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Cissbury Ring: Neolithic flint-mines in the digital age
Seventy years after John Pull’s excavations at Cissbury Ring transformed our understanding of Neolithic flint-mining, an innovative new interpretive trail has been launched at the West Sussex landmark. Carly Hilts visited the site with James Brown and James Sainsbury to find out more.
Crowning high ground just to the north of Worthing, Cissbury Ring is the second-largest Iron Age hillfort in England. Its monumental earthworks, built c.300 BC, enclose an area of 26ha – but the site is also home to traces of much earlier activity. The ground within and around the ramparts is pockmarked with grassy mounds and overgrown craters testifying to the efforts of Neolithic flint-miners, working some 6,000 years ago. Before the advent of metal-working, flint was one of the go-to materials for tool-making – it was durable and hard, but capable of being shaped into a variety of forms – and the chalky environment of the South Downs was a rich source of this glossy black stone.
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