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

The Buried Landscapes project is a multi-institution, interdisciplinary research programme that maps and dates the buried Holocene sediments, palaeochannels and loess deposits around the River Avon and the eastern margin of the Stonehenge landscape (the Blick Mead / Vespasian’s Camp–Amesbury area). Its goal is to recover long environmental sequences preserved beneath later sediments so palaeoecological proxies (pollen, sedaDNA, macrofossils), OSL/14C dating and geoarchaeology can reconstruct valley evolution, wetland formation and the timing of open vs. wooded conditions prior to monument construction. The project is described on the UK Research and project partner pages and brings together universities (Southampton, UCL, Bradford, Leipzig, etc.) with specialist geoarchaeological teams. 

Closely linked is the focused research on Blick Mead, the chalk-spring locality just east of Stonehenge, which provides an exceptionally long and rich Mesolithic sequence of human activity, faunal remains and environmental samples. Multi-proxy studies from Blick Mead (pollen, sedimentary DNA, faunal analysis) indicate repeated Mesolithic occupation in a partially open clearing exploited for large ungulates (aurochs, deer) over millennia — a setting that would later have been amenable to Neolithic monument builders because large open patches already existed. Publications and project reports (including a detailed PLoS ONE study) show how environmental reconstructions from Blick Mead directly inform hypotheses about landscape continuity from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic ritual activity.

Methodologically the Buried Landscapes programme ties palaeoenvironmental cores, sedaDNA and geochronology to the legacy of the Stonehenge Riverside and related regional projects: where the earlier Stonehenge Riverside Project established links between rivers, monuments and movement across the Avon–Salisbury Plain corridor, the buried-landscapes work supplies the sedimentary and dating framework that explains why particular places (springheads, terrace edges, palaeochannels) attracted people in the Mesolithic and remained important through the Neolithic. In practice this means combining LiDAR/geomorphology, borehole logs and OSL dating with artefact distributions and HER/CRM records to relocate palaeochannels and targeted test excavations. 

The project’s broader significance is twofold. First, it reframes the Stonehenge zone as a longue durée landscape with deep Mesolithic roots — not an empty prehistory cleared only by Neolithic farmers — which affects interpretations of monument placement, access and memory. Second, by producing a fine-grained environmental chronology across the Avon corridor, it provides a template other regional studies can use to locate buried Mesolithic deposits (e.g., springheads, gravel rises) and to integrate geoarchaeology with lithic/faunal assemblage studies across southern Britain. The Buried Landscapes outputs therefore sit as a crucial bridge between site-level discoveries (Blick Mead, Ufton Bridge, etc.) and wider questions about cultural continuity, mobility and the environmental preconditions for monumentality.

In addition to the long‐term palaeoenvironmental sequence around the Stonehenge corridor, geo-archaeological investigations at Jubilee Gardens, Ringwood, on the lower Hampshire Avon floodplain have provided a high-resolution sedimentary record for the early Holocene and later. Two boreholes drilled in March 2022 revealed basal deposits that date to the early Neolithic (c. 3530-3370 cal BC) and show transitions from alder-carr and wetland vegetation to more open grassland, then later wetter conditions and floodplain re-working. These results offer a rare opportunity in the Avon valley to contextualise human activity and environmental change: even where no direct Mesolithic occupation has been found at the site, the geological model helps to explain the formation of potential Mesolithic surfaces, palaeochannels or gravel rises across the floodplain, and therefore helps target where Mesolithic remains might survive.

• Hudson, S. M., Pears, B., Jacques, D., Fonville, T., Hughes, P., Alsos, I. G., … & Brown, A. G. (2022). Life before Stonehenge: The hunter-gatherer occupation and environment of Blick Mead revealed by sedaDNA, pollen and spores. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0266789. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266789

• Brown, A. G. et al. (2022). Buried landscapes of the Avon Riverside and the Mesolithic of the Stonehenge Area. AHRC Research Project. University of Southampton. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH/W002868/1

• University of Southampton. (2022, April). Study reveals Stonehenge landscape before the world-famous monument. https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2022/04/blick-mead.page

• The Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Project Overview: Buried landscapes of the Avon Riverside and the Mesolithic of the Stonehenge Area. https://www.dainst.org/en/research/projects/noslug/579

• Taylor, J., Langdon, C. T., Scaife, R. & Cameron, N. G. (2025) The River That Swallowed the Ringwood Prehistoric Landscape: Geoarchaeological investigations in advance of the development of the A31, Hampshire, England. Internet Archaeology, 69. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.69.6

• AOC Archaeology Group (2025) Digital Archive from a Geoarchaeological Borehole Evaluation at Jubilee Gardens, Ringwood, Hampshire, March 2022. Archaeology Data Service. https://doi.org/10.5284/1129480

•  Additional thematic context: People visited Stonehenge site thousands of years before it was built – dating studies (ScienceDirect article) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262407922007898