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| Woodhenge |
Woodhenge
Maud Cunnington (24 September 1869–28
February 1951).
Born in the latter part of the 19th century Maud
Cunnington was, according to her biography, educated briefly at Cheltenham
Ladies School, she went on to marry Benjamin Cunnington, who was a honorary
curator at Devizes Museum and who also worked in his family’s business. Amongst
the many places they excavated, Woodhenge and The Sanctuary at Avebury stands
out as sites of special importance. They excavated a late Neolithic henge at
Woodhenge from 1926-1928. The site had been identified from the air in 1925 by
O.S. Crawford and Alexander Keiller. What we see today of course are concrete
pillars establishing where the large wooden posts would have been. In the centre
is a small stone mound covering the grave of a young child of about three years
old.
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| Child's grave |
Hunting
round on the web for information about the privately published book that the
Cunnington’s wrote about Woodhenge after the excavation, I came across these
words recorded
by
Rideflame, and would like to quote them in full in Maude’s own words…
There is something sad about these relic bones of
a young child found in the 1920s, a prehistoric child ghost still haunting our
world. The bones were in actual fact destroyed in the Blitz during the war.
There was also another skeleton found in the ditch of the henge. This was of a
teenage boy, who seemed to have suffered some deformities. Sir Arthur Keith who
studied the bones said this of them, that he found the shape of the skull was
more typical of an Iron Age date and Maud had also written that “It is
remarkable that the man from the bottom of the ditch bears a striking
resemblance to skulls found during the course of excavations at Casterley Camp,
Salisbury Plain: 1909 -1912.”
Sir Arthur Keith’s report:
A slim man five feet seven inches tall all
his teeth free from disease – but certain of his bones have not ceased growing.
Wrist bones are finished so is knee and shoulder. Epiphyses of hip and shoulder
blade are un-closed. Sagittal suture if fussed which makes him older
than thirty-five -but other signs show him to be less than twenty-two.
His face and appearance different to that of Bronze Age
people.
Such judgement made in the early 20th century are
reflections of that time, today’s interpretation would probably be different.
Mike Pitts in Hengeworld, stresses that the Cunningtons were not necessarily the
best of archaeologists, Maud did not produce field notes for the important
Sanctuary stone circle site, recorded by Stukeley but subsequently destroyed
soon after.
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| The Sanctuary |
She did though write a report to be published the
following year, but as field notes are essential to interpretation of detail,
such information is lost to later archaeologists. She also however, as in the
case of Woodhenge, bought the land on which The Sanctuary stone circle was
located, though it it is now under the ownership of English Heritage. She left
in her estate £14,000 pounds to pay the salary of a curator at Devizes
Museum.
Archaeology in the early 20th century was to be
fair, still in the hands of people who had funds to privately excavate,
Alexander Keiller comes to mind, his excavations at Windmill Hill and Avebury
were funded by a ‘marmalade empire’. He did not like Maud Cunnington, the
feeling was mutual, but he was prepared to watch the Cunnington’s excavations
from afar, employing the same foreman as well. The Cunningtons were fascinated
by the past, and we must be thankful for those antiquarians who were prepared to
dig and delve, record and draw in past centuries; archaeology also had to
undergo a ‘growing up’ period, developing along the way a purer form of sciences
for the extraction of knowledge, but without those first pioneers there would be
no information to build on in the present!
With thanks to:
Information gleaned from Rideframe’s blog.
Hengeworld by
Mike Pitts. Published by Century in 2000.
