Knap Hill is a causewayed enclosure, a form of Neolithic earthwork which began to appear in England in the early Neolithic, from about 3700 BC. Causewayed enclosures are areas that are fully or partially enclosed by segmented ditches, often with earthworks and palisades in some combination. Over seventy are known in the British Isles, and they are one of the most common types of earlyNeolithic site in western Europe.
About Knap Hill in brief
Knap Hill is a causewayed enclosure, a form of Neolithic earthwork which began to appear in England in the early Neolithic, from about 3700 BC. Causewayed enclosures are areas that are fully or partially enclosed by segmented ditches, often with earthworks and palisades in some combination. They may have been settlements, or meeting places, or ritual sites of some kind. Over seventy are known in the British Isles, and they are one of the most common types of earlyNeolithic site in western Europe, with about a thousand known in all parts of Europe. The site has been scheduled as an ancient monument. The causeways were difficult to explain in military terms, though it was suggested they could have been sally ports for defenders to emerge from and attack a besieging force. They were constructed in a short time, which implies significant organization since substantial labour would have been required, for clearing the land, preparing trees for use as posts, and digging the ditches. In 2011, the Gathering Time project published an analysis of radiocarbon dates which included several new dates from Graham Connah’s finds and concluded that there was a 91% chance that the Knap Hill enclosure was constructed between 3530 and 3375 BC. Two barrows lay within the Neolithic enclosure, and at least one more outside it. The hilltop also contains the remains of a Romano-British settlement on an adjoining smaller area called the plateau enclosure, along with some evidence of occupation in the 17th century. An Anglo-Saxon sword was found in the smaller enclosure and there is evidence of an intense fire in the same area, which imply a violent end to the Romano.-British occupation of the hilltop.
In 1930, the archaeologist Cecil Curwen identified sixteen sites that were definitely or probably Neolithic. The list of known sites was significantly expanded with the use of aerial photography in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the late 1920s, after the excavation of Windmill Hill and other sites, it became apparent that causewaying enclosures were a characteristic monument of the Neolith period. They range in dates from 4000 BC to shortly before 3000 BC in northern France, Germany, Denmark and Poland, and continued to be built at least 200 years after that time in southern Britain and Ireland. The enclosures in southern Ireland and Ireland began not to appear long before 3700BC, and began to be not long before 200 years before that. The enclosure in northern England is the only one of its kind to be found in all of western Europe. It is located on the northern rim of the Vale of Pewsey, in northern Wiltshire, England, about a mile north of the village of Alton Priors. It was excavated in 1908 and 1909, and Maud Cunnington published two reports of their work, noting that there were several gaps in the ditch and bank surrounding the enclosure. Early investigators suggested that the inhabitants lived in the ditched, but this idea was later abandoned in favour of any settlement being within the enclosure boundaries.
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This page is based on the article Knap Hill published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
