Cissbury Ring LiDAR Investigation

Cissbury Ring, traditionally classified as an Iron Age hill fort, is actually one of the oldest and largest Neolithic flint mining sites in Britain, covering an impressive 65 acres. It ranks second only to Maiden Castle in terms of size. However, its primary historical significance lies not in its defensive role, but in its function as a major center for flint extraction and trade. This site represents one of the earliest known industrial landscapes in prehistoric Britain, with mining activity that dates back to around 4000 BCE, challenging the conventional Iron Age classification.
The site contains approximately 200 flint shafts, some extending as deep as 12 meters, and mining activities here spanned an extraordinary 900-year period. These shafts were dug into the chalk bedrock to access high-quality flint, a critical resource in the Neolithic era for tool-making and other practical purposes. Flint extraction at Cissbury was a meticulous process, involving the excavation of large shafts and tunnels to reach the valuable deposits. Skilled miners likely used bone and stone tools to carve through the chalk, carefully extracting flint nodules that would have been in high demand across Britain and beyond.
The surrounding landscape is marked by a series of interconnected ditches and dykes that connect ancient paleochannels to the site's main ditch, forming an intricate transportation network. This system likely facilitated the movement of flint from the mines to boats for trade, indicating Cissbury’s role as a strategic trading hub. These channels would have allowed the extracted flint to be efficiently transported to nearby waterways, where it could be shipped to other regions.
The sheer scale and complexity of the mining operations at Cissbury Ring provide a glimpse into the sophisticated logistical organization of Neolithic communities. This site was not merely a fortified settlement, but a bustling center of industry, resource management, and trade in prehistoric Britain.This is a journey through time looking at the CISSBURY RING Landscape based on the new third (2020) edition book of the best seller - that contains conclusive and extended evidence of Robert John Langdon's hypothesis, that rivers of the past were higher than today - which changes the history of not only Britain, but the world.
Post-Glacial Flooding
In his first book of the trilogy 'The Post-Glacial Hypothesis', Langdon discovered that Britain was flooded directly after the last Ice Age, which remained waterlogged in to the Holocene period through raised river levels, not only in Britain, but worldwide.
In this second book of the series 'The Stonehenge Enigma', he also shows that a new civilisation known to archaeologists as the 'megalithic builders' adapted to this landscape, to build sites like Stonehenge, Avebury, Woodhenge and Old Sarum, where carbon dating has now shown that these sites were constructed about five thousand years earlier than previously believed.
Within the trilogy 'Prehistoric Britain', Langdon looks at the anthropology, archaeology and landscape of Britain and the attributes and engineering skills of the builders of these megalithic structures. Including finding and dating the original bluestones of Stonehenge Phase I from the quarry of Craig-Rhos-Y-Felin in Wales, five thousand year earlier than current archaeological theory and how this civilisation used the sites surrounding Stonehenge at a time of these raised river levels.
This unique insight into how the prehistoric world looked in the 'Mesolithic Period' allows Langdon to explain archaeological mysteries that have confused archaeologist since the beginning of the science and allows us to make sense of these sites, allowing us to understand their function for this society for the first time.
With over thirty 'proofs' of his hypothesis and one hundred and twenty-five peer-reviewed references - Langdon uses existing excavation findings and carbon dating to forward a new understanding of the environment and our ancient society, which consequently rewrites our history books and allows us to find more conclusive and persuasive evidence which is currently trapped in our landscape, ready to be discovered by future students of archaeology.
Articles on this Trilogy and an Active FaceBook Group where you can leave comments and get feedback can be found at:
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