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* Chapter 4*


      The Monuments of the Early Farmers in the Landscape

Knowledge of farming reached the British Isles from France and Flanders
and appeared in various localities in Britain and Ireland. It suggests
that individual parties of farmers from Europe set out at different
times to settle here.  The conventional date for the first of these
events, the beginning of the British Neolithic, is c4500BCE.

Many of the monuments that were the first to appear in the British
version of the Western Neolithic landscape are still with us today and
include causewayed enclosures, mortuary buildings/enclosures and long
barrows and some were embarked upon around 3800 cal BC, some 200 years
after the introduction of agriculture. This was a period of ?settling
down? in which generations of people became accustomed to the new way of
life and built up the resources that allowed them to construct the
enduring signs of the Neolithic presence. In contrast, their farming
sites, as we have seen, were far more ephemeral and have left less record.

The number of causewayed enclosures (earlier called causewayed camps)
(Oswald) have greatly increased in recent years due, in the main, to
aerial photography. These enclosures, usually difficult to spot from the
ground, show up as crop-marks from the air in grain fields as the
greater depth of soil in their ditches allows the crop planted above the
ditches to grow taller and ripen later than the rest of the field so,
early in the summer, the lines of the ditches appear as dark marks in
the lighter green of the crop.  The number of known causewayed
enclosures has jumped from 16 in 1970, mainly in southern England, to
round about 50 today, with one at Donegore Hill in Co. Antrim in
Northern Ireland. However, northern and western Britain still appear
blank on a distribution map. 

They are so called because the enclosure is formed by a rough circle of
short stretches of ditches and banks. In some cases there is more than
one 'circle' as at Windmill Hill (three) and Robin Hood's Ball (two) in
Wiltshire and Maiden Castle (two) in Dorset and at least one monument,
Knap Hill, in Wiltshire, appears to be incomplete. They range in area
from less than two hectares at Whitesheet Hill in Wiltshire to
twenty-eight hectares at Crofteon in the same county.

A good deal of effort has been devoted to the elucidation of these
monuments but so far no satisfactory general explanation has been
forthcoming and we can only point to possible explanations for specific
monuments derived from excavation evidence.  But it is probably safe to
assume that they were meeting places.

The pioneering excavation was done at Windmill Hill, part of which was
examined in 1925 and it is still one of the sites that present some of
the fullest evidence. Very little was found in the interior of the
enclosure but the ditches turned out to be a series of conjoined pits
containing a variety of materials . These included deposits of various
topsoils, pottery from as far afield as the Lizard in south-west
Cornwall, animal bones, charcoal and stone axeheads from Cornwall, North
Wales and the Lake District. Excavations in recent years in the area
around the monument have discovered smaller pits containing animal
skulls and flint implements.  Dating for the site runs from 3600-3300BCE.

These bewildering collections of materials were clearly buried by a
variety of depositees and are ritual deposits which have also been
discovered in other causewayed enclosures like Crickley Hill in
Gloucestershire and Hambledon Hill in Dorset where they were found in
the ditches and at Etton in Cambridgeshire (Pryor), which was almost
completely excavated, where there were deposits in both the ditches and
in pits in the interior of the enclosure.

The deposits were perhaps made as offerings to some power(s) that
was/were thought to control natural phenomena like the weather,
fertility of animals, crops, human diseases, running water, etc, etc,
and are  attempts to ensure good fortune and the favour of the deities
who were in charge of these things. Ceremonial places where deposits of
this sort are made are called fana and this is one explanation for some
causewayed enclosures.

Other explanations that have been put forward over the years are
cattle-markets and central places, a term that means a place where
members of a scattered community could come together. Another particular
function was identified by the excavator at Hambledon Hill. Roger Mercer
found the soil in the interior of the enclosure full of small pieces of
human bone and in one of the ditches the lower half of a skeleton of a
small boy where it had been dragged by some wild animal. Mercer
identified the monument as a place of excarnation where bodies were
exposed to the elements after death until the flesh had rotted away.
Thereafter the remaining bones were collected up and stored in barrows
that have been identified as ossuaries.

Dating of these enclosures rests mainly on determinations from the
southern monuments. A rough estimate for the construction of Knap Hill
would be c3450BCE, for the first construction at Maiden Castle about
3800BCE, and for Hambledon Hill, c3400BCE. So round about the middle of
the fourth millenium BC would be a good starting point for them and. as
far as we can tell, they seem to have been falling out of use about a
thousand years later. But we have so little evidence for the use of
these monuments which would have taken so long to contruct with the
tools that were employed at the time that one sometimes wonders whether
the actual construction was the work of various groups and an important
ritual in itself and that its completion and the subsequent history of
the site an irrelevance as far as its originators were concerned. They
were, in fact, simply making an individual statement and not an artefact
for use.  In this scenario, evidence found on the sites would include
deposits by later people making use of a site that was well known as a
place of spiritual power.

