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0:01 · 1872 and Sir John Lubbock was concerned about the amount of land being sold for development
0:07 · around Avebury Center he was very much concerned about these his actions to try and save this site
0:16 · Avebury and all of the wonderful stuff that comes with it the henge the stone circle his actions
0:21 · in doing that would inadvertently save another feature in the landscape potentially much more
0:26 · important than this one and much older and also a mile or two in that direction up on the hilltop
0:33 · in fact let's go there now so as we head out of the Avebury complex we get a quick glimpse
0:38 · across the meadow to Silbury before we head to our feature at the top of the hill the feature
0:43 · that John Lubbock probably didn't know anything about feature that could be up to 6,000 years old
0:49 · the feature that to this day nobody really knows its original purpose i always thought the oldest
0:55 · thing that you could see in the landscape today was a long barrerow or perhaps even the cursive
1:01 · structures like the six mile long one in Dorset but well this feature could outdate those ever
1:07 · so slightly in some cases and the best part of all you can still see them so back here
1:13 · at Avebury well Sir John Lubbock took matters into his own hands he decided to buy up chunks
1:19 · of Avebury not only that but he also spoke to a number of locals and asked them to swap plots of
1:24 · land in order to try and save what was here now that one act by Sir John Lubbock meant that when
1:30 · Alexander Keiller and his wife Veronica Liddell turned up here in 1924 50 years on it was in
1:37 · some part saved from further destruction that it had been undergoing over the last few centuries
1:42 · keiler himself developed a passion for archaeology and subsequently decided that he
1:47 · would buy not Avebury yet but perhaps something more important than this he purchased Windmill
1:53 · Hill which contains that feature to the northwest of Avebury welcome to the story of the causeway
2:00 · enclosure so Alexander Keiller found something in this field now he wasn't the first person
2:13 · to see this feature in the landscape in fact William Stukeley came here in the early 1700s
2:19 · and drew this but Alexander Keeiler was the first person to actually recognize this as
2:25 · something different subsequently he digs and he would find flint tools fragments of pottery and
2:32 · pieces of animal and human bone in fact he finds a skull of an ox with some scratch marks on it
2:38 · perhaps indicating that skull would have sat on a totem now you might have been thinking I was
2:43 · going to refer to those barrerows in the middle of this filled system well I'm not i'm going to
2:48 · actually refer to something much more subtle and the beauty about what Alexander Keiller
2:53 · declared was that this was something different this wasn't a henge or a hill fort perhaps like
2:58 · those before him had interpreted this site as here we are so from that point forward
3:05 · this is recognized as a causeway enclosure an enclosure because it circled a large area with
3:11 · a ditch that I'm stood in there causeway because Okay well let's address that at a
3:16 · completely different site and here is another one of those structures this is KNap Hill in
3:22 · Wiltshire up very high excuse the wind and this one perhaps gives us a much better example than
3:28 · the windmill hill one we can actually see now what this looks like come and have a look at
3:33 · this so all the way around this hilltop we're circled by a ditch can't make it out that well
3:42 · here on this side but I'm out of the wind you can see why therefore people thought that this
3:45 · was like a hill for a defensive structure of sorts but then we have a bit of an issue with
3:49 · this because every so often well the ditch just disappears and the bank disappears we have a
3:54 · gap we have a causeway inside we go back to ditch and then we have this causeway again going inside
4:00 · and that happens all the way around this entire structure Maud and Benjamin Cunnington came here
4:07 · in the early 1900s and excavated this over two autumns they published their report in around 1912
4:14 · and they set the ball rolling for the structures now they didn't fully understand it but they did
4:20 · identify that we had a hill for like structure but there was one key sentence from their reports
4:26 · that we should take away from this excavations clearly show that none of the gaps in the ramp
4:31 · part are result of wear or any accidental circumstance but they are actually part of
4:36 · the original construction of the camp they even go on to ask for suggestions as to what
4:41 · this could be and perhaps maybe just maybe a decade or so later Alexander Keiller read
4:47 · their note and he declared that of course we are now dealing with something very different
4:54 · so above all we have a circular ditch all the way around this hilltop here we have
5:01 · most the bank on the inside and we have the most important part this causeway bit here that goes
5:06 · into the circular sort of enclosure and we have those all the way around the outside this is all
5:12 · good we've now identified this as a separate structure we just don't know what it is yet
