A ground-breaking scientific dating project led by English
Heritage and Cardiff University has succeeded in dating
prehistoric features down to a margin of decades instead of
centuries. By applying this method to a type of early Neolithic
earthwork called causewayed enclosures, it has revealed that
Britain experienced a frenetic period of monument building in
the decades after 3,700BC, with the country's first big
monuments being erected some 1,000 years before Stonehenge was
created. Causewayed enclosures are known prehistoric features,
but up to now it has been thought that they spread slowly across
Britain over five centuries. But this research reveals that this
new class of huge monuments spread rapidly all over southern
Britain in a short span of 75 years, starting from the Thames
Estuary through Kent and Sussex, and then west, on an intense
scale that was not apparent before. Revolutionising the
perception of prehistory The new knowledge that this happened in
a flurry within two to three generations wil