Associated with causewayed enclosures and perhaps constructed by groups
of people (septs or small clans) who cleared and farmed in adjacent
small areas are mortuary enclosures and barrows. Professor Colin
Renfrew, who has studied megalithic stalled cairns (barrows) on the
island of Rousay, identifies each barrow with an adjoining territory
belonging to an individual sept. The cairns not only served as places
where excarnated remains (skulls and long bones) could be deposited
after exposure but also as markers of the sept territories on which
dwelt the people whose ancestral remains were stored within them.

It may be then that the barrows in other areas performed the same
function as on Rousay, so that, in the Windmill Hill area, for example,
long barrows belonged to septs who later created the causewayed
enclosure. Building a long barrow may have been within the capacity of
the twenty or thirty people who made up an early sept but who could not
have constructed a causewayed enclosure unless they co-operated with
their neighbours.  Latest reaearch suggests that long barrows began to
be built around two hundred years after the arrival of agriculturists
but few were used for for more than three to four generations. The first
barrow built at Wayland?s Smithy in Oxfordshire was probably used for
under a decade.

There are two types of long barrow: the earthen long barrow (Ashbee) and
the megalithic long barrow (Daniel). The 'long' refers to their shape,
the 'earthen' to the material forming the mound and 'megalithic' to the
stones used for building the chambers. It has never been a particularly
useful distinction for it really only works in Wessex and not in other
parts of the country. Nowadays, it is better simply to distinguish
between non-megalithic (without stone chambers) and megalithic, and this
is probably valid as (a) a constructional distinction and maybe (b) as a
ritual distinction which is perhaps real but which we have only the
haziest conception of. A typical neolithic position! Very roughly
speaking, the non-megalithic (earthen) types are found in eastern
Britain while the megalithic ones are found in western Britain and Ireland.

But the function of all Neolithic barrows was probably the same: they
were almost certainly used as a repository for human remains left behind
after excarnation (exposure to denude the flesh). As, during the decay
of the corpse, animals and birds carry off the smaller skeletal bits, it
is usually only the long bones and the skulls that survive the process.
In Europe the bodies that lay out for months on the Western Front of the
First World War suffered the same process and photographs of them show
the process in various stages and suggest that, depending on the time of
the year, several months are necessary for the process to be completed.
At Douaumont near Verdun in France a large ossuary contains the bones of
thousands of the dead from both sides collected from the battlefield and
stored in chambers which visitors can view. You can think of it as a
modern version of a Neolithic long barrow built for the same
commemorative purpose and in much the same shape.

In India and elsewhere, people still excarnate their dead. In the Naples
area of Italy bodies are disinterred after they have become desiccated
and are then stored in communal charnel houses where they are visited
each year and ceremoniously doused in perfume and rewrapped in fresh
silk for the coming twelve months. In other places today the dead are
paraded annually through the village and shown the changes that have
taken place over the last twelve months. So the idea that the ancestors
should be respected and shown consideration as though they remained as
part of the community survives in a number of societies today.

In Neolithic Britain, barrows seem to have been used for a limited
period of time, perhaps for not much more than three to four generations
which supports the idea of small communities keeping alive memories of
their immediate kin and other people they respected rather than tribal
ancestors. In the case of four barrows, at Ascott-under-Wychwood,
Hazleton, West Kennet and Fussell?s Lodge their period of active use
ended within a decade or so of 3625BC 

Archaeologists love to classify things and barrows are frustrating to
archaeologists because they are so varied that they defy classification
except in very broad (and probably rather meaningless) categories. The
mounds might be long, trapezoidal, ovate, rectangular or oval while the
chambers underneath can be made of wood or megaliths (large stones) and
constructed in a variety of plans. Entrances can be at the sides or at
the ends or in the case of the earthen long barrows entirely obliterated
by the heaping up of the mound.  Do these represent local deviations
encapsulated within a broad tradition?

Names given to categories can be geographical: Severn-Cotswold, Clyde
cairns, Maes Howe tombs, Clava cairns and Camster cairns. Other names
describe some specific feature of the category: Entrance graves (portal
dolmens), Wedge graves, Passage graves and Court cairns.

