The Sixty Neolithic Long Barrows of North and Mid-Wessex: Analysed by Fieldwork in a Landscape Context

By Terence Meaden

This monograph is a reprint of a MSc thesis completed at Oxford University in 2009. It reports the fieldwork study of 60 Wessex long barrows of central-southern England as observed in a landscape context using a multi-disciplinary approach involving orientations and alignments to sunrises and moonrises. As a consequence, the core meanings of many Neolithic long barrows become meaningful at a cultural level because of the characteristic groupings thus disclosed. The study helped to establish that Neolithic Britons were using a practical eight-period, agricultural calendar in the most general sense, with intervals between special dates amounting to 45-46 days. The manner in which long barrows are configured in the landscapes of the Avebury area and the Wylye/Salisbury Plain area hints at a family-farming clan-patterning based on agropastoral land-units.

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