5:22 · probably one of the most problematic aspects about one of these features is that they often
5:27 · came within sites like this this is Hamilton Hill in Dorset and like many of the causeway
5:34 · enclosures we can still see and touch today well it's within or very close to
5:39 · an Iron Age hill now by the 1920s we have the aid of aerial photography to help us
5:45 · identify these sites and so excavations continue on and the discussions rise but only with a
5:50 · handful of archaeologists ceil Curwen is one of them and we start to find some Neolithic
5:55 · archaeology within them so immediate assumptions about what these could be are made and we come
6:01 · up with the defensive structure the Neolithic equivalent of the Iron Age hill fort now Cerwin
6:07 · and Cunnington back at Knap Hill well they're not completely convinced about this but it does
6:12 · seem to be the most likely plausible outcome we have of the Neolithic defensive hill fort
6:19 · so Curwen follows this up with a really odd suggestion he says that actually the
6:23 · Neolithic people might well have lived in these ditches which is odd come take a look at one of
6:29 · them because some of these Neolithic remains are deemed accumulated domestic waste now we might
6:38 · think that was odd for many reasons but the key hint here was he suggested that each ditch between
6:44 · the causeway inlets each ditch was occupied by a family or social group now this is quite
6:50 · interesting well that's all good but Hamilton nearly cause enclosure throws up another problem
6:56 · for us because this one here had a palisade around it think wooden stakes buted up against
7:01 · one another all around it so you might think well that flips us back to the defensive side of things
7:06 · but here's the problem you see all the radiocarbon dating we have for the actual construction of the
7:12 · ditch and the bank and the causeway bits well all of those absolutely point to 3,800 BC and 3,600 BC
7:21 · the palisade however throws out a completely different date because it was burnt and a
7:27 · supposed battle took place with associated speared body over 800 years later so we've
7:34 · got a really vast date range usage of this area we've got that Neolithic causeway enclosure 3,800
7:40 · or thereabouts BC we've then got some earthwork modification as time goes on and of course we've
7:45 · got the Palisade maybe a thousand years later with some kind of battle going on perhaps and of course
7:51 · then we move forward another 2,000 years or so and we've got this the Iron Age hill fort what
7:57 · great area for history okay so let's try and put this into some order and work out what these were
8:02 · for so studies now try and look at where these occur perhaps this will tell us their function
8:12 · now from the 1920s to the 1930s onwards well we start to see a few more of these monuments
8:17 · again by aerial photography ladies and what's key here is it's assumed that they are once
8:23 · again similar to hill fors because they're always on the hilltops they're always on the
8:27 · high ground but was this perhaps survivorship bias at play here move forward 30 years or
8:33 · so and we find a few examples of these in the lands rather than just on a hilltop like this
8:38 · one and perhaps we now need to reconsider that these were essential for us to find a causeway
8:44 · enclosure and perhaps that will give us another clue and if we look at today's maps well we see
8:49 · a seemingly unconnected random distribution but there was one thing that these early stages of
8:54 · studies didn't really consider and that was a consideration of those across the water
8:58 · on what is now mainland Europe so now we know the change in the mesolithic to the Neolithic
9:03 · can be attributed to the movement of people from what is mainland Europe the continent
9:07 · now across into Britain and the change in that lifestyle from nomadic to the farming
9:14 · practices and of course they brought with them the knowledge of these structures that they were
9:18 · building and to them they were essential for that way of life so now they brought
9:23 · them here into Britain of course now the burning question of course is what exactly were they for
9:34 · so evidence for Neolithic settlement in Britain isn't hugely abundant so a lot
9:39 · of the archaeologists assumed at the time when they were sort of working out what these were
9:43 · for people actually lived inside the causeway enclosures now particularly on mainland Europe
9:48 · we do have evidence for this but it's always later Neolithic we have various structures associated
9:54 · with occupation both near the enclosures and even within it but this is always towards the end of
10:00 · the Neolithic none of these structures were there it seems at the time of construction of the coe
10:06 · enclosures so from that we can conclude their primary function was not to live in the eastern
10:12 · ditches that still remain today of windmill hill were particularly spectacular now Joshua Pollard
10:18 · a local archaeologist and very much an expert of these sites particularly this one at Wimmill
10:23 · Hill well he suggested that their use would have changed over time and we see different practices
10:28 · within these that makes sense because if we have a thousand year usage on these that's a massive era
