A small village in Wiltshire, southwest of England; the site of the Avebury Circle, the largest ancient stone circle in the world. The circle was built around 2000 B.C.E. at about the same time or perhaps a few years earlier than stonehenge, a smaller but better-preserved monument of a different type that is located 17 miles to the south.
The monument originally had several components. The main circle consisted of 98 very large stones surrounding two smaller circles of about 30 smaller stones each. Unlike Stonehenge, the stones retained their natural shape. There are some clues that there might have been a third small 30-stone circle. All stones lie within a huge circular ditch and bank, 330 meters (1,400 feet) in diameter; the bank is about 6 meters (20 feet) high and the ditch 9 meters (30 feet) deep, with a 5 meter (15 foot) ledge between bank and ditch. The bank was originally higher and steeper, and the ditch was about twice as deep. The construction of bank and ditch would have taken more than a million human-years of labor. There are four entrances through the bank and ditch, roughly southeast, southwest, northwest, and northeast. The large circle is just inside the ditch. Most of its stones (weighing up to 50 tons) and almost all the stones of the smaller circles have long since been broken up and used in the buildings of the village, which lies inside the circle. Concrete posts now mark where stones once stood. The inner circles, each about 90 meters (300 feet) in diameter and 15 meters (50 feet) apart, contained smaller stone structures. Two lines of stones 24 meters (80 feet) apart, link Avebury with another structure, the Sanctuary, a mile away. The Sanctuary was demolished in the 18th century, and the only traces we now have of it are the holes that once held the stones.