Whitehawk Hill Excavations

I was not planning on joining this new Brighton dig that began last week (only for the month of August) but curiously, I found myself out there two days ago on my day off. And I'm glad I went. The view of Brighton and the sea is absolutely stunning from this site. The day started off with a glorious blue sky only to abruptly change to storm clouds by mid afternoon. The storm hit just as I got home to Lewes around 16:30, so we were quite lucky to get in an entire day of excavations unscathed by inclement weather.

There were plenty of volunteers from the BHAS and professionals from Archaeology South-East as well as a few newcomers. The newcomers including myself were given an induction to the site. From what we were told this site dates back to the Neolithic (different from the Neolithic period anywhere else in Europe since it started later around 4500 B.C.E. - 2500 B.C.E.) when a new wave of European immigrants brought farming technology to this island and settled in communities, most likely greatly impacting the status quo of the indigenous people as hunter-gatherers.

A reconstruction by Ian Dennis of the
Whitehawk causewayed enclosurec. 3,600 cal BC
(reproduced from Whittle, Healy and Bayliss
2011; fig. 1.3)

Whitehawk hill is an ancient habitat designated as a Local Nature Reserve (LNR) and is recognized as being the first Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM) in Sussex (Brighton-Hove.gov.uk). The ancient monument, Whitehawk Camp, is one of Britain’s earliest stone age monuments.  The hill was chosen some 5,500 years ago as the site for a series of circular ditches and banks which marked the hill as an area for feasting, burials and other activities of a ritual nature. This curious and obviously non-defensive arrangement gives these sites their name: causewayed enclosures.  They represent the earliest ritual circles in northern Europe and predate later stone age enclosures like Stonehenge and Avebury by up to 1000 years.  They all appear to have been built around 3500 B.C., predating Stonehenge by about 500 years.

Archaeologists have explored only a small portion of Whitehawk Camp.  Within the fill of the surviving ditches the remains of four complete burials have been found alongside huge numbers of stone age flint tools, pieces of pottery and the bones of ox, cattle, pig, deer and other fragmentary human remains.  These suggest the consumption of large amounts of meat as part of the activities which took place on the hill.  The site was important enough to become the final resting place of members of the local tribes and these included the bodies of an eight year old child and a young woman buried alongside the remains of her new born child.  The details of Stone-age religion are largely unknown, but the archaeology suggest an emphasis on seasonal gatherings, the importance of the ancestors, tracking of the seasons through astronomical observation and the marking of territorial ownership. (http://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/content/leisure-and-libraries/parks-and-green-spaces/whitehawk-camp)

BHAS members, ASE archaeologists, and volunteers.

Our focus was to get down to the Neolithic layers in the trenches and continue what the excavations in the 1920s and 1930s had uncovered, even though a majority of debris was modern. On this particular hill, allotments were established during WWII and after. These are now gone, but remnants still exist in the plethora of broken glass everywhere, modern porcelain, nails, and bits of plastic.

The main trench just had it's turf removed this week, so we were each given slots to trowel back. I discovered no features amidst the chalky and flint infested top soil and the annoying roots that kept interfering with the troweling. Unlike Ovingdean, where the soil is also very chalky, there were finds aplenty. Besides the usual piece of broken glass, I filled my tray with two and a half rusty nails, blue and white decorated porcelain fragments, two or so bits of CBM, charcoal bits, possible pottery fragments but methinks I just filled my finds tray with some sort of stone that looked like IA pottery, possible slag chunks, fire-cracked flint, fragments of oyster shell, snail shells which I chucked out later, two small echinoids (Cretaceous fossils - 145-66 million years ago) and small bone fragments. Not bad in a day's work.

Hope to get up there at least one day a week until the project is finished at the end of August.