Britain's OLDEST Ancient Monument that Still Confuses us! [13:17]

--> 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

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

--> 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