ÃÛÌÒAV

The Living with Monuments Project is directed by Prof. Mark Gillings (ÃÛÌÒAV) and Joshua Pollard (University of Southampton), in collaboration with Rosamund Cleal and Nick Snashall (National Trust), Mike Allen (Allen Environmental Archaeology) and Charly French (University of Cambridge).  

It is funded by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The aim of the project is to redress a critical imbalance in our knowledge of life and cultural landscapes during a key period of British prehistory – the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (Neo-EBA; c.4,000-1500 BC).

Accounts of the Neo-EBA are dominated by an interpretive framework devised to explain the creation of ceremonial and funerary monuments, which form the most visible and tangible part of its archaeological record. By contrast, knowledge of the character of contemporary settlement and other non-monument-focused activity lags behind.  

The project redresses the imbalance through a coherent and innovative programme of targeted fieldwork and reassessment of existing data within one landscape that is famed for its monumental architecture: that of the Avebury region in Wiltshire.