Causewayed Enclosures

Neolithic people created funerary monuments, such as West Kennet Long Barrow, but Causewayed Enclosures were different. They were it seems about life not death. They are thought to be some of the earliest examples of humans creating a special space within a landscape.

What exactly went on inside the special space remains an enigma.

The first Causewayed Enclosure to be identified in Britain was excavated by Alexander Keiller in 1924, at Avebury in Wiltshire.

Other examples were later found around the country and now around 80 are known, of varying sizes. They all have the essential feature of causeways interrupting a roughly circular ditch.

Windmill Hill had three concentric ditches, and so it turned out did the one at Thame. That’s what made archaeologists and academics take notice. Here was a new causewayed enclosure next to a tributary of the river Thames which was on a scale similar to that of Windmill Hill.