mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== British Archaeology banner Cover of British Archaeology Issue 67 October 2002 Great Sites: Windmill Hill Rosamund Cleal on a Neolithic enclosure where excavations gave a rare glimpse of the vibrant gatherings that took place in this obscure period Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, famous for the Neolithic site on its summit, hardly looks like a 'great site'. It isn't even much of a hill, as its summit can be reached by very gentle slopes and rises only 43 metres above the floor of the neighbouring Winterbourne valley, where the more famous Avebury henge lies. The present day visitor will be hard pressed to find any traces of Neolithic occupation, and even the passing archaeologist has been known to have trouble in that respect. Its most noticeable features are early Bronze Age round barrows - the few survivors of a once extensive barrow cemetery, long since largely destroyed - and a stretch of apparently impressive ditch, which is in fact the result of chalk quarrying in relatively recent times. It is possible to trace the lines of the three circuits of Neolithic enclosure ditch at Windmill Hill, but the shallow depressions which are visible are mainly ditches excavated in the 1920s and subsequently refilled almost to their tops. This dearth of visible evidence is the result of ploughing of the hill from at least the Romano-British period. But it is deceptive, because under the feet of visitors, even today, while they listen to the larks and enjoy the peace of this unusually quiet corner of the Avebury World Heritage Site, lie the remains of one of the most important Neolithic sites ever excavated in this country. The 'causewayed enclosure' at Windmill Hill and the finds associated with it dominated the study of the Neolithic period for more than a generation. Even today the work which has been done on Windmill Hill remains highly influential in the way the Neolithic period is viewed, even though many subsequent excavations of similar sites have now taken place. By the time excavation first took place at Windmill Hill in 1922, the Neolithic period had been recognised for nearly 60 years, and the study of its burial practices, artefacts and other features had an even longer history. But even with this progress, by the early 20th century there were still huge gaps in our understanding of Neolithic Britain, particularly in subjects other than burial practices or flint mining. Although occasional instances of occupation evidence had been recognised, larger and more formal places of settlement had not been found in southern or central Britain until 'causewayed enclosures', or 'causewayed camps' as they were initially known, were recognised in the first decade of the 20th century. In 1908 and 1909 Mr and Mrs BH Cunnington, of a famous Wiltshire archaeological family, excavated at Knap Hill, a hilltop enclosure about 412 miles south-west of Avebury and Windmill Hill. There the discontinuous line of bank and ditch of a single enclosure circuit were, and still are, visible. In her report on the site Maud Cunnington noted that the ditch was quite clearly dug in short lengths and that the gaps in the ditch matched similar interruptions in the bank - thus creating 'causeways' across the enclosure perimeter. Mrs Cunnington was unsure whether the site was Neolithic because of the then difficulty in identifying Neolithic pottery, but she seems to have suspected that it was. No other sites with interrupted ditches were excavated in the next decade, but in the early 1920s the rector of Winterbourne Basset, HGO Kendall, carried out a small excavation at Windmill Hill. He had been prompted to do so by the existence of at least one ditch around the hill top, which had been recognised some 200 years earlier by the antiquary William Stukeley. The site lay in an area also known as a rich source of worked flint implements, which Kendall and others had collected from the ploughsoil. Kendall suspected that the pottery he found during this small excavation was Neolithic, and his interpretation was suppported by others. Subsequently the archaeologist OGS Crawford led a campaign to save the hill from the threat of a wireless station. Although this threat was removed by the Government for non-archaeological reasons, this campaign led to the involvement of Alexander Keiller, a rich, still relatively young man (in his thirties in the 1920s) who had pursued an interest in archaeology up to then largely in Scotland. By spring 1925, Keiller had purchased a large part of Windmill Hill and was about to begin excavations. Alexander Keiller's excavations at Windmill Hill lasted five seasons between 1925 and 1929, and incorporated 16 complete segments of the inner of the site's three circuits of ditches, 11 of the middle and three of the outer. Just under half the area within the inner ditch circuit was also excavated, as were most of the causeways between the excavated ditch segments and part of the outer bank. Huge quantities of pottery, worked flint and animal bone - including whole skeletons of a dog, a pig and a goat - were found during the excavations, mainly in the ditches, as were smaller amounts of human bone, worked chalk, other worked stone and charred plant remains. The pottery included pieces of about 1,300 different pots, while the excavations produced approximately 