10:34 · of time we're not just talking a few generations here and there but that doesn't help us with the
10:40 · big question the primary use of these what was it what were they built for initially so then
10:46 · we move forward into the 2000s and the 2010s and we have a very different notion altogether
10:52 · so back up here on Wimmill Hill we have evidence of very early Neolithic activity 4,000 to 3,700
10:59 · BC the enclosures themselves remain a tad of a mystery in terms of their age of construction
11:06 · with regards to the order it's probable that the inner ditch was dug first the middle was last now
11:13 · all three ditches however appear to have been dug in the 37th century BC probably within the
11:19 · lifespan of a single individual if not over two generations so we already know we have activity in
11:25 · and around these ditches of feasting we have lots of animal bones we have lots of sort of scraping
11:32 · tools of the Neolithic nature which indicated to us it would be sort of a a feasting or a ritual
11:38 · meeting place or something like that it didn't really explain though the causeway between them
11:42 · these these sort of raised bits that go in and break the ditches up well the current thinking
11:48 · is that whether this was for feasting meeting trading or even ritual we have specific entrances
11:55 · for specific family or social groups each section representing an area you would enter or occupy
12:04 · okay so you might be just about to sit down pull your keyboard out and start bashing away
12:10 · thinking "Well that's a bit of a mundane use." Yet again we come to the ritual sort of place
12:15 · the meeting place all very boring but think about this think about what is your central
12:21 · place to go to is it your local pub or the town hall or the town center or a community
12:26 · that you're part of is it something where you meet other people because for me I really enjoy human
12:32 · interaction and being out here in the landscape well there's absolutely none think about this
12:37 · as your local pub as your local community center the gathering of people the gathering of societies
12:43 · from all around here that to me makes a lot of sense and whilst we see these structures
12:49 · in use for 800 a thousand years obviously that's generation after generation and their use changed
12:55 · but perhaps perhaps the coming together of all the societies around here in one
13:00 · meeting place perhaps that never changed i've been Paul i hope you've enjoyed this
13:04 · click subscribe and hit the like button etc we'll see you this time next week

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
0:01	·	1872 and Sir John Lubbock was concerned about the amount of land being sold for development
0:07	·	around Avebury Center he was very much concerned about these his actions to try and save this site
0:16	·	Avebury and all of the wonderful stuff that comes with it the henge the stone circle his actions
0:21	·	in doing that would inadvertently save another feature in the landscape potentially much more
0:26	·	important than this one and much older and also a mile or two in that direction up on the hilltop
0:33	·	in fact let's go there now so as we head out of the Avebury complex we get a quick glimpse
0:38	·	across the meadow to Silbury before we head to our feature at the top of the hill the feature
0:43	·	that John Lubbock probably didn't know anything about feature that could be up to 6,000 years old
0:49	·	the feature that to this day nobody really knows its original purpose i always thought the oldest
0:55	·	thing that you could see in the landscape today was a long barrerow or perhaps even the cursive
1:01	·	structures like the six mile long one in Dorset but well this feature could outdate those ever
1:07	·	so slightly in some cases and the best part of all you can still see them so back here
1:13	·	at Avebury well Sir John Lubbock took matters into his own hands he decided to buy up chunks
1:19	·	of Avebury not only that but he also spoke to a number of locals and asked them to swap plots of
1:24	·	land in order to try and save what was here now that one act by Sir John Lubbock meant that when
1:30	·	Alexander Keiller and his wife Veronica Liddell turned up here in 1924 50 years on it was in
1:37	·	some part saved from further destruction that it had been undergoing over the last few centuries
1:42	·	keiler himself developed a passion for archaeology and subsequently decided that he
1:47	·	would buy not Avebury yet but perhaps something more important than this he purchased Windmill
1:53	·	Hill which contains that feature to the northwest of Avebury welcome to the story of the causeway
2:00	·	enclosure so Alexander Keiller found something in this field now he wasn't the first person
2:13	·	to see this feature in the landscape in fact William Stukeley came here in the early 1700s
2:19	·	and drew this but Alexander Keeiler was the first person to actually recognize this as
2:25	·	something different subsequently he digs and he would find flint tools fragments of pottery and
2:32	·	pieces of animal and human bone in fact he finds a skull of an ox with some scratch marks on it
2:38	·	perhaps indicating that skull would have sat on a totem now you might have been thinking I was