Mortuary Enclosures show up best from the air as rectangular banked and
ditched enclosures. An excavated example at Yarnton near Oxford
contained three inhumation and eight cremation burials. But it seems
that these enclosures were usually developed into earthen long barrows
and as such have been found underneath some excavated mounds. Wor Barrow
in Dorset, Willerby Wold in Yorkshire, Fussell's Lodge in Wiltshire,
Nutbane in Hampshire and Lower Luggy in Powys are examples of mortuary
enclosures later incorporated in barrows, the last one dated by AMS to
c3600-3300BCE (Gibson).

Remains of what is thought to have been an excarnation platform where
dead bodies were exposed (see also the enclosure at Hambledon Hill) have
been discovered at Stoney Middleton in Derbyshire (English Heritage).
The platform, found underneath an Early- Bronze Age round barrow (note
the continuity), was surrounded by a semi-circular wall with three
standing stones by the entrance. Hundreds of human teeth and bones have
been found at the site together with the tiny bones of small animals
such as frogs and rodents, which are thought to have been deposited at
the site in the droppings of owls and other birds of prey attracted to
the decaying human flesh. The excavators suggest the site was built
c3000BCE and remained in use for some 1000 years.

At Wor Barrow, Dorset, a palisaded exposure enclosure was later removed
and the ditches filled in and covered with a mound of chalk and soil dug
out of flanking ditches so converting the site into an earthen long
barrow.  The bones that had previously been excarnated/stored in the
enclosure were placed together at the eastern end prior to the building
of the mound. Willerby Wold, Wiltshire, before the heaping up of the
mound, had a timber facade at one end of the enclosure, like Kilham in
Yorkshire, and a crematorium area, Fussell's Lodge, also in Wiltshire,
in its early stage had a timber enclosure and porch similar to Wor
Barrow while Nutbane at first was a mortuary area and featured an
enclosure with a timber building/elaborate porch in front of it.

Radiocarbon dates for excavated earthen long barrows include:

    Dalladies, Fettercairn, Kincardineshire    c4100 cal BCE
    Willerby Wold, Yorkshire                   c3710 cal BCE
    Kilham, Yorkshire                          c3670 cal BCE
    Nutbane, Hampshire                         c3450 cal BCE    
    South Street, Wiltshire                    c3400 cal BCE
    Normanton, Wiltshire                       c3390 cal BCE
     (Cal = calibrated)

At Wayland's Smithy in Berkshire, an earlier non-megalithic long barrow
had a megalithic barrow built on top of it, demonstrating a continuation
of burial practice on the same spot and the essential equivalence of the
megalithic and non-megalithic monuments so we can  see them as analogous
strands of the same tradition of ancestor veneration. There is no need
to regard this necessarily as evidence of religious or ritual practice
as we would the deposits mentioned in association with the causewayed
enclosures but rather as a means of proclaiming the continuity of the
communal identity with the barrow as marker of the ancestral land. The
early timber barrow was used between 3450 and 2400 cal BC. Then after
around a hundred years or so a second but megalithic barrow was
constructed and was in use until around 3350 cal BC.

Two non-megalithic long barrows are unusual in that there is no sign of
any bones or wooden mortuary structures underneath the mounds, only an
arrangement of hundreds of upright stakes which divide the areas under
the barrows into segments along both sides of a central spine. The
arrangement has the same pattern as the skeleton of a fish. These
barrows at Beckhampton Road and South Street, close together in
Wiltshire, are usually referred to as cenotaphs for want of a better
description.

The megalithic (= large stone) tradition has benefited by large-scale
excavations devoted as much to the mounds as to the stone structures
under them. Three Severn-Cotswold types have been totally excavated in
recent years at Ascott-under-Wychwood, Oxon, Gwernvale in Brecknockshire
and Hazleton North in Gloucestershire. At Ascott and Hazleton,
stone-walled segments under the mounds recall the stake segments in the
Wiltshire earthen examples described above and at Gwernvale a wooden
phase preceded the stone phase as it did at Wayland's Smithy.

Excavations of megalithic barrows have demonstrated their function as a
repository for human bones, almost always long bones and skulls, lying
in stone chambers that are usually arranged at the end or along the
sides of the passage leading into a round mound, or in compartments of a
segmented gallery in a long mound, one end of which serves as the
entrance to the structure. Otherwise, the gallery is reached by means of
a tunnel at right-angles to the east/west alignment running into it from
the side of the long mound.

