Nothing Inside

Silbury Hill is the largest artificial mound in prehistoric Europe. It stands about thirty metres high beside the A4 in Wiltshire, a few minutes from Avebury, and it was built in stages by people using antler picks and baskets somewhere around four and a half thousand years ago.

The labour involved is on the scale of a cathedral. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chalk, quarried, carried and stacked, in a sequence of enlargements, by a society without metal.

Three times people have dug into it to find out what is in the middle.

1776

The Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Edward Drax brought in a team of Cornish miners, who sank a shaft from the summit straight down through the mound to its base.

They were looking for a burial — a king, a chieftain, grave goods — because that is what a large mound meant in the eighteenth-century imagination, and because barrows all over Wessex had been producing exactly that.

They found nothing.

1849

The Archaeological Institute, under the Dean of Hereford, John Merewether, tried the other approach and drove a tunnel in horizontally from the edge to meet the centre.

This was a considerable operation and it produced a certain amount of useful information about how the mound was constructed. It did not produce a chamber, a body, or a deposit of any significance.

1968

Richard Atkinson, one of the leading prehistorians of the day, ran a major excavation that the BBC part-funded and televised. They reopened the 1849 tunnel and drove side galleries off it.

The public watched, week by week, waiting for the discovery.

There was no discovery. Atkinson recovered good environmental evidence — including material that showed the mound had gone up quickly enough for turf and insects from the original ground surface to be sealed underneath — but there was no burial.

What that means

Three centuries of excavation, at three different scales, with three different theories, all looking for the contents.

The answer appears to be that the hill has no contents. It is not a container. It is not a tomb with a lost chamber or a monument robbed in antiquity. It was built as a mound, and the mound is all there is.

Every one of those excavations assumed that a large structure must be for something else — that the earth was a wrapper and the meaning was inside. That is a very particular assumption about how monuments work, and it is ours rather than theirs.

The current reading is that the building was the point: a sequence of enlargements over generations, in which the act of quarrying and carrying and stacking chalk was itself what the community was doing together. The evidence sits in the layers, not in a centre.

The hole

In 2000, the 1776 shaft, which had been backfilled carelessly and left for two hundred and twenty-four years, gave way, and a hole opened in the top of the hill.

Between 2007 and 2008 English Heritage went back in through the 1849 tunnel, recorded the stratigraphy properly on the way, and then filled every shaft and gallery that previous investigators had left with hundreds of tonnes of chalk.

So the interior of Silbury Hill now contains rather more than it did in 2400 BC, and all of it was put there to repair the damage done by people looking for what was never in it.