Quiddity: The Sarsen Stones of Avebury
Fay Stevens
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Avebury (Wiltshire, UK) is an ancient stony archaeological place constructed using local sarsen stones of post-glacial Cenozoic silicified sandstone. The stones are formed through a petrification process in which silica-rich fluids seep into voids (created by rocks, wood, bones, shells) and replace the original materials with silica (SiO2).
These ‘sarsen stones’ hold the essences and memories of their pre-silicified states – memories that can be encountered as echoes, traces and whispers within the vast stone megaliths of the site.
This zoom session was live from Avebury, a haptic conversation with the Avebury sarsen stones in which the zoom draws across the surface of the sarsens in a tactile praxis engaged with the stones’ inherent nature or essence of past environments, present climates and future lifeways. We observed the natural formations of solution hollows and lichens that tell a story of climates past and climate present. We engaged with the human shaping of the stones that were moved and sculpted by people over five thousand years ago.
In essence, our senses and the moving of the camera over the stones is akin to a sensorial drawing/rubbing/tracing: a quiddity of rock. We might also play around at the site with 18th century antiquarian Willian Stukeley’s drawings of the stones. This is a phantasmagorical process of deep time materiality: site, stone, time, body, action. Here, the viewers step into the drawing, through my presence within Avebury, in a tangible immersive palimpsest of sarsen and site, environment and stone.