2:43	·	going to refer to those barrerows in the middle of this filled system well I'm not i'm going to
2:48	·	actually refer to something much more subtle and the beauty about what Alexander Keiller
2:53	·	declared was that this was something different this wasn't a henge or a hill fort perhaps like
2:58	·	those before him had interpreted this site as here we are so from that point forward
3:05	·	this is recognized as a causeway enclosure an enclosure because it circled a large area with
3:11	·	a ditch that I'm stood in there causeway because Okay well let's address that at a
3:16	·	completely different site and here is another one of those structures this is KNap Hill in
3:22	·	Wiltshire up very high excuse the wind and this one perhaps gives us a much better example than
3:28	·	the windmill hill one we can actually see now what this looks like come and have a look at
3:33	·	this so all the way around this hilltop we're circled by a ditch can't make it out that well
3:42	·	here on this side but I'm out of the wind you can see why therefore people thought that this
3:45	·	was like a hill for a defensive structure of sorts but then we have a bit of an issue with
3:49	·	this because every so often well the ditch just disappears and the bank disappears we have a
3:54	·	gap we have a causeway inside we go back to ditch and then we have this causeway again going inside
4:00	·	and that happens all the way around this entire structure Maud and Benjamin Cunnington came here
4:07	·	in the early 1900s and excavated this over two autumns they published their report in around 1912
4:14	·	and they set the ball rolling for the structures now they didn't fully understand it but they did
4:20	·	identify that we had a hill for like structure but there was one key sentence from their reports
4:26	·	that we should take away from this excavations clearly show that none of the gaps in the ramp
4:31	·	part are result of wear or any accidental circumstance but they are actually part of
4:36	·	the original construction of the camp they even go on to ask for suggestions as to what
4:41	·	this could be and perhaps maybe just maybe a decade or so later Alexander Keiller read
4:47	·	their note and he declared that of course we are now dealing with something very different
4:54	·	so above all we have a circular ditch all the way around this hilltop here we have
5:01	·	most the bank on the inside and we have the most important part this causeway bit here that goes
5:06	·	into the circular sort of enclosure and we have those all the way around the outside this is all
5:12	·	good we've now identified this as a separate structure we just don't know what it is yet
5:22	·	probably one of the most problematic aspects about one of these features is that they often
5:27	·	came within sites like this this is Hamilton Hill in Dorset and like many of the causeway
5:34	·	enclosures we can still see and touch today well it's within or very close to
5:39	·	an Iron Age hill now by the 1920s we have the aid of aerial photography to help us
5:45	·	identify these sites and so excavations continue on and the discussions rise but only with a
5:50	·	handful of archaeologists ceil Curwen is one of them and we start to find some Neolithic
5:55	·	archaeology within them so immediate assumptions about what these could be are made and we come
6:01	·	up with the defensive structure the Neolithic equivalent of the Iron Age hill fort now Cerwin
6:07	·	and Cunnington back at Knap Hill well they're not completely convinced about this but it does
6:12	·	seem to be the most likely plausible outcome we have of the Neolithic defensive hill fort
6:19	·	so Curwen follows this up with a really odd suggestion he says that actually the
6:23	·	Neolithic people might well have lived in these ditches which is odd come take a look at one of
6:29	·	them because some of these Neolithic remains are deemed accumulated domestic waste now we might
6:38	·	think that was odd for many reasons but the key hint here was he suggested that each ditch between
6:44	·	the causeway inlets each ditch was occupied by a family or social group now this is quite
6:50	·	interesting well that's all good but Hamilton nearly cause enclosure throws up another problem
6:56	·	for us because this one here had a palisade around it think wooden stakes buted up against
7:01	·	one another all around it so you might think well that flips us back to the defensive side of things
7:06	·	but here's the problem you see all the radiocarbon dating we have for the actual construction of the
7:12	·	ditch and the bank and the causeway bits well all of those absolutely point to 3,800 BC and 3,600 BC
7:21	·	the palisade however throws out a completely different date because it was burnt and a
7:27	·	supposed battle took place with associated speared body over 800 years later so we've
7:34	·	got a really vast date range usage of this area we've got that Neolithic causeway enclosure 3,800
7:40	·	or thereabouts BC we've then got some earthwork modification as time goes on and of course we've
7:45	·	got the Palisade maybe a thousand years later with some kind of battle going on perhaps and of course
7:51	·	then we move forward another 2,000 years or so and we've got this the Iron Age hill fort what
7:57	·	great area for history okay so let's try and put this into some order and work out what these were
