Book Notes pages 62-83 Inside the Henge
Page 62 - Inside the Henge
Notes on every stone of the Avebury Henge, with their exact positions, may be found in this pdf: STONES OF THE AVEBURY HENGE
For notes on the morphology of each stone (holes etc) see the GEOLOGY section of this website
Page 65 - Stone 9 and the Barber Surgeon
During Keiller's excavations of the SW Quadrant a skeleton was discovered beneath Stone 9. Keiller declared the man to have been a 'Barber-Surgeon' but was he really?
Brian Edwards' 2006 article investigates the mystery:
Page 62 - Musical Resonances in Stone 9
We are all familiar with ways of producing a musical note from a bottle: we can either blow across the neck to make a flute sound, or slap it for a percussive 'gloop'. The bottle functions as a Helmholtz Resonator, with a resonant frequency that may be calculated from its proportions; hence a large bottle will produce a lower note than a small bottle. Root holes found in some sarsen stones may similarly be used to produce musical sounds. One example is the famous 'blowing stone' not far from the Uffington White Horse, which can be made to sound like a trumpet and features in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Most sarsen holes are not suitably positioned for blowing, but there are many in and around Avebury that will sound a note if lightly tapped with the palm of a hand. The best example is Stone 9 of the southwest quadrant, the 'Barber Stone'. Its outer (western) face has many holes that can produce musical notes when struck; in the centre of its inner (eastern) face is one particularly resonant hole that is tuned to middle C (261.6 Hz). The resonance may be excited by tapping the hole, or by making vocal clicks into it. If a middle C is sung into the hole, unlike other notes it will be amplified; the resonance will cause the note to ring on for some time. Several other stones of the southwest quadrant and the West Kennet Avenue have musical resonances.
Whether or not this property of sarsen stone was known or exploited in prehistory is impossible to say. However, if the stones were revered, perhaps as the embodiment of ancestral spirits, then slapping them would hardly be a respectful thing to do. Also, the majority of the resonant holes in the southwest quadrant are positioned on the outer, hidden faces of the stones; one would assume that if they were meant to be played, the stones would have been mounted the other way around, facing in to the centre of the henge.
Page 65 - Smoother on the Inside?
It has been claimed that all of Avebury's stones are set with their smoothest, flattest faces to the inside of their settings. Is this actually true? Determining this from fieldwork is not a simple task. Here are my findings, from June 2009:
ROUGH OR SMOOTH?
Page 78 – Stone Breaking
For information on the role of the Non-Conformist movement in Avebury's destruction of the 1720s, see Brian Edwards' 2004 article 'Changing Avebury':
Page 79 - The Cove
Coves are mysterious features and very little has been written about them. Aubrey Burl 's WANHM article from 1988 is quite informative:Burl, Aubrey 1988 `Coves: structural enigmas of the Neolithic' Wiltshire Archaeol Natur Hist Mag 82, 1988 1-18
A text-only archived version may be found here: BURL COVES
See also Coves, cosmology and cultural astronomy by Lionel Sims: COVES SIMS
PAGE 82 - New Findings on The Z-Feature
In 2017 a geophysical survey conducted by the Living with Monuments team found that the Z-Feature, a straight row of small sarsens, once formed one side of a square setting. Although there has been no excavation yet, the team believe that they may have found evidence for a Neolithic house within the setting. See report: Z-STONES GEOPHYS