Description

Neolithic Horizons investigates the communities who built some of our most remarkable and iconic archaeological sites: the great public monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury and others like them. Rightly famous the world over, these monuments are complemented by less well-known, contemporary, foci such as the earthen circles at Knowlton, in Dorset, or Marden, in Wiltshire and seen to be part of an earth-shifting tradition that extends right across the Wessex landscape and traced back to our very earliest monuments, long barrows, causewayed enclosures and the enigmatic cursus enclosures. After Stonehenge the tradition continued with the construction of enormous numbers of circular burial mounds along the river valleys and hillsides. Indeed, few other regions in Europe, or further afield, can match the scale and intensity of development that we see at these ceremonial complexes. These locations, places of ritual, must nevertheless be viewed as part of a wider landscape; one where features of the land are continually changing according to the influence of local inhabitants. Whilst charting a remarkable archaeological legacy, this book reveals the developing landscape of grassland, settlements and fields; the product of the early farming communities who lived their lives in the shadow of the monuments.