Severn-Cotswold types of long barrow comprises two sub-types. One is the
transepted gallery grave with a gallery, one end of which forms the
entrance, from which open on both sides a number of compartments, known
as transepts. The best-known excavated example open to the public is
West Kennet not far from Avebury in Wiltshire. The other sub-group
consists of individual chambers placed on both sides of the long mound
each with its separate entrance. Occasionally in this sub-group there is
a false entrance at the broad, eastern end of the mound where the
entrance of the transepted gallery grave would be found. An example of a
'dummy portal' is at Belas Knap in Gloucestershire that gives the
impression that it is leading into a gallery

The West Kennet barrow is often taken as a typical example of the
'transepted gallery grave' but the mound is much larger than most,
having megalithic chambers only under the eastern end of a
ninety-metre-long mound. The chambers are fronted by a small courtyard
later closed off by a facade of upright large stones, one of which is
said to weigh fifty tons. The small chambers open off both sides of the
gallery. There are two chambers on each side with a chamber at the end
of the gallery. Unusually, the structure is high enough for one to walk
upright. The mound over them is much larger than is required to cover
them and boldly announces their location on the top of the ridge.  The
first of the burials took place in the 3640s cal BC and the last some
10-30 years later. After a hundred-year gap the chambers began to be
filled up with material scraped up from the surrounding area and, last
of all, a thousand years later, the barrow was finally blocked off with
the large stones that still seem to bar access. Not far away, Fussell?s
Lodge barrow was constructed with a mound of chalk gradually piled over
a period of time inside a massive timber fence. The earliest burials
date to around 3700 cal BC and the final inhumations to between 3630 and
3620 cal BC when the chalk mound was completed.

In the Cotswolds, Ascott-under-Wychwood and Hazleton long barrows both
consist of wedge-shaped mounds over stone chambers accessed through
short passages through the sides of the mounds. Excavations found the
remains of 21 people in the Ascott barrow chambers and 40 at Hazleton. A
Neolithic settlement under the  Ascott mound is dated to the 3900s or
3720s cal BC followed by a gap of 50 years before the barrow was built
in the 3730s or 3720s cal BC. The Hazleton pre-barrow settlement dates
to the 3800s cal BC and the barrow on top between 3700 and 3650 cal BC,
being used until around 3630 cal BC.  (English Heritage).

Usually, in those barrows open to the public as, for example, at Stoney
Littleton south of Bath, one has to crouch inside and crawl on all-four
sinto a corridor which has three 'transepts' on each side and the mound
has a kerb of drystone walling around it that may be original and not
added at a whim of a nineteenth-century antiquary. In contrast to West
Kennet, the chanbers take up a large proportion of the length of the mound.

Examination of the alignments of long barrows in the Windmill
Hill/Avebury region show that they have their broad ends, where the
megalithic chambers are or where the remains of the bodies were placed
in the case of a non-megalithic long barrow, facing in a general
easterly direction. This has prompted the suggestion that the megalithic
'suite' or mortuary enclosure underneath the earthen barrow was built to
face the point on the horizon where the sun would rise on a particular
day of the year.

An example of the passage grave type of megalithic tomb under a circular
mound is Newgrange in the valley of the Boyne in Ireland where cremation
is the commonest burial rite. The chambers lie under a vast pile of
mainly water-rolled pebbles that has been restored to a likeness of its
original prehistoric form. Around this 200,000 tons of material, is a
kerb of oblong boulders decorated with a variety of incised designs. 
(Irish barrows: Herity and Eogan). A cruciform chamber at the end of the
entrance passage is roofed with a hexagonal vault built of corbelled
blocks each weighing up to a ton. This chamber is also ornamented with
incised designs.

Above the entrance is a fanlight leading to a tunnel above the passage.
This allows the rising sun to shine along the tunnel and play on the
centre of the chamber floor each midwinter's day. A similar phenomenon
has been engineered in Cairn T and Cairn U of the Loughcrew (County
Meath) group, many of which are similarly decorated.

Not far off, two passage graves, one a Breton type (similar to examples
in Brittany), and the other similar to that at Newgrange, lie under
mounds even bigger than Newgrange's. Like Newgrange, Knowth has carving
on the stones of the grave and on the kerbstones surrounding the mound
but the quality of the art is higher with simple, bold designs that can
be appreciated at a distance. Around this spectacular monument are
grouped seventeen smaller tombs each covered with a round mound. At the
eastern end of the group is the Dowth tumulus, the largest of the
complex, covering two megalithic structures, both decorated, although
not to the same standard as Knowth and the mound has similar kerbstones,
albeit decorated in a second-rate style. These great megalithic round
barrows are matched but not outclassed by the similar structures in
Brittany in north-western France.

