Buried landscapes of the Avon Riverside and the Mesolithic of the Stonehenge Area

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Recent excavations in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site (SHWS) and a pilot study (2020) have provided an unexpected opportunity to reveal the history of the area throughout the Mesolithic and just prior to the Neolithic. This tackles a long-running debate about the antecedence of the early Neolithic, and the nature of the archaeological activity in the late Mesolithic. This is a period with landscape-interactions are still largely based on models from other areas. Was the Stonehenge area a persistent place prior to the erection of the monuments? Without new data this debate is sterile; however, the excavations at Amesbury (Blick Mead), Bluestonehenge and test pitting along the west slope of the Avon valley, have revealed a buried potential to provide the Meso-Neo environmental context for the monumental complexes. Revealed at Blick Mead, along the eastern edge of the chalk and under the Iron Age hillfort to West Amesbury, is a semi-continuous set of deposits of loess, primary and reworked, with intercalated land-surfaces and palaeosols, extending to 4m depth. The project is based on using this resource to investigate the pre-Neolithic environment of the eastern part of the SWHS from Durrington Walls to West Amesbury extending south to Old Sarum and another smaller area at Downton south of Salisbury. This is timely for four reasons: 1) preliminary sediment-based dating at Blick Mead suggests that the loess component yields accurate and potentially quite precise sediment-based (OSL) dates, 2) preliminary work at Blick Mead has been able to recover ancient sedaDNA and so offers opportunity for similar Mesolithic sequences, 3) the location of these deposits links with 'dry-valley' sediment catchments draining a large part of SWHS, and 4) previous indications of environmental potential down the valley edge to Salisbury and around Downton. The project has 4 workpackages; WP1 - geophysics (GPR and ERT), Lidar, direct-push and coring transects between Durrington Walls and the Countesweir Roundabout and between Blick Mead and West Amesbury, down to Old Sarum and at Downton. The extension south is partly to test the proposition of different, or even unique, conditions in the SWHS area. Test pits (8-10, 2x2m) will be excavated at the locations with the most complex or informative stratigraphy. We also hope to collect as much data in the field as possible, including pXRF and pOSL/pIRSL. WP2 - sub-sampling using U-channels, Xray core scanning (Itrax), magnetic susceptibility LOI sedaDNA and soil micromophology. We also have samples from the 4 sites that sampled in 2020 (stored at 4 oC at Southampton). WP3 - sedaDNA extraction, OSL determination, and processing pollen and counting. SedaDNA PCR and sequencing will be undertaken and PDRA1 (Hudson) will do the bioinformatics processing. WP4 - The stratigraphic and sedimentary data will be compiled into a 4D model using Rockworks and profiles and units linked to supplementary files of analytical data from other projects in the SWHS. Whilst the project is primarily field-archaeology focused it does have innovative techniques nested within it, particularly direct push penetrometry and sedaDNA metabarcoding. These will be supported by more traditional techniques from pollen analysis to soil micromorphology. Although based around the SWHS (with an outlier down-valley), the project will have wider implications to Wessex, other areas with concentrations of Mesolithic sites such as the Kennet Valley, and other monumental Neolithic-Bronze Age landscapes such as the Cranborne Chase, Dorset and Milfield Plain, Northumberland. Similar questions have also been raised in Continental Europe even if earlier in some areas and later in others where there appears to be an environmental factor in the location of early Neolithic-early Bronze Age sites (e.g. Pömmelte, Germany). To undertake this project we have assembled a world-renowned team of experts on Stonehenge and also environmental archaeology.