In the late 1930s, archaeologists digging under a toppled stone at Avebury in Wiltshire found a crushed skeleton with a leather pouch holding three silver coins from the 1320s, iron scissors, and a lancet: a medieval traveling barber surgeon killed while helping bury one of the stones. Avebury is the largest megalithic stone circle in the world, so large that a village with a pub, thatched cottages, and a post office sits inside it. In the third millennium BC, early farmers dug a ditch 11 meters into chalk bedrock with red deer antlers and cattle shoulder blades, raised a bank over 340 meters across, and set up an outer circle of 98 unworked sarsen stones, some over 40 tons, with two inner circles and stone-lined avenues leading in.

By the late Middle Ages the Christian villagers saw the stones as the devil’s work, naming them the Devil’s Chair, the Devil’s Coits, and the Devil’s Brand Irons. After the surgeon’s death, the Black Death hit in 1349 and the burying stopped for three centuries. Puritan-era villagers later smashed stones with fire and cold water for building material. John Aubrey came upon the site while hunting in 1649 and brought Charles II, and William Stukeley documented it in the 1720s while bending his measurements to fit a Druid and Trinity theory. By the 1930s only nine outer stones still stood, until marmalade heir Alexander Keiller bought the site and re-erected the buried stones.

• How antlers were used as picks along fault lines in the chalk, with cattle shoulder blades as shovels
• The unusually clean interior that suggests the henge was kept off limits for special ceremonies
• The thermal shock method of heating toppled stones with bonfires and drenching them with cold water
• Keiller’s concrete markers for stones that had been destroyed, and the 50 local men he hired
• Modern Druid rites at the Devil’s Chair and the weekend rota pagan groups use to share the stones