This art which consists of what has been described as ?motives of the
mind?, copies of mental imagery generated in the brain by altered states
of consciousness ? ?trances? in other words and in the opinions of some
experts is related to the Neolithic conception of death which was a
transition to another environment and given substance by the structure
of the tomb itself.  This is an attractive idea but does not help us to
explain the role of the many other megalithic tombs that were not
supplied with similar megalithic art unless it was only the
passage-grave builders who were privy to these visions.

A group of barrows is described as a cemetery and this is the finest
barrow cemetery in the British Isles. Other passage grave cemeteries
exist in Ireland, as well as individual barrows, all in the north and
east of the island; the earliest built in the cemetery above Sligo town,
according to the latest excavators, between 5620 and 5310BCE. This
dating brings into focus the question of the nomenclature of British and
Irish archaeological periods.  Within the present framework, the dating
of this tomb places it in the Mesolithic rather than in the Neolithic
period in which megalithic tombs have long held an iconic position. So,
either one accepts that Mesolithic people were building such structures,
both here and on the Continent where there are radiocarbon dates of late
6^th and early 5^th millennia for tombs in Brittany, Poiters and
Galicia, or one must accept that the Neolithic period had its beginning
around a thousand years earlier than what is usually accepted. The
definition of the Neolithic period is as the era of the earliest farming
in the British Isles but one is never going to be able to give a
definite date for its inception simply because the evidence for the
first farmers is always going to be ephemeral and a date in the middle
of the 6^th millenium is as likely as one in the middle of the 5^th . It
may be germane to this discussion  to point out that some of the
earliest dates for firm evidence of agriculture in the British Isles are
from the north of Ireland (Cf. Ballynagilly etc). 

           The two commonest types of megalithic tombs in Ireland are
the courtyard cairn, which is the earlier, and the portal dolmen. The
earliest courtyard cairns date from the fifth millenium BCE. Under a
trapezoid or elongated mound is a segmented gallery consisting of two or
more chambers that leads out of a forecourt (an area enclosed by a wall
of stones) at one end of the mound which is continued round the
forecourt on both sides, forming a wall, sometimes almost totally
enclosing it, like the claws of a lobster.

One of the best examples of a court cairn is Creevykeel in Co. Sligo
with a cairn some 55m metres long. The evidence for deposition was five
small pockets of cremated bone in the chambers. Three subsidary chambers
were inserted into the tail of the cairn and in one of them a great deal
of pottery was discovered.

Portal dolmens are found in Cornwall and Wales but their greatest
concentration is in Ireland. From a miniature forecourt one enters,
between two tall slabs, a rectangular chamber which usually becomes
narrower and lower towards the further end. The entrance is often
blocked by a slab that may reach right up to the capstone (roofing-slab)
that can be massive. At the Brownshill Portal Dolmen near Carlow in
Leinster it weighs over a hundred tons. Grave goods are similar to those
from the court cairns except that the pottery is decorated. These
similarities have led Irish archaeologists to put forward the idea that
the Portal Dolmen was derived from the Court Cairn. The chambers of many
Portal Dolmens stand unencumbered by a cairn, suggesting that they never
reached the stage of acquiring a mound.

At the end of the Neolithic period the Wedge Grave appears in Ireland.
Its chamber is in the form of an antechamber and gallery that narrows
slightly at the inner end and is often entered by a doorway framed by
tall slabs. Some examples have a double thickness wall with a narrow
space between the two walls. The cairn may be roundish, oval or D-shaped
and often has a retaining wall to hold the mound in shape. Inside, both
inhumations and cremations have been found together with pottery,
commonly of the Beaker type (see below). At Moytirra, Co. Sligo, the
inhumed remains of four adults and a child were found. At Lough Gur, the
chamber contained the remains of at least twelve inhumations and a
cremation.   Barbed-and-tanged arrowheads and thumb scrapers occur
amongst the flint artifacts.

In south-west Scotland cairns tend to be rectangular or wedge-shaped
with the wider end built concave to form horns like the court cairns of
Ireland. The gallery leads off this forecourt and is split into
compartments by kerbs. Half of the burials found in the excavated
chambers were cremations and half inhumations and both were accompanied
by round-bottomed early neolithic bowls and flints. Dating for the
earliest example is probably before 4000BCE and the monuments are known
as Clyde Cairns.

Bargrennan is one of a small group of passage graves in south-west
Scotland and has given its name to the group.  Elsewhere in Scotland the
megalithic cairns are mainly variations on the themes of the passage
grave and the gallery grave. In Orkney are the passage graves referred
to as the Maes Howe type named after the most famous example which has a
high passage leading to a spacious rectangular corbelled chamber with
three rectangular cells opening from it about a metre above the floor of
the main chamber. The chamber lies under a mound of about 35 metres in
diameter that is surrounded by a ditch. Radiocarbon determinations from
Maes Howe and from the Quanterness passage grave indicate dates for the
group in the later fourth and early third millenia BCE.

