page_title: Wayland's Smithy
section_title: Context
hierarchical_section_title: Wayland's Smithy / Context
caption_attribution_description: English: The Ridgeway, looking eastwards, with Uffington Castle ringfort in distance on left
context_page_description: Wayland's Smithy is a chambered long barrow located near the village of Ashbury in the south-eastern English county of Oxfordshire. Probably constructed in the thirty-sixth century BC, during Britain's Early Neolithic period, today it survives in a partially reconstructed state.
  Archaeologists have established that the monument was built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe. Although representing part of an architectural tradition of long barrow building that was widespread across Neolithic Europe, Wayland's Smithy belongs to a localised regional variant of barrows produced in the south-west of Britain, now known as the Severn-Cotswold group. Of these, it is in one of the best surviving conditions.
  The later mound was 185 feet long and 43 feet wide at the south end. Its present appearance is the result of restoration following excavations undertaken by Stuart Piggott and Richard Atkinson in 1962–63. They demonstrated that the site had been built in two different phases, a timber-chambered oval barrow built around 3590 and 3550 BC and a later stone-chambered long barrow in around 3460 to 3400 BC.
context_section_description: The Early Neolithic was a revolutionary period of British history. Between 4500 and 3800 BC, it saw a widespread change in lifestyle as the communities living in the British Isles adopted agriculture as their primary form of subsistence, abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had characterised the preceding Mesolithic period. This came about through contact with continental societies, although it is unclear to what extent this can be attributed to an influx of migrants or to indigenous Mesolithic Britons adopting agricultural technologies from the continent.
caption: The Ridgeway (Uffington Castle ringfort in the distance, on the left)
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