ABSTRACT
When we look at the wreck of Stonehenge, open now to the ravages of the weather as it always was, it seems to epitomise the traditional image of the material culture: roofless and wind-blown, frazzled by frost, sleet and beating sun. We tend to picture the people living rough, perhaps in caves, perhaps in makeshift and rickety shelters that were cramped, damp and draughty, creaking in the wind. When Curwen excavated Whitehawk camp at Brighton in the 1930s, he saw its squalid inhabitants crouching in dank, windswept ditches for shelter, living out an abject existence at the lowest imaginable level of barbarism. His view was not unlike that of John Aubrey, who described the Avebury people as ‘almost as savage as the Beasts, whose Skins were their only Rayment. They were 2 or 3 degress I suppose less savage than the Americans.’ But life was not so wretched. What emerges from the archaeological evidence is that people made a variety of types of houses, each carefully built, probably quite comfortable and in some instances surprisingly large.
