Whitehawk
Whitehawk is a causewayed camp and is located in an eastern suburb of Brighton in Brighton and Hove in England .
history
Whitehawk is one of the oldest Neolithic monuments studied and a place of national standing in Britain . The hill was built from around 3,500 BC. BC provided with circular ditches and walls to prepare it as a place for ritual acts. Before that, the first farmers from the continent reached the island. The agriculture goes hand in hand with an increasing number of ritual activities. First of all, Long Barrows will be built , then causewayed camps will be built, of which there are six in Sussex. They represent the earliest circular moats in the British Isles .
nature
The facilities were given the name Causewayed camps or Causewayed enclousures because of the many wide gaps in the moat rings, which prove that they are not military facilities. The facilities of this type have a central area that varies in diameter between 75 m ( Windmill Hill ) and 225 m (Barkhaie Camp). The average is around 100 m ( Combe Hill , Orsett , Robin Hood's Ball , The Trundle and Whitesheet Hill ). The size varies because some systems have a single ring of trenches (Barkhale, Whitesheet), while others have two ( Staines ), three (Windmill Hill) or even four or five rings (The Trundle and Whitehawk). As a consequence, the complexes are between 1 and 8.5 hectares in size.
Finds
Traces of five moat rings with regular interruptions have been found in Whitehawk. Although only a small part was excavated, the trenches contained large quantities of pottery shards, flint tools and the bones of deer, cattle and pigs. In addition to fragmentary human bones, four graves with intact corpses were also found. Including an eight year old child and a young woman with her newborn child. In Whitehawk, the remains of a seven-year-old child were also found in a post hole under a scratched plate. This find, like that of a three-year-old child with a broken skull in the center of Woodhenge , points to a building victim . Some of the skulls found in Wessex have been forcibly cut. There is a discussion among archaeologists as to whether the wounds caused death or were post-mortem.
literature
- Rodney Castleden: The Stonehenge People. An Exploration of Life in Neolithic Britain, 4700-2000 BC Routledge, London et al. 1990, ISBN 0-415-04065-5 .
- Alasdair Whittle, Frances Healy, Alex Bayliss: Gathering time: dating the Early Neolithic enclosures of southern Britain and Ireland. Oxbow, Oxford 2011, ISBN 978-1-84217-425-8 .
Web links
- Description Engl. and pictures
- Rodney Castleden: Neolithic Britain: new stone age sites of England, Scotland, and Wales. Routledge, 1992, ISBN 0-415-05845-7 .
Coordinates: 50 ° 49 ′ N , 0 ° 6 ′ W