Cissbury

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Cissbury is the name of a prehistoric site near the village of Findon around 5 miles north of Worthing in the English county of West Sussex.

The site was one of the first Neolithic flint mines in Britain and it was exploited throughout the period. It is part of a group of flint mines in Sussex which followed a rich seam of flint bearing chalk. Other examples include Blackpatch and Harrow Hill.

Cissbury was one of the most prominent mining industries in the UK during the Stone Age through to the Iron Age, and examples of Cissbury flint can be found as far as Italy.

Around 200 shafts were dug into the Cissbury hill over around 900 years of use starting in c. 2700 BC. Shafts were up to 12m deep with 7m diameters at the surface. Up to eight galleries extended outwards from the bottoms of the shafts, often interconnecting with one another.

Excavation of the mine shafts by John Pull in the 1950s uncovered the remains of a young woman who had been apparently killed in a tunnel collapse around 2000 BC. Charcoal possibly from her torch and a miniature whale carved from chalk were with her. The possibility that the shaft was used for a ritual burial has also been suggested however. The remains of two other people, a man and a woman, were recovered from different shafts at Cissbury in the nineteenth century and it has been suggested that the exhausted mines had a secondary purpose for formal burial. Alternatively, it may have been expedient to send women into the mines as they could squeeze into the narrow galleries and some archaeologists have suggested that flint extraction was a rite of passage for the more slightly-built juvenile members of Neolithic societies.

The site is significant as it represents the switch from open cast flint extraction favoured previously by prehistoric peoples who exploited deposits of flint close to the surface, to deep shaft mining which required more effort but produced more flint of a higher quality.

Cissbury Ring is the name of a later Iron Age hill fort that occupied the site between 300BC and the Roman conquest.

See also denehole

[edit] Bibliography

Russell, Miles, Rough quarries, rocks and hills : John Pull and the neolithic flint mines of Sussex. Oxford: Oxbow, 2001. Bournemouth University School of Conservation sciences occasional series.