95,000 pieces of struck flint. We now know, thanks to radiocarbon dating, that the bulk of these date to between about 3600-3300 BC. Analysis carried out in preparation for the eventual publication demonstrated how exotic some of these items were. Some of the pots, it turned out, had been made in the extreme south-west of Cornwall, on the Lizard, some 115 miles from Windmill Hill. Some of the stone axes had travelled a similar distance from Cornish sources, while others, in later Neolithic levels, had come from sources in North Wales and the Lake District. On the last day of the excavations in 1929, Alexander Keiller narrowly escaped death when, with his secretary in the passenger seat, his Bugatti hit a railway bridge at 80 mph. He went on to publish little on the site, and what had been found there was mainly publicised through the work of another archaeologist, Stuart Piggott. Piggott used this material to define a 'Windmill Hill culture', which included causewayed enclosures and long barrows, leaf-shaped arrowheads, flint axes - indeed almost the entire repertoire of features still used to define the earlier Neolithic of southern Britain. Later excavations on the site included two seasons of work in the 1950s by Isobel Smith, who was working on the publication of Keiller's work on behalf of his widow. Her book, Windmill Hill and Avebury. Excavations by Alexander Keiller 1925-1939, published in 1965, is still highly sought after although long out of print. In 1988 a team led by Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University carried out one further season of work, in order to bring some new techniques of excavation and analysis to bear on this classic site, and that work was published in 1999. What has emerged from all this work at Windmill Hill is a glimpse of a remote period for which there is still a great scarcity of evidence in southern Britain. In many ways the lives of Neolithic people are still obscure. Settlements are few and far between, there are still hardly any Neolithic farmsteads or houses recognised over much of the British Isles, and the vast majority of Neolithic people have left no trace of themselves even as bones. But at Windmill Hill, for a moment, it is as if they emerge into our vision. The picture of earlier Neolithic life which has been teased out of sites like Windmill Hill is one of richness, variety and complexity. It was clearly a great gathering place. The predominance of cattle bones and apparent absence of domestic structures led Piggott to interpret it largely as a corral and market for cattle. More recent interpretations have focused on evidence for ritual activity, notably on certain types of structural deposition of artefacts in the ditches, and the recurrent association of certain types of objects with one another. We can now see that the people who gathered here were not just engaged in a primitive struggle to survive. They had complex social relations, rituals, arrangements for exchanging goods and animals, and they almost certainly engaged in feasting and other ceremonies which reinforced their sense of identity. People who lived perhaps large parts of their lives on small settlements which we find represented by isolated pits or scatters of artefacts must have needed to come together for a variety of reasons, from looking for marriage partners to acquiring stone axes. Modern archaeology looks for patterns of use and meaning in the archaeological record. For Windmill Hill, current interpretations emphasise the role of the hill through repeated use, a site where coming together may have been a way in which Neolithic people reassured themselves as to the nature of their society and reinforced their ideas about what it was right to do, to make, and to eat. What we find at Windmill Hill are the lingering last traces of all that activity which was so vital and vibrant to them and is so tantalisingly obscure to us. Here, still under the visitors' feet in great lengths of the ditches which remain unexcavated, are the broken remains of hundreds of pots which were once used for cooking, eating and drinking - some of them perhaps even made on the hill. The cattle and pigs, sheep and goats which were cared for and brought to Windmill Hill to be killed for meat and skins lie there under the turf, as bones in the ditches. Children died and were laid to rest there, like the child now in the museum at Avebury, and some people seem to have brought bones of their relations or ancestors to the site and these too were placed in the ditches. Today, about 66 causewayed enclosures have been reliably recognised. Several of them - such as Hambledon Hill in Dorset, Etton in Cambridgeshire, Abingdon in Oxfordshire or Staines in Middlesex - are of no less importance than Windmill Hill as sources of evidence for the period. Yet Windmill Hill remains one of the largest enclosures in the group, and its seminal importance remains for its crucial role in defining the early Neolithic of southern Britain in the middle years of the 20th century. Rosamund Cleal is Curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury. The museum, managed by the National Trust in co-operation with English Heritage, houses the finds from Windmill Hill which were given to the nation by Keiller's widow Gabrielle. Windmill Hill itself is owned by the National Trust, and is freely accessible to visitors.