The most obvious landscape feature on Roughridge Hill is no doubt Wansdyke, but at its side is a hugely older Neolithic long barrow. Two early Bronze Age round barrows were also on the hill: these were excavated by Proudfoot in the 1960s. Underneath them he found traces of pits dating to the early Neolithic. The largest was over 2m across and contained: pottery sherds from over 30 pots; worked flints; a broken polished axehead; bone pins; antler; a sarsen polissoir; bones of cattle, pigs and sheep; and a piece of human bone! In the base of another was a human cremation. It seemed that the site had been occupied for a few months (or maybe a couple of years) and at that time was a clearing in woodland; the pits were maybe filled in at the time the people moved on, maybe with ceremony.
Pollard and Reynolds describe the discoveries in 'Avebury- the biography of a landscape' (2002) and emphasise that these pits are really the first traces of Neolithic activity in the Avebury region.
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Posted by Rhiannon
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