Windmill Hill Wiltshire United Kingdom

The Windmill Hill culture is a name given to a people inhabiting southern Britain, in particular in the Salisbury Plain area close to Stonehenge, around approximately the late fourth millennium.

An agrarian Neolithic people, their name comes from Windmill Hill, a causewayed enclosure, a type of large prehistoric earthwork common to the early Neolithic in Europe.

The site was first occupied around 3800 BCE although the only evidence is a series of pits apparently dug by an agrarian society using Hembury pottery.

Together with another Neolithic tribe from East Anglia, a tribe whose worship was for stone circles, it is thought that they were responsible for the earliest work on the Stonehenge site.

The material record left by these people includes large circular hilltop enclosures, causewayed enclosures, long barrows, leaf-shaped arrowheads, and polished stone axes.

They raised cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs, grew wheat and mined flints.

Since archaeologists first coined the term, further excavation and analysis has indicated that it consisted of several discrete cultures such as the Hembury and the Abingdon cultures; and that "Windmill Hill culture" is too general a term.

Causewayed enclosures are often located on hilltop sites, encircled by one to four concentric ditches with an internal bank.

In general, enclosures located in lowland areas are larger than hilltop ones.

Crossing the ditches at intervals are causeways that give the monuments their names.

Three concentric segmented ditches are placed in about 3300 BCE around the hilltop site of Windmill Hill, the outermost with a diameter of three hundred and sixty-five meters.

The causeways interrupting the ditches vary in width from a few centimeters to seven meters.

Material from the ditches is piled up to create internal banks; the deepest ditches and largest banks are on the outer circuit.

Archaeological evidence implies that the enclosures were visited occasionally by Neolithic groups rather than being permanently occupied.

It is possible that they represent a transitional period in the Neolithic before hunter-gatherer societies finally became fully settled.

Animal remains (especially cattle bones), domestic waste, and pottery have been found at the sites, but there has been limited evidence of any structures.

In some locations, such as Windmill Hill, evidence of human occupation predates the enclosure.

Environmental archaeology suggests that the European landscape was in general heavily forested when the enclosures were built and that they were rare clearings in the woodland that were used for various social and economic activities, but their true functions are unknown.