July 6: Avebury and Oxford

Today we went to Avebury to behold the magnificent stones (and witnessed a pagan religious ceremony!) and then Sainsbury's to shop for some stuff we need at the house, like electric fans (no buildings have air conditioning here, because they so rarely need it) and groceries for a home-made dinner tonight (yay!!).

Avebury (/ˈeɪvbəri/) is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles, around the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, in southwest England. One of the best known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans.

Constructed over several hundred years in the Third Millennium BC,^[1] during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge (a bank and a ditch) with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument. Its original purpose is unknown, although archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony. The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby, including West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill.

By the Iron Age, the site had been effectively abandoned, with some evidence of human activity on the site during the Roman occupation. During the Early Middle Ages, a village first began to be built around the monument, eventually extending into it. In the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, local people destroyed many of the standing stones around the henge, both for religious and practical reasons. The antiquarians John Aubrey and William Stukeley, however, took an interest in Avebury during the 17th century, and recorded much of the site before its destruction. Archaeological investigation followed in the 20th century, led primarily by Alexander Keiller, who oversaw a project which reconstructed much of the monument.

Sainsbury's is the second largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom,^[2] with a 16.9% share of the supermarket sector in the United Kingdom.^[3] Founded in 1869, by John James Sainsbury with a shop in Drury Lane, London, the company became the largest retailer of groceries in 1922, was an early adopter of self-service retailing in the United Kingdom, and had its heyday during the 1980s. 

This made me laugh. The grass is always greener...

Homemade dinner! We voted unanimously for just a regular old every-day California dinner, so we did tacos with fajita onions and peppers and fresh guacamole. The store even had tortilla chips!! Glorious!! Then after dinner I convinced everyone to watch the British claymation movie "Early Man," which the kids thought would be terrible but I thought would be awesome because it's the same people who made Chicken Run and Wallace and Grommit. Plus, a British movie about Stone Age and Bronze Age history? What could be more perfect?? A lot of things, as it turns out. We lasted 20 minutes but it was too dumb, and the history was all wrong, mixing up mammoths and armor and horned helmets and castles. "I am deeply offended!!" cried my little historians, so we jumped ship and watched the movie "Holes" instead. :)