ABSTRACT

Around the beginning of the first millennium be on what we now call the Sussex Downs, someone stepped out through the low earthworks and fences which defined the margins of their settlement. Walking along the edge of the fields which skirted their home, they occasionally bent to pull out the weeds which grew in great profusion among the newly seeded corn. Tossing them to one side, they finally came to the low flint cairn which stood at the point where the boundaries of two fields ran into each other. The cairn had always been there. Like the sherds of strange pottery and the white stone tools that were sometimes found in the surrounding fields, this low mound capped with flint nodules belonged to another time and to an older family. Stepping over the jumbled flakes and shattered nodules which mingled with the grass around the base of the cairn, this person scrambled up to where the cap of larger nodules remained intact. Hammerstone in hand, they tapped a number of the nodules, listening for the distinctive ring which spoke of workable stone. For several minutes their tests were met by the dull crack which signified that the weathered nodule in their hand was fractured and liable to shatter. Then, after several of these uppermost stones had been cast aside, they found a number which ‘rang true’. Balancing precariously on the shifting pile of stone, they threw these pieces out from the cairn and onto the surrounding earth, then followed their path until they too returned to more level ground.