Antiquity 81 (311)

The paper offers an exposition of the difficulties of dating a major monument and why it matters: Silbury Hill, one of the world's largest prehistoric earth mounds, is too valuable to take apart, so archaeologists are reliant on samples taken from tunnels and chance exposures. Presenting a new edition of thirty radiocarbon dates, the authors offer models of short- or long-term construction, and their implications for the ritual landscape of Silbury and Stonehenge. The sequence in which monuments, and bits of monuments, were built indicates the kind and history of societies doing the building.

In a response to R A Bentley (in Antiquity 80:307 (2006), pages 196--201), the author discusses the use of buzzwords, and the use and misuse of words generally, concluding that the problem of lack of clarity lies at the level of the phrase, sentence, or higher rather than that of the individual word.