In north-eastern Scotland the Clava Cairns are another type of passage
grave. Two sub-groups make up the assemblage. One is an annular cairn
with a hole in the middle like an American doughnut. Like the doughnut,
there is no break in the encircling material. In the unroofed interior,
cremation burials were made.  The other sub-group is a characteristic
passage grave with a corbelled chamber at the end of a short passage set
under a round mound. Monuments of both sub-groups are surrounded by
circles of monoliths (individual standing stones).  The N.E. Clava cairn
has been investigated and it has been found that the final rays of the
setting midwinter sun shine directly down the passage and into the
chamber.  These Clava tombs have recently been dated to around 2000BCE.

Further north in eastern Scotland is the group known as the Camster
Cairns. Chambers are galleries, entered at one end, and divided up by
projecting jambs into interconnecting compartments, the whole being
covered by a circular mound. In some examples, however, the gallery can
be much longer, accommodating up to twelve compartments and the mound is
correspondingly elongated. In these examples the chambers are entered
through a short passage at the side like the Stalled Cairns on Rousay
mentioned above.

A final type of megalithic tomb remains to be described. This contains a
short passage with no differention between the passage and the chamber
covered with a round mound that is usually revetted with a kerb of
stones. In south-west Cornwall, the Scilly Isles and south-eastern
Ireland there is a small group of these monuments which seem to belong
to the early Bronze Age.

Although we have a great deal of evidence of human remains being placed
in megalithic tombs in a fragmentary condition, presumably after
excarnation, as in the chambers on Rousay Island, we also find examples
of complete bodies being laid in them accompanied by grave goods.
Instances of such have been found in the courtyard cairn at Audleystown
in Co. Down. This is perhaps the earliest evidence of a development
originating in the late Neolithic that begins the practice of what we
might describe as ?proper burial?.

It is this variety of practice that makes it so difficult to provide a
coherent picture of neolithic disposal of the dead. The best we can do
is to say that a great deal of it revolved around the mortuary enclosure
or the megalithic chamber and it involved the storage of body parts and
the cult of veneration of the ancestors.

Megalithic chambers were constructed with large stones that were not
artificially pre-shaped. They were, in fact, selected so that they
fitted their appointed position in the structure. Weighing many tons,
the largest of them were probably not transported over a great distance
but needed to be manhandled on the journey and then lifted into
position, an operation that would have required considerable engineering
expertise and a large number of people. This last is certainly true for
constructing the passage grave mounds and for positioning the largest
capstones.  Our problem in understanding the proceedures that centres
around this last point ? the large number of people that would have been
required and our perception that the Neolithic population was small and
scattered.

It is unlikely that this specialised building knowledge was possessed by
everybody at the time and this raises the possibility of the existence
of specialist megalithic builders, people whose traditional activity was
the handling of large stones. If such people existed they would have had
to travel from one site to another to supervise constructions and this
would have needed a system of communication between communities which
may not have been as isolated as is sometimes supposed.

This idea is given greater weight by the evidence of the distribution of
various materials:  stone artifacts and pottery. These are the materials
that best survive from the period but we should remember that other
things could have been circulated but they were organic and therefore
perishable and have not survived in the ground to provide us with the
evidence.

As far as we know the stone used for making tools and weapons by earlier
peoples was collected from the surface but in the Neolithic period for
the first time mining or quarrying of stone is apparent. Technology had
taken a significant step forward with the discovery of methods of
obtaining materials from a considerable depth under the ground.

This was a major advance. The first mining was for flint and the basic
technology remained the same for thousand of years of mining for other
materials like copper, salt, iron and coal. It involved digging a pit
until the required seam of material was reached and then following it in
various directions for as long as it was safe to do so before
backfilling the pit and digging another close by to follow the seam
further. Such pits are referred to as bell-pits, a reference to the
shapes of their cross-sections.

Best-quality flint is found in situ lying in discrete layers under the
ground. Flint from outcrops that have been weathered on the surface is
not as good for flint-working and it is clear that the difference in
quality was enough to make it worth while going to the trouble of
digging pits many metres deep.

