Recent from talks
Silbury Hill
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Silbury Hill
Silbury Hill is a prehistoric artificial chalk mound near Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire. It is part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site. At 39.3 metres (129 ft) high, the hill is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world; it is similar in volume to contemporary Egyptian pyramids. The site is in the care of English Heritage.
Silbury Hill is part of the complex of Neolithic monuments around Avebury, which includes the Avebury Ring and West Kennet Long Barrow. Its original purpose is still debated. Several other important Neolithic monuments in Wiltshire, including the large henges at Marden and Salisbury Plain (Stonehenge), may be culturally or functionally related to Avebury and Silbury.
The mound is composed mainly of chalk and clay excavated from the surrounding area and stands 39.3 metres (129 ft) high and covers about 2 hectares (5 acres). The hill was constructed in several stages between c. 2400 and 2300 BC and displays immense technical skill and prolonged control over labour and resources. Archaeologists calculate that it took 18 million man-hours, equivalent to 500 men working for 15 years to deposit and shape 248,000 cubic metres (324,000 yd3) of earth and fill. Euan MacKie asserts that no simple late Neolithic tribal structure as usually imagined could have sustained this and similar projects, and envisages an authoritarian theocratic power elite with broad-ranging control across southern Britain.
The base of the hill is circular and 167 metres (548 ft) in diameter. The summit is flat-topped and 30 metres (98 ft) in diameter. A smaller mound was constructed first, and in a later phase much enlarged. The initial structures at the base of the hill were perfectly circular: surveying reveals that the centre of the flat top and the centre of the cone that describes the hill lie within a metre of one another. There are indications that the top originally had a rounded profile, but this was flattened in the medieval period to provide a base for a building, perhaps with a defensive purpose.
The first clear evidence of construction, dated to around 2400 BC, consisted of a gravel core with a kerb of stakes and sarsen boulders as a revetment. Alternate layers of chalk rubble and earth were placed on top of this: the second phase involved heaping further chalk on top of the core, using material excavated from a series of surrounding ditches which were progressively refilled then recut several metres further out. The step surrounding the summit dates from this phase of construction, either as a precaution against slippage, or as the remnants of a spiral path ascending from the base, used to raise materials during construction, and later as a processional route.
Silbury Hill was originally entirely white since it had a chalk (limestone) exterior, and the surrounding ditch may have been regularly filled with water from underground springs.
The site was first illustrated by Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian, whose notes were published between 1680 and 1682, in the form of his Monumenta Britannica. Later, Stukeley wrote that a skeleton and bridle had been discovered during tree planting on the summit in 1723. In October 1776, a team of Cornish miners overseen by the Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Edward Drax sank a vertical shaft from the top. Brian Edwards argues that Drax and his friends – all members of Mrs. Millers's poetry set in Batheaston – were interested in Silbury Hill because they thought it paralleled the Greek legends of Apollo killing Python, the monstrous snake that lived in the Caves of Parnassus. In 1849, a tunnel was dug horizontally from the edge into the centre. In 1867, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society excavated the east side of the hill to see if traces of the Roman road were underneath it. No traces were found, and later excavations south of the hill located the road in fields to the south, making a pronounced swerve to avoid the base of the hill. This was conclusive proof that the hill was there before the road, but the hill had provided an alignment sight-line for the road.
Flinders Petrie investigated the hill after the First World War. From 1968 to 1970 professor Richard J. C. Atkinson undertook work at Silbury which was broadcast on BBC Television. This excavation revealed most of the environmental evidence about the site, including the remains of winged ants which indicate that Silbury was begun in an August. Atkinson dug numerous trenches at the site and reopened the 1849 tunnel, where he found material suggesting a Neolithic date, although none of his radiocarbon dates are considered reliable by modern standards. He argued that the hill was constructed in steps, each tier being filled in with packed chalk and then smoothed off or weathered into a slope. Atkinson reported the C-14 date for the base layer of turf and decayed material indicated a corrected date for the commencement of Silbury was close to 2750 BC.
