My wobbly-handed drawing of the engraving. ‘Serpentiform’ yes, if by that you mean wavy, but anthropomorphic? Kind of, but couldn’t it really be anything? I admit it was hard to see what was going on through the cabinet, it was hard to see what were deliberate scratches and what was chalk crackiness. Now if it had a face, that’s anthropomorphic. All very unusual and interesting, regardless.
The accompanying blurb said: “Rock carving from the Flagstones monument on chalk bedrock. Middle Neolithic, c3300BC.
One of four carved on chalk rockfaces within separate ditch segments of this circular enclosure. This is the largest. The gentle serpentiform line within enclosed rings is cut across an earlier carving. The image can be regarded as anthropomorphic and perhaps a cult symbol linked to life, death and burial.”
A prehistoric burial site in Dorset is now thought to be the earliest known large circular enclosure in Britain prompting researchers to question whether current dating of Stonehenge may need revising.
In Jim Leary and David Field’s “The story of Silbury Hill” The Flagstones enclosure is mentioned in relation to Silbury (in one of it’s earlier phases) and Stonehenge.
the book ties together the early Silbury enclosure with the first phase of Stonehenge and the Flagstones which was said to be over 100m in diameter.
Rodney Castleden’s book ‘Neolithic Britain’* says that half this ritual enclosure still exists unexcavated – the rest was lost when the Dorchester bypass was built. He says: “The most striking thing about Flagstones has been the discovery of neolithic chalk engravings, carved in the near-vertical walls of the ditch.” The enclosure was constructed on the same east-west ridge where Mount Pleasant and Maumbury Rings would later be sited.
I was in Dorchester’s museum today, where you can visit one of the carvings.
*What you probably really want is PJ Woodward’s 1988 Antiquity article about the discoveries, ‘Pictures of the Neolithic’. I haven’t seen that though.