We first know of this activity on the Continent/. The Rijckholt mines in
the Netherlands, some up to fifteen metres deep, probably produced in
all over 153 million axeheads/. In England the practice started in the
south, in Sussex at Findon and in Wiltshire at Easton Down, during the
fourth millenium BCE (Russell). But the most extensive flint-mining area
is at Grimes Graves in Norfolk with 350 shafts up to 18m deep. Here, the
miners sank their shafts in the upper chalk, passing through two layers
of flint, the topstone and the wallstone, to reach the desired
floorstone that is found in the form of large tabular chunks of black,
glossy flint. This industry dates from c2500 BCE and continued for
several hundred years. It has been estimated that some 28 million flint
axeheads were made from the flint mined there. 

Axeheads were the principal product and must have been distributed over
a wide area. Work on identifying the places of origin of specific flints
is still in its infancy but it will be a great step forward in our
understanding of the processes of trade/exchange at the time when the
method has been fully established and we can map the distribution
pattern of the Grimes Graves products.

Quarrying was confined to the highland regions of Britain and Ireland
where specific kinds of rock are to be found. Like the flint from Grimes
Graves, the stone was to be made into axeheads and needed to be tough
and resilient. Also, it was to be polished to ape the gl;ossy flint so
required to be fine-grained enough for this to be possible. Fortunately,
petrology (the study of rocks) is far enough advanced now to allow
experts to pin down these stone axeheads to their places of origin.

There were a large number of axe quarry or axe-factory sites but the
most productive was a site in Cornwall, precise location uncertain,
where greenstone was quarried. The axeheads made from this rock are the
most widely distributed in England, particularly in the south, with an
overwhelming preponderance around Penzance. Another quarry is at Great
Langdale in the Lake District where the only intensive exploration of
such a site has been done. The rock here is a fine-grained andesitic
ash, formed between 400 and 350 million years ago which produces
arguably the finest of all axeheads which were distributed widely
throughout Britain. Graig Llwyd, near Penmaenmawr, in North Wales,
produces an igneous rock, formed by volcanic action. Not far away is
Mynydd Rhiw in the Lleyn peninsula where another ash formed the rock
that is very different from the Langdale material.

In Northern Ireland two quarry sites have been identified. One is at
Tievebulliagh in Co. Antrim and the other at Rathlin Island in the same
county. The rock is black and flint-like and examples of axeheads made
from it are found all over Ireland and even in Britain as far afield as
Kent.

Stone axeheads, like some of the flint axeheads, were polished, using,
one supposes, fine sand, water and a leather and were then hafted in a
hole in a wooden handle, perhaps using an antler sleeve between the
stone and the handle to absorb some of the vibration.

Complete examples of hafted axeheads have been discovered in both
Ireland, in Co. Fermanagh and at Ehenside Tarn in the English Lake
District. Axeheads can often be found in almost mint condition, showing
very little signs of wear and some found in this country are made of a
dark-green semi-precious stone known as jadeite. They were imported from
the Continent. Such axeheads were presumably not employed for common
tasks like chopping wood and may have been carried as status symbols or
used in some sort of ritual. But others were clearly working tools as
worn examples in settlements at Goodland and Lyles Hill in Antrim and at
several other habitation sites in Ireland has shown.

Because of the ability of the petrologist to identify sources of a
number of these axeheads, it is possible to say something about their
distribution in a way that is not yet possible with the flint examples.
What is surprising is the distance that they could travel. The
Tievebulliagh axeheads have been found not only in Kent but also in the
London area, in north-eastern Scotland and in the Western Isles. In
Ireland their distribution is densest in Ulster but the spread is as far
south as Co. Cork.

It is difficult to believe in organised trade in the Neolithic period.
For one thing the quantity of goods concerned is too small to support
such an idea and there is no evidence of markets or anything of that
sort nor is it likely that there was such a demand for the products so
that it was worthwhile trading directly with customers over a long
distance.

As there was no currency at this time goods were exchanged for other
goods or services and one can visualise a local system whereby small
quantities of artifacts were carried round by pedlars in the zone
surrounding the production source and given to customers in exchange for
s night's lodging, food, clothes or other necessities of life. This
would account for the concentration of finds of Tievebulliagh axeheads
around the axe quarry for example. When we look at the long distance
distribution, we can remark that the numbers of artifacts are very small
compared to the number in the production source zone and perhaps could
have reached their find-spots by being passed on from hand to hand as
gifts or tribute.

Petrology, of course, can be useful in identifying stones that have been
used for other artifacts apart from axeheads. Querns and millstones must
be made of rocks with hard mineral contents and yet they must contain a
limited proportion of softer grains or crystals that wear away to
maintain a rough grinding surface. At the Iron Age hillfort of Danebury
in Hampshire the millstones were made of a particular form of greensand
that was traced to its actual quarry source in West Sussex. The
aptly-named millstone grit of the Carboniferous rocks of the north
Midlands and Yorkshire has provided grinding stone throughout the ages.
A source much further away in the Rhineland of Germany, at Niedermendig,
sent millstones to Britain from the Neolithic period onwards.

