Bournemouth University

School of Conservation Sciences

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Joint Day School

Unquiet Lands: People and Landscapes in Prehistoric North West Europe

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Boscombe Down – a Stonehenge landscape
Alistair Barclay, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Catriona Gibson and Andy Manning

Boscombe Down is a piece of downland landscape that sits on the north-east side of the river Avon, not far from the monumentalised landscape of Stonehenge and with vistas of Woodhenge and King Barrow Ridge.

Our landscape narrative has beginnings in at least the early Mesolithic period, although this paper will explore the Boscombe site as it appeared between the 30th and 20th centuries BC and connections with local and distant lands. In many ways this landscape was unremarkable. It was not part of the landscape that was heavily monumentalised, although it was a place where such a landscape could have been viewed. Woodland clearance appears to have happened towards the close of the 4th millennium. In the 3rd millennium it was a place chosen for sporadic pit digging. This unremarkable piece of landscape was, however, chosen for the burial of a few exceptional individuals with novel goods and exotic materials that in at least one case provides a biography of their travels; people with knowledge of distant lands and places, and who had lived their lives at a time when Stonehenge was undergoing major re-construction. Some of these people would have encountered seascapes and would have had memories of contrasting landscapes and possibly even seen or had direct knowledge of the source of the bluestones.