Imogen Lycett Green on ancient Sussex: #1 Cissbury Ring.

The men can wait. The woman will nurse her child. The baby suckles noisily, gripping her mother’s thumb. The woman’s thumb is stained red.
The woman looks up, alert. From here, high on the hill, as near to the sky as it is possible to be without actually flying, what can she see? To the south, the wide blue sea, like you can. To the north? The never-ending fold and swell of the chalk downs, like you can. What can she smell? In summer, the storm coming, salt, chalk, barley. Milk, sweat, cow dung, the smell of wet wool in winter. Rain. What can she hear? The wind, like you can. The sheep bleating, her children playing. What is she thinking?
Flint shards in myriad shapes litter the chalk path which runs along the steep ramparts enclosing the 26 hectares of Cissbury Ring. The Iron Age hill fort, built in c400 BC, is the second largest in England, connecting to a line of hill forts on prominent sites in the south east. Chalk tracks leading off into the fields tell tales of Roman occupation, but the oldest stories lie under the ground. Pick up a shard of flaky surface flint, and you hold in your hand a piece of rock that relates you directly to the Neolithic (new Stone Age) tribes who dug 200 or so shafts leading to a labyrinth of passages inside this hill. Over five hundred years, from c4000 to 3500 BC, they mined for the deeper, tougher flint, out of which they would fashion axes and arrowheads.
Today, you stand on a level platform of turf cropped by wild ponies and rabbits into a grassland abundant in summer with harebells and scabious, wild parsnip, thyme and lady’s bedstraw. Among the grasses are the brilliantly named sheep’s fescue and creeping bent. Yes, Worthing is sprawled beneath you, but from this impressive green earthwork, you can see almost to France. Which is where the Neolithic farmers came from, bearing obsidian (black volcanic glass good for blades) and hematite (red ore used as dye), as well as farming methods which had spread into Europe from the Middle East. To settle, farm and protect crops and livestock, you needed tools and weaponry; for these early immigrants, the material was beneath their feet.
Alongside agriculture and mining, the Neolithic farmers who superseded Britain’s scattered population of hunter gatherers brought another revolutionary idea: figurative art. A group of Victorian landowners and antiquarians, excavating Cissbury Ring in the 1870s, found abstract linear scratches on the walls of the mine, but also symbols of deer, possibly with sun or moon, an ox with a rope, on chalk blocks, some on backgrounds of red ochre. Astonishingly, these discoveries were hushed up. In 1878, Augustus Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers due to the inheritance of an ancestral title and founder of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) wrote:
‘Any discovery of this nature would create such a revolution in our views of the condition of the early inhabitants of this country in the Stone Age, that although we must, of course, be prepared at all times to receive new truths, we ought not lightly to accept an assumption so much at variance with all collateral evidence.’
New truths. Researching Neolithic art over a hundred years later, archaeologist Dr Anne M Teather provided the collateral evidence. The chalk blocks, thought lost, turned up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Teather compared five of the original 39 chalk blocks extracted in the 1800s with art across Europe in the Mesolithic and Early Bronze Age to declare the Cissbury hoard ‘the earliest Neolithic art in Britain’. Publishing her research in Antiquity in 2015, Teather suggested that the art might have been made as a ‘pre-extraction ritual offering’.
Archaeology is an academic discipline rapidly evolving alongside ever more sophisticated technology. With keyhole excavations, drone mapping, DNA sampling and radiocarbon dating, a 21st century researcher can now build a complex story. You can answer what and when, but rarely can you answer why. Where did I come from, human beings ask? Here, says the archaeologist, relying on one piece of obsidian found a long way from its source. What did I eat? Barley and shellfish, says the researcher who has excavated a Neolithic settlement. Why did I scratch a deer on the wall? What was I thinking? The archaeologist can only imagine.
When a plumber’s son and self-taught archaeologist from Worthing called John Pull found a skeleton at Cissbury Ring in the 1950s, he was ridiculed by the archaeological establishment, much like Sutton Hoo’s Basil Brown, whose story was made into a 2021 film starring Ralph Fiennes. Now celebrated by Worthing Museum – home to Cissbury artefacts – as their own ‘working-class hero archaeologist’, Pull suggested the skeleton ‘was one of the old flint-miners who had met with a fatal accident at his work and whose body had never been recovered by his friends’. Subsequent radiocarbon dating would indeed date the skeleton to 3650 BC. But later analysis revealed the bones to be female, of a woman aged 25. Whether she was a miner, or fell to her death or was buried inside the shaft, we’ll never know for certain. Perhaps the so-called ‘Cissbury Lady’ was marking the walls with her thumbs.