, as indicated by the subsequent monumentalization of at least two locations from which they were likely acquired. We argue that since such stones embodied place(s), their removal, movement and resetting represented a remarkably dynamic and potentially disruptive reconfiguration of the world as it was known. Megaliths were never inert or stable matter, and we need to embrace this in our interpretative accounts if we are to understand the very different types of monument that emerged in prehistory as a result.

The assemblage of Neolithic cremated human remains from Stonehenge is the largest in Britain, and demonstrates that the monument was closely associated with the dead. New radiocarbon dates and Bayesian analysis indicate that cremated remains were deposited over a period of around five centuries from c. 3000–2500 BC. Earlier cremations were placed within or beside the Aubrey Holes that had held small bluestone standing stones during the first phase of the monument; later cremations were placed in the peripheral ditch, perhaps signifying the transition from a link between specific dead individuals and particular stones, to a more diffuse collectivity of increasingly long-dead ancestors.

The long-distance transport of the bluestones from south Wales to Stonehenge is one of the most remarkable achievements of Neolithic societies in north-west Europe. Where precisely these stones were quarried, when they were extracted and how they were transported has long been a subject of speculation, experiment and controversy. The discovery of a megalithic bluestone quarry at Craig Rhos-y-felin in 2011 marked a turning point in this research. Subsequent excavations have provided details of the quarrying process along with direct dating evidence for the extraction of bluestone monoliths at this location, demonstrating both Neolithic and Early Bronze Age activity.

This paper presents the results of a programme of research on an unusual group of prehistoric stone settings located on Exmoor, south-west England. Taking a variety of semi-geometric and apparently random forms, a total of 59 settings have been identified, with new discoveries taking place on a regular basis. These stone settings are remarkable for their diminutive size, with component stones often standing to heights of 100 mm or less, a factor which has led to their being termed ‘minilithic’. Through reference to the results of a programme of geophysical survey and small-scale excavation targeted upon a particularly rich cluster of settings around the upper reaches of Badgworthy Water, issues of morphology, dating, relationships, and the implications of the Exmoor miniliths for developing understandings monumentality are discussed.

The Greater Cursus – 3km long and just north of Stonehenge – had been dated by a red deer antler found in its ditch in the 1940s to 2890-2460 BC. New excavations by the authors found another antler in a much tighter context, and dating a millennium earlier. It appears that the colossal cursus had already marked out the landscape before Stonehenge was erected. At that time or soon after, its lines were re-emphasised, perhaps with a row of posts in pits. So grows the subtlety of the discourse of monuments in this world heritage site.

The late Neolithic monument complex at Avebury, Wiltshire, continues to elicit much curiosity and attention. However, with excavation unlikely to occur in the near future, new and non-destructive means of exploring the monument complex are required. Although a number of such investigations have been undertaken, to date no concerted effort has been made to consolidate the results within a single framework. The opening stages of such a project, involving innovative research using GIS and Virtual-Reality technologies within an explicitly theoretical interpretative agenda, are described here.

But topography (like cartography) also is a ‘practice’, knowledge put to use, knowledge in the service of power that is deeply intertwined in the cultural, social and political webs of a society (Duncan and Ley 1993, 1, emphasis added).

The changing cosmological symbolism incorporated in Phases 1 and 2 at Stonehenge is reviewed in the light of new evidence from patterns of deposition prior to the construction of the bluestone and sarsen stone settings. The early structure of the monument and attendant depositional practices embodied a scheme of radial division, including a symbolic quartering primarily demarcated by solstitial rising and setting points. Through sustained ritual practice, however, the motions of the moon came increasingly to be referenced through deposition, particularly of cremations. This evidence seems to contradict earlier claims of a sudden shift in and around Wessex during the mid-third millennium BC from a predominantly lunar to a predominantly solar cosmology. It suggests instead that interest in solar and lunar events did not necessarily preclude each other and that over the centuries there was a process of subtle change involving the continual reworking of symbolic schemes emphasizing a sense of ‘timelessness’ and the unchanging order of the universe.

The results of architectural recording within the North Range of the University's Old Schools are described. Argued to have stood independently as a hall in the later fourteenth century, the progressive development of the Schools' quadrangle, and extensive alterations to it – culminating in Wright's neo-classical facade of 1754–58 – reflects upon the historical development of academic architecture. The prestigious display of the complex in the mid eighteenth century, facilitated through the mass levelling of domestic properties, equally tells of the institutional ‘realization’ of the University.

Excavations at a deeply alluviated site near St Ives, Cambridgeshire, revealed a complex sequence of boundary works of later prehistoric and Roman date running along the edge of a former course of the river Great Ouse. The most significant of these were two successive pit alignments constructed in the early-mid 1st millennium BC. One alignment ran along the very edge of the channel and was waterlogged over much of its length; upon excavation producing a rich assemblage of worked wood, including hedging debris. Broader discussion on the social context of pit alignments as boundary systems is offered.