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What future for Avebury?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Michael Pitts
Michael Pitts*
Affiliation:
4 Green St. Avebury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 1RE
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Extract

Towards the end of 1989, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Chairman of English Heritage, announced that detailed planning had started on a visitor centre at Stonehenge. For someone not touched by the generations of wrangling over this site, or spared the depressing squalor with which a visit deftly obliterates any preconceptions of mystery or romance, what could be more appropriate than good visitor facilities at one of the world’s top heritage attractions? What could be simpler to construct in an open landscape of not particularly valuable farmland?

Of course, Stonehenge is not like that. This small group of standing stones by a road has provoked one of the most complex, bitter, and long-running archaeo-political stories of all time. It will run and run – make no doubt about that – but Lord Montagu’s announcement has a real significance for anyone with an interest in our past. Someone is actually trying to do something about the place.

Information

Type
Papers
Information
Antiquity , Volume 64 , Issue 243 , June 1990 , pp. 259 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1990

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Footnotes

The great complex of Neolithic monuments at Avebury in Wiltshire is, deservedly, a World Heritage Site (FIGURE 1). Avebury is a living village, as well as an ancient monument, and the conflicts between the various interests – of archaeologists, of visitors, of residents – are as acute as anywhere. Michael Pitts knows many of these rôles, as an archaeologist and sometime curator of the Keiller Museum in Avebury, as owner of the splendid Stones Restaurant in the village and publisher of guide-books and postcards, and as an in-coming resident to Avebury. Curiously, as he explains, the future of Avebury seems to depend scarcely at all on a national interest, still less on a world view of the heritage; rather it is the local concerns that will direct it for us all

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