contd
Earlier prehistory Although there are spectacular Lower Palaeolithic finds from Hitchin, dating back to around 400,000 years ago, the only evidence so far from Norton is a flint tool from a gravel pit on Arlesey Road, which lay outside the historic parish. No finds have been made of the people who first colonised Britain at the end of the Ice Age, around 11,000 BC. We can suspect that they passed through this area, hunting and gathering in the woodland that would have covered the hills and in the wetlands that developed in the valley of the Pix Brook. Farming started in Britain around 4350 BC. Although all of the crops and domesticated animals were imported from overseas, it is now thought that there was only a small influx of population (perhaps no more than about 5%) and that the local hunter-gatherers gradually adopted farming techniques. Throughout the fourth millennium BC, they had a mixed economy, with hunting remaining the main source of foodstuffs, but slowly they came to rely increasingly on farmed produce. As this meant that they were becoming more settled, they began to construct monuments in the landscape that must have helped assert their ownership of the land. The cursus excavated by John Moss-Eccardt Part of one such monument was excavated by John Moss-Eccardt of Letchworth Museum in 1963 on the line where the A1(M) was to be built. Consisting of a pair of parallel V-shaped ditches and banks seven metres apart, it is a monument known as a cursus. Residual Neolithic flints and a sherd of Late Neolithic Grooved ware pottery suggest that the ditches were probably constructed in the later Neolithic. A later phase of use, possibly in the Early Bronze Age, is indicated by posts found in several of the ditch sections excavated. The ditches were traced for a distance of 244 metres and aerial photographic evidence indicates that they may be over 500 m long, running from the Ivel Springs towards Nortonbury. The purposes of cursus are obscure, although the way they meander across the countryside, some for considerable distances, suggests that they were used as processional ways. A number of them incorporate burial mounds into their banks, sometimes changing direction to do so, which suggests that they may have been used for rituals associated with the dead or with ancestral spirits. A number of early Neolithic flint tools have been found in the parish, including several from Wilbury Hill and nearby, and a scraper from Eastholm. As stray finds, we do not know the contexts in which they were lost or thrown away. Some may have been discarded on settlement site, some in fields where people were working and others dropped by travellers.
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