stonehenge - English Heritage

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Illustration 5
Watercolour by Philip
Crocker showing William
Cunnington and Sir Richard
Colt Hoare (left)
supervising Stephen
and John Parker opening
a round barrow in the
Normanton cemetery.
[Reproduced courtesy of
the Wiltshire Archaeological
and Natural History Society,
copyright reserved.]
Illustration 6
Plan of Stonehenge by
Flinders Petrie, completed
in 1877, with the stone
numbers and provisional
geological identifications
noted. [From Petrie
1880, plate II.]
and its landscape setting. In 1721 he found the Stonehenge
Avenue, and on 6 August 1723 he discovered the long narrow
embanked enclosure north of Stonehenge that he called the
cursus (Piggott 1985, 93). In 1722 and 1723 he investigated 13
barrows (12 round and 1 oval), most of them in Amesbury and
Wilsford parishes. His published account (Stukeley 1740,
81–93) represents the first illustrated excavation report in
British archaeology (Atkinson 1984).
Relatively little work took place during the later
eighteenth century, although two barrows within Vespasian’s
Camp were excavated in 1770, probably in the course of
landscaping works (RCHM 1979, 22). However, from about
1800 onwards interest seems to have been rekindled, the
early nineteenth-century investigations being dominated by
the work of Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington.
These notable, eminent, and some would say destructive,
antiquarians individually or together investigated more than
200 barrows around Stonehenge using the shaft technique
(Meyrick 1948; and see Cunnington 1975, appendix IV for a
list of sites investigated). This popular, and in retrospect
rather economical, approach involved digging a pit in the
centre of the mound, the investigations continuing
downwards until a burial was found or the old ground surface
under the mound was reached. Cunnington began work
about 1802, being sponsored by the Revd William Coxe and H
P Wyndham, and employing Stephen Parker and his son John
as labourers (Illustration 5). From March 1804 the costs of
employing Cunnington and the Parkers were assumed by
Richard Colt Hoare, who assisted with the work and took
control of its overall direction. The results of this fieldwork
were published in two volumes as The ancient history of
Wiltshire (Colt Hoare 1812 and 1821). Stonehenge and its
surroundings are included in the first volume (Colt Hoare
1812, 113–78), the account being accompanied by numerous
high-quality illustrations, made by Philip Crocker, and the first
detailed map of the archaeology of the Stonehenge environs
(Colt Hoare 1812, op. 170). Both Cunnington and Colt Hoare
deposited a coin or specially made token in their excavation
trenches to alert future archaeologists to the fact that they
had been forestalled, a tradition started by William Stukeley
(Grinsell 1978, 11).
The most spectacular discovery made by Cunnington
was the richly furnished Wessex I burial at Bush Barrow
(Wilsford 5) uncovered in September 1808. It contained an
inhumation with accompanying grave goods. These included
a bronze axe, three daggers, one of which had a pommel
decorated with gold, a stone sceptre, and two gold lozenges
(Colt Hoare 1812, 203–5). But Colt Hoare and Cunnington
did not confine their investigations to barrows. Cunnington
excavated at Stonehenge at least three times before his
death in 1810. Work also took place at Rox Hill, and
numerous other sites described in The ancient history of
Wiltshire were tested by the spade in various ways.
Cunnington and Colt Hoare’s work naturally inspired
others to engage in excavation. Amongst them was the Revd
Edward Duke (1779–1852) who inherited Lake House in
1805. In 1810 he excavated barrows within the Lake
Cemetery, the Wilsford Down Cemetery, and the Lake Down
Cemetery. Although these excavations were small scale
Duke attempted grand interpretations on a wide canvas,
elaborating the ideas of Stukeley in maintaining that the
early inhabitants of Wiltshire had portrayed in their
monument-building a vast planetarium or stationary orrery.
He saw the earth being represented by Silbury Hill while the
sun and the planets revolving around it were marked by a
series of earth and stone ‘temples’ in which Stonehenge
was supposed to represent Saturn (Duke 1846).
After a lull of about 40 years, investigations of sites
around Stonehenge continued in the later nineteenth
century with the campaigns of John Thurnam, medical
superintendent at the Devizes Asylum (Piggott 1993). He
opened long barrows and round barrows in the Stonehenge
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