The Neolithic Flint Mines Of England

Only rarely in Europe do the surface remains of Neolithic flint mines remain so dramatically for all to see as those located along the South Downs and in the Breckland of England. Even within England they represent a diminishing resource and only ten sites have been recorded with any certainty. As examples of our earliest industrial heritage they represent archaeological sites of the first importance and have a special part to play in the history of technology. However, despite a lengthy history of archaeological investigation, they have rarely been considered nationally as a class of monument. Although some sites such as Grime's Graves are well known through excavation campaigns, others are known only through obscure articles and unpublished archival material. Many of those that survive as earthworks or cropmarks have never been surveyed previously or accurately planned. Consequently, English Heritage has compiled detailed plans of the surface areas of all of the known flint mines and investigated the sites of other potential examples. Using a combination of field survey, aerial photography and archival research, this volume looks at each site in its own right as a major and important complex and - for the first time - offers a synthesis of the evidence to date.

In this book Anne Teather develops a new approach to understanding the Neolithic flint mines of southern Britain.

Grube - Bergbau - Neolithikum.

The Raunds Area Project investigated more than 20 Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the Nene Valley. From c 5000 BC to the early 1st millennium cal BC a succession of ritual mounds and burial mounds were built as settlement along the valley sides increased and woodland was cleared. Starting as a regular stopping-place for flint knapping and domestic tasks, first the Long Mound, and then Long Barrow, the north part of the Turf Mound and the Avenue were built in the 5th millennium BC. With the addition of the Long Enclosure, the Causewayed Ring Ditch, and the Southern Enclosure, there was a chain of five or six diverse monuments stretched along the river bank by c 3000 cal BC. Later, a timber platform, the Riverside Structure, was built and the focus of ceremonial activity shifted to the Cotton 'Henge', two concentric ditches on the occupied valley side. From c 2200 cal BC monument building accelerated and included the Segmented Ditch Circle and at least 20 round barrows, almost all containing burials, at first inhumations, then cremations down to c 1000 cal BC, by which time two overlapping systems of paddocks and droveways had been laid out. Finally, the terrace began to be settled when these had gone out of use, in the early 1st millennium cal BC. This second volume of the Raunds Area Project, published as a CD, comprises the detailed reports on the environmental archaeology, artefact studies, geophysics and chronology.

The social processes involved in acquiring flint and stone in the Neolithic began to be considered over thirty years ago, promoting a more dynamic view of past extraction processes. Whether by quarrying, mining or surface retrieval, the geographic source locations of raw materials and their resultant archaeological sites have been approached from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. In recent years this has included the exploration of previously undiscovered sites, refined radiocarbon dating, comparative ethnographic analysis and novel analytical approaches to stone tool manufacture and provenancing. The aim of this volume in the Neolithic Studies Group Papers is to explore these new findings on extraction sites and their products. How did the acquisition of raw materials fit into other aspects of Neolithic life and social networks? How did these activities merge in creating material items that underpinned cosmology, status and identity? What are the geographic similarities, constraints and variables between the various raw materials, and how does the practise of stone extraction in the UK relate to wider extractive traditions in northwestern Europe? Eight papers address these questions and act as a useful overview of the current state of research on the topic.

This volume offers a review of major flint mines dating from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The 18 articles were contributed by archaeologists from Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden, using the same framework to propose a uniform view of the mining phenomenon.

The Neolithic was a period of prolific activity for the South Downs in Sussex, when enclosures and monuments were being built, ditches cut, large areas cleared and flint was extracted from the ground. This study features one of the last, great unpublished excavation archives relating to fieldwork conducted on the Neolithic monuments of the South Downs, carried out by John Henry Pull in the 1920s-50s. It includes reports from four major areas of flint mining (Blackpatch, Church Hill, Cissbury and Tolmere), largely based on contemporary records and accounts, with comments and observations from Miles Russell. The specialist reports and studies of artefact assemblages are to be published in a separate report.