Hub AI
Silbury Hill AI simulator
(@Silbury Hill_simulator)
Silbury Hill
Silbury Hill is a prehistoric artificial chalk mound near Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire. It is part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site. At 39.3 metres (129 ft) high, the hill is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world; it is similar in volume to contemporary Egyptian pyramids. The site is in the care of English Heritage.
Silbury Hill is part of the complex of Neolithic monuments around Avebury, which includes the Avebury Ring and West Kennet Long Barrow. Its original purpose is still debated. Several other important Neolithic monuments in Wiltshire, including the large henges at Marden and Salisbury Plain (Stonehenge), may be culturally or functionally related to Avebury and Silbury.
The mound is composed mainly of chalk and clay excavated from the surrounding area and stands 39.3 metres (129 ft) high and covers about 2 hectares (5 acres). The hill was constructed in several stages between c. 2400 and 2300 BC and displays immense technical skill and prolonged control over labour and resources. Archaeologists calculate that it took 18 million man-hours, equivalent to 500 men working for 15 years to deposit and shape 248,000 cubic metres (324,000 yd3) of earth and fill. Euan MacKie asserts that no simple late Neolithic tribal structure as usually imagined could have sustained this and similar projects, and envisages an authoritarian theocratic power elite with broad-ranging control across southern Britain.
The base of the hill is circular and 167 metres (548 ft) in diameter. The summit is flat-topped and 30 metres (98 ft) in diameter. A smaller mound was constructed first, and in a later phase much enlarged. The initial structures at the base of the hill were perfectly circular: surveying reveals that the centre of the flat top and the centre of the cone that describes the hill lie within a metre of one another. There are indications that the top originally had a rounded profile, but this was flattened in the medieval period to provide a base for a building, perhaps with a defensive purpose.
The first clear evidence of construction, dated to around 2400 BC, consisted of a gravel core with a kerb of stakes and sarsen boulders as a revetment. Alternate layers of chalk rubble and earth were placed on top of this: the second phase involved heaping further chalk on top of the core, using material excavated from a series of surrounding ditches which were progressively refilled then recut several metres further out. The step surrounding the summit dates from this phase of construction, either as a precaution against slippage, or as the remnants of a spiral path ascending from the base, used to raise materials during construction, and later as a processional route.
Silbury Hill was originally entirely white since it had a chalk (limestone) exterior, and the surrounding ditch may have been regularly filled with water from underground springs.
The site was first illustrated by Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian, whose notes were published between 1680 and 1682, in the form of his Monumenta Britannica. Later, Stukeley wrote that a skeleton and bridle had been discovered during tree planting on the summit in 1723. In October 1776, a team of Cornish miners overseen by the Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Edward Drax sank a vertical shaft from the top. Brian Edwards argues that Drax and his friends – all members of Mrs. Millers's poetry set in Batheaston – were interested in Silbury Hill because they thought it paralleled the Greek legends of Apollo killing Python, the monstrous snake that lived in the Caves of Parnassus. In 1849, a tunnel was dug horizontally from the edge into the centre. In 1867, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society excavated the east side of the hill to see if traces of the Roman road were underneath it. No traces were found, and later excavations south of the hill located the road in fields to the south, making a pronounced swerve to avoid the base of the hill. This was conclusive proof that the hill was there before the road, but the hill had provided an alignment sight-line for the road.
Flinders Petrie investigated the hill after the First World War. From 1968 to 1970 professor Richard J. C. Atkinson undertook work at Silbury which was broadcast on BBC Television. This excavation revealed most of the environmental evidence about the site, including the remains of winged ants which indicate that Silbury was begun in an August. Atkinson dug numerous trenches at the site and reopened the 1849 tunnel, where he found material suggesting a Neolithic date, although none of his radiocarbon dates are considered reliable by modern standards. He argued that the hill was constructed in steps, each tier being filled in with packed chalk and then smoothed off or weathered into a slope. Atkinson reported the C-14 date for the base layer of turf and decayed material indicated a corrected date for the commencement of Silbury was close to 2750 BC.
Recent media