Early Neolithic Sites

Here are some key Early Neolithic sites from around 6,300 years ago!

Balbridie, Aberdeenshire

This is one of the best neolithic houses so far found. It is rectangular with rounded ends, and is 24 metres by 12 metres in size. The walls were made of large wooden posts. Finds from it include grains of wheat and barley. It is dated by radio-carbon to 5900 to 5500 years old.

Cissbury and Harrow Hill, Sussex

These were large flint mines. There were 270 mine shafts at Cissbury and 250 at Harrow Hill. An antler pick from Cissbury dated to 5,500 years old, while charcoal at Harrow Hill was dated to 6,200 years ago. The mine shafts could be up to 4 metres deep, and the galleries were around 1 metre high. Carvings of rectangular grids were found on the walls. We don’t know what these mean.

Great Langdale, Cumbria

High up in the fells of the Lake District are beds of very hard rock ideal for making axeheads. At Pike of Stickle in Great Langdale, there are thousands of fragments of waste from quarrying the stone and shaping the axeheads. The climb up to the site is hard on the legs and not for those who don’t like heights! The earliest activity at the site was around 5,700 years ago and Great Langdale would later become the most important source of stone axes in the whole of Britain.

Horton, Berkshire

A new find in 2008, this is a house, 10 metres by 5 metres and rectangular in shape. It seems to have had 2 rooms. Neolithic houses are still very rare. It has not yet been radio-carbon dated but the pottery and flint found with it suggest it is 5,600 years old.

West Kennet, Wiltshire

This is one of the most impressive surviving long barrows. It was built 5,650 years ago, and is a 100 metre long earth mound, and 2.5 metres high. There is a 10 metre long stone structure at the eastern end with 5 small chambers off a narrow corridor. The eastern face of the mound was a gently curving hollow where people would gather to feast and commemorate the dead. Bones of 46 people were found inside. The west chamber was mainly for adult men; the southeast for the old people and the southwest chamber for children. The chambers were left open and bones taken out occasionally as part of religious beliefs. The whole tomb was filled in and sealed by a face of very large boulders at the end of its life. 250 different pots were were found, along with beads made of bone, stone and shells, flint tools, and animal bones.

Windmill Hill, Wiltshire

Excavated in 1920 by a wealthy amateur archaeologist, Alexander Keiller, Windmill Hill was a causewayed enclosure. There were 3 concentric sets of banks and ditches. Most of the finds came from the ditches: 95,000 flints, 1,300 pots (some from Cornwall), stone axes (some also from Cornwall), animal and human bones. The site was built and used 5,600 to 5,300 years ago. It was used to define the whole of the Neolithic in Britain, by calling it the Windmill Hill Culture; sadly a term no longer used in archaeology today.