This demonstrates the amount of trouble people took in selecting and
obtaining the best materials at the time. The same care was taken with
later materials. When metals came in, hones became very important for
sharpening edged tools. Suitable stone for them was also carried over
long distances. In medieval Yorkshire, a number of whetstones were found
that had been quarried near Aberdeen.  Petrological examination of metal
slags can show what product was being made on the site and often what
type of ore was being smelted. Jewellery too can be examined to suggest
where the stones came from. Although petrology is a geological study, it
is one that archaeologists have 'borrowed' as they have done with a
number of other disciplines.

In recent years a small number of defended or fortified sites have been
discovered which belong to the Neolithic period. Three of the best-known
are Carn Brae in Cornwall, Helman Tor in Devon and Crickley Hill in
Gloucestershire. At Carn Brae a neolithic hut was found built up against
a stone rampart and was associated with pottery, flints, pits and hearths.

At Crickley Hill (Dixon) around 3500BCE over 1.6 hectares of the highest
area of the hill were enclosed with a stone bank. Evidence of the use of
antler picks was found in the shallow pits from which the stone was
quarried immediately in front of the rampart. Around the inner edge of
the half-metre high rampart a timber stockade was built. There appear to
have been five entrances. Inside, neolithic flints and pottery were
uncovered which suggested a settlement site. Later, a second bank dug
from a deeper ditch and another palisade about thirty metres inside the
first surrounded the same settlement. Four entrances in this new rampart
matched four in the outer bank. They were framed in timber and
apparently had wooden gates. Through the south-eastern entrance led a
straight, fenced roadway with a rectangular wooden house standing beside
it. These defences were demolished and rebuilt several times and also
suffered from fire. It has been suggested that finds of arrowheads are
evidence of attack. Round about 2,500BCE the last neolithic defences
were built. There were three entrances with a low stone rampart and a
rear palisade. One of the entrances opened onto a fenced road along
which stood at least two wooden, rectangular houses. A path continuing
the line of the road led to a fenced enclosure that has been interpreted
as a shrine. This final neolithic settlement was apparently razed to the
ground and burnt after an attack by bowmen, four hundred of whose
arrowheads have been found embedded in the remains of the palisade and
around the entrances. This ultimate disaster occurred some time before
2000BCE in the early Bronze Age.

Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowheads occur in some numbers at other
neolithic enclosure sites: at Carn Brea and Hambledon Hill in Dorset.
These occurrences have been taken by archaeologists to demonstrate that
serious clashes took place between rival groups at the time but we do
not know whether this was tribal warfare or the result of disputes
between neighbouring communities over grazing land or animals or similar
local concerns. It is interesting to record that a dozen or more
instances of death by leaf arrowheads have been recorded from various
excavations where skeletons have been unearthed in sites of this period.
The bow and arrow was clearly a seriously popular weapon, the earliest
example of a bow coming from a Scottish peat-bog at Rotten Bottom dated
by radio-carbon to 3040BCE. 

Apparently, large enclosures in the later Neolithic period were used for
a variety of purposes, none of which we fully understand. There are
ditched areas with no special characteristics as at Bury Hill in West
Sussex which was discovered as a crop mark from the air, large
rectangular areas at Dorchester in Dorset and very large
timber-palisaded enclosures found and partially excavated at West Kennet
near Avebury, at Hindwell, Powys, in Wales and Plasketlands in the Lake
District. Like a great many neolithic monuments, these large enclosures
remain an enigma. At West Kennet, its location in the special area where
so many neolithic barrows and ritual features have been found may mean
that it too had a ritual function.

A type of monument that makes its first appearance in the Neolithic
period is rock art or cup and-ring carving which is found on rocks in
northern England, Scotland and Ireland. The symbols are pecked into a
rock slab with a hammer-stone and are reminiscent of but by no means
identical to the megalithic art on Irish tombs in the Boyne valley.
Recent work has established that the earliest-known examples date from
the Neolithic and the latest-known from the Early Bronze Age.  A useful
way of studying the rock art in Northumbria is with the web-site at
http://rockart.nd.ac.uk

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* Environment and Landscape <chapter03.htm>** <../cap.htm>* 	*
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* Cults and Rituals <chapter05.htm>* 	* <chapter05.htm>*

	


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