Neolithic Man

One man who has excavated the hill and tried to unravel its meaning is Professor Alistair Whittle the most obvious question what was it for?

We are dealing with a developed society, very organized, politically settled, perhaps ranked or stratified, what archeologists borrowing anthropologist jargon have called chiefdoms.

Professor Whittle: There could be a number of factors, population growth might be one, climatic change might have something to do with it, but I think you have to be careful to specify the region or the country you are talking about that may be more of an affect in Western and Island areas of the country, changes in social structures, changes in social ethic and also perhaps if you were coming over the horizon, there may be an element of Britain and Ireland getting bound into a wider ...

Narrator: Agriculture, the first science and the first philosophy released men’s minds to conceive of and then to build these great monuments and agriculture, the provider, released the millions of hours of labor it took to build them.

Professor Whittle: Well, there is good evidence up and down in the country and including locally wonderful evidence up on Windmill Hill just not far away causewayed enclosure dating around about 3500 BC where the really striking exciting evidence in the ditches is lots and lots of cattle bone, old cattle, young cattle, animals that have been butchered, consumed, but the bones also kept and stored and eventually deposited in very carefully determined ritual kinds of ways.

Narrator: Animals then are no longer simply walking larders, they have become clearly associated with social ritual and belief systems, that now we can only guess.

Professor Whittle: Ultimately, if you want me to stick my neck out, I think it takes this right into the heart of belief systems, religion, and ideas about where people were in their universe, in their cosmos, where they came from, where they were going to, where the earth itself had begun, may be this could be seen for example as a metaphor for the earth itself being reborn at a particular point in the cycle of time and the passage of life.

We are dealing with a developed society, very organized, politically settled, perhaps ranked or stratified, what archeologists borrowing anthropologist jargon have called chiefdoms.

We are dealing with a developed society, very organized, politically settled, perhaps ranked or stratified, what archeologists borrowing anthropologist jargon have called chiefdoms.