Excavating East Sussex

A patchwork of prehistory

Four prehistoric sites located around Lewes tell an intriguing story of East Sussex’s Neolithic and Bronze Age communities. The oldest of these is Offham Hill, just to the north of the town. CA 58 (September 1977) reported on fieldwork undertaken in 1976 on the Neolithic causewayed enclosure here by Peter Drewett, doyen of Sussex archaeology and founder of the Sussex Archaeological Field Unit (now Archaeology South-East, part of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, where Drewett taught for many years). Sections of the site had already been removed by quarrying, and as the remainder was farmland under threat from further development it was totally excavated by Drewett’s team, revealing Neolithic pottery and the articulated skeleton of a single young adult.

Slightly more recent in age are two middle/late Bronze Age settlements located on the South Downs: one at Itford Hill and the other at Black Patch. CA 32 (May 1972) reported on the former and CA 67 (June 1979) on the latter, which featured on the magazine’s cover. Itford’s settlement had first been excavated in the 1940s-1950s, but in the early 1970s, when ploughing threatened the site, fieldwork resumed, this time at its cemetery. There were a total of 16 cremations in all on the site, representing a maximum of 19 individuals. Meanwhile, at Black Patch ploughing was again threatening to damage the site, so in 1978 one hut group was totally excavated. The site consisted of five terraces cut into the hill, each of which proved to contain a single hut, which was interpreted as the settlement of an extended family group.

Most recently in CA’s chronology, issue 174 (June 2001) examined the most famous prehistoric site in the area, that of Mount Caburn, again near Lewes. Caburn’s occupation was long-running, commencing in the Neolithic/late Bronze Age, but its main occupation period dates to c.400 BC when a deep, V-shaped ditch and bank enclosed it. The site’s fame stems from two sources: first, it is a particularly distinctive outlier of the South Downs, separated from the main range and thus functioning as a notable local landmark; and, second, it has seen successive excavations by Pitt Rivers (1877-1878), the Curwens (1925-1926 and 1937-1938), and finally by the Sussex Archaeological Society (1996-1998). There has also been much post-excavation analysis of the finds, including by Barry Cunliffe in the 1960s and Sue Hamilton in the 1980s. The sum of these works is an impressive patchwork of 170 separate trenches, and nearly as many hypotheses as to its purpose. Was it a defended settlement in the traditional model of hillfort usage? A more modest fortified farmstead or, rather, a more strategic (albeit apparently unfinished) military site? Or was it perhaps religious in nature? Evidence for the latter is implied through the unusual composition and contents of more than 140 burial pits, which included a stunning array of tools, coins, weapons, pottery, and disarticulated animal and human bones.