Stones Before Steeples: Faith and Memory in Britain’s First Sacred Landscapes
Member Exclusive Lectures
•
1h 21m
This talk explores evidence for religion and ritual among Britain’s first farming communities. Focusing on the Neolithic period, it examines monuments such as long barrows and stone circles as places of belief, memory, and communal gathering, embedded within carefully structured landscapes. The lecture considers how people in prehistory were motivated to invest huge resources into the construction of monuments which persisted in use and memory for many centuries and survive within our Christian landscapes today.
Win Scutt is an archaeologist and the English Heritage Curator of Stonehenge. Although he curates a range of sites in the West of England, his love of prehistory means that the stone circles, henges, long barrows and hillforts are his favourites. He did his first archaeological excavations while at school at Downside in Somerset and went on to excavate on many sites in Britain and abroad. He worked in museums for many years before going into lecturing in both archaeology and tourism. He has worked for the BBC as a contributor since the 90s and won a British Archaeological Award for his weekly features on archaeology on BBC Radio 5 Live. He is married with two grown up children and lives in South Devon.
Our host, Vikki Jenner, kicks of the session by talking about local churches around Shrewton near Stonehenge.
Up Next in Member Exclusive Lectures
-
Faith in the Ice
Dan Snow explores the life, triumphs, and controversies of the charismatic Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. In 1914, Shackleton set out with 27 men on an ambitious expedition to cross the Antarctic continent, only for their ship, Endurance, to be crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea. What f...
-
Sceptred Isle: A New History of the F...
Beginning with the death of Edward I in 1307 and ending with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, Sceptred Isle is the story of a century told through the lives of the last Plantagenets, uncovering lesser-known voices and untold stories along the way. Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the...
-
Rediscovering English Churches throug...
In this engaging lecture, Dr Simon Bradley draws on three decades of work with the iconic Pevsner Architectural Guides to explore how the series has described England's parish churches. The revised volumes published since the 1980s have been once more thorough in terms of research and fieldwork a...