8:02	·	for so studies now try and look at where these occur perhaps this will tell us their function
8:12	·	now from the 1920s to the 1930s onwards well we start to see a few more of these monuments
8:17	·	again by aerial photography ladies and what's key here is it's assumed that they are once
8:23	·	again similar to hill fors because they're always on the hilltops they're always on the
8:27	·	high ground but was this perhaps survivorship bias at play here move forward 30 years or
8:33	·	so and we find a few examples of these in the lands rather than just on a hilltop like this
8:38	·	one and perhaps we now need to reconsider that these were essential for us to find a causeway
8:44	·	enclosure and perhaps that will give us another clue and if we look at today's maps well we see
8:49	·	a seemingly unconnected random distribution but there was one thing that these early stages of
8:54	·	studies didn't really consider and that was a consideration of those across the water
8:58	·	on what is now mainland Europe so now we know the change in the mesolithic to the Neolithic
9:03	·	can be attributed to the movement of people from what is mainland Europe the continent
9:07	·	now across into Britain and the change in that lifestyle from nomadic to the farming
9:14	·	practices and of course they brought with them the knowledge of these structures that they were
9:18	·	building and to them they were essential for that way of life so now they brought
9:23	·	them here into Britain of course now the burning question of course is what exactly were they for
9:34	·	so evidence for Neolithic settlement in Britain isn't hugely abundant so a lot
9:39	·	of the archaeologists assumed at the time when they were sort of working out what these were
9:43	·	for people actually lived inside the causeway enclosures now particularly on mainland Europe
9:48	·	we do have evidence for this but it's always later Neolithic we have various structures associated
9:54	·	with occupation both near the enclosures and even within it but this is always towards the end of
10:00	·	the Neolithic none of these structures were there it seems at the time of construction of the coe
10:06	·	enclosures so from that we can conclude their primary function was not to live in the eastern
10:12	·	ditches that still remain today of windmill hill were particularly spectacular now Joshua Pollard
10:18	·	a local archaeologist and very much an expert of these sites particularly this one at Wimmill
10:23	·	Hill well he suggested that their use would have changed over time and we see different practices
10:28	·	within these that makes sense because if we have a thousand year usage on these that's a massive era
10:34	·	of time we're not just talking a few generations here and there but that doesn't help us with the
10:40	·	big question the primary use of these what was it what were they built for initially so then
10:46	·	we move forward into the 2000s and the 2010s and we have a very different notion altogether
10:52	·	so back up here on Wimmill Hill we have evidence of very early Neolithic activity 4,000 to 3,700
10:59	·	BC the enclosures themselves remain a tad of a mystery in terms of their age of construction
11:06	·	with regards to the order it's probable that the inner ditch was dug first the middle was last now
11:13	·	all three ditches however appear to have been dug in the 37th century BC probably within the
11:19	·	lifespan of a single individual if not over two generations so we already know we have activity in
11:25	·	and around these ditches of feasting we have lots of animal bones we have lots of sort of scraping
11:32	·	tools of the Neolithic nature which indicated to us it would be sort of a a feasting or a ritual
11:38	·	meeting place or something like that it didn't really explain though the causeway between them
11:42	·	these these sort of raised bits that go in and break the ditches up well the current thinking
11:48	·	is that whether this was for feasting meeting trading or even ritual we have specific entrances
11:55	·	for specific family or social groups each section representing an area you would enter or occupy
12:04	·	okay so you might be just about to sit down pull your keyboard out and start bashing away
12:10	·	thinking "Well that's a bit of a mundane use." Yet again we come to the ritual sort of place
12:15	·	the meeting place all very boring but think about this think about what is your central
12:21	·	place to go to is it your local pub or the town hall or the town center or a community
12:26	·	that you're part of is it something where you meet other people because for me I really enjoy human
12:32	·	interaction and being out here in the landscape well there's absolutely none think about this
12:37	·	as your local pub as your local community center the gathering of people the gathering of societies
12:43	·	from all around here that to me makes a lot of sense and whilst we see these structures
12:49	·	in use for 800 a thousand years obviously that's generation after generation and their use changed
12:55	·	but perhaps perhaps the coming together of all the societies around here in one
13:00	·	meeting place perhaps that never changed i've been Paul i hope you've enjoyed this
13:04	·	click subscribe and hit the like button etc we'll see you this time next week