Avebury Papers Talk: Avebury and World-building

Dr Colleen Morgan from the University of York is at Southampton City Art Gallery on Saturday 19 September, talking about Avebury and world-building. It's part of The Avebury Papers, a four-year UKRI-funded project that's been digitising, exploring and sharing the multimedia archive of Avebury's Neolithic origins.

To get people thinking about how to use all that material, the project commissioned two artists to respond to it. Gayle Chong Kwan's Oneiric Archaeologies reimagines Avebury as a stone circle that opens onto surreal dream landscapes of collage, clay objects, tools and lidar scans. Kialy Tihngang's The Bluest Eye works from the theory that the circles commemorated the domestic dwelling of a group of early farmers who migrated to southern England some 5,800 years ago. Dr Morgan's talk looks at how archaeologists are using digital tools and approaches today to access and communicate the worlds of the past, and it'll reference both of those responses.

There was a companion popup exhibition of work by the University of York's Digital Creativity students that went along with this, but it's no longer showing, though it'll still be mentioned during the talk. If you're in the gallery anyway, you can also see Changing Landscape: The Photography of O.G.S. Crawford, which is running at the same time.

The talk is in the Lecture Theatre on the ground floor of the North Block of the Civic Centre, Commercial Road, SO14 7LP, from 11am to 12noon. It's free to attend, and there's the option to add a £5 or £10 donation to Southampton Museums and Art Gallery.