Silbury Hill

Largest prehistoric manmade mound in Europe, located in Wiltshire, England, and part of the Avebury complex of Neolithic monuments. It is a huge conical chalk mound, 40 meters high and 160 meters in diameter. No burials have been found within or beneath the mound to this date. It was built in four distinct phases, but apparently continuously as part of a single constructional process, dated c 2600-2300 BC.

The largest man-made mound in Europe, situated near Avebury, Wiltshire, southern England. It was built in four distinct phases, but apparently continuously as part of a single constructional process, dated c2600-2300 bc. The final monument was a mound 40 metres high with a base covering cl hectares, which the most recent excavator, Richard Atkinson, calculates may have required 18 million man-hours to build (other scholars have produced lower estimates). It was for long believed to be an outsize round barrow, but no burial has been found on any of the five occasions when the hill has been excavated (whether by shafts sunk from the top or by tunnelling from the side). In any case the date of construction now seems earlier than the main phase of round-barrow building in Wessex. Silbury Hill belongs with the phase of large ritual monument construction of the Late Neolithic and, although no evidence survives (as a result of use of the hilltop in medieval times) it is perhaps most likely that there was on the top either a timber sanctuary building or possibly a large stone or timber to serve as a foresight for astronomical alignments.