HOR 050511 Archaeological excavation at Chichester College, Brinsbury Campus. photo by derek martin ENGSNL00120110605114652HOR 050511 Archaeological excavation at Chichester College, Brinsbury Campus. photo by derek martin ENGSNL00120110605114652
HOR 050511 Archaeological excavation at Chichester College, Brinsbury Campus. photo by derek martin ENGSNL00120110605114652

Looking back to 2011 when exciting new evidence about West Sussex’s history was unearthed

This week we look back to 2011 when exciting new evidence about West Sussex’s history was unearthed near Pulborough.

Our reporter wrote at the time:

EXCITING new evidence about life in West Sussex 4,000 years ago has been unearthed in a field in the grounds of Brinsbury College, near Pulborough. Volunteer archaeologists and students investigated the site during a week-long dig and ended up calling in national experts to take a closer look at what they had discovered. Ian Robertson, one of the project managers from Worthing Archaeological Society, reported there had been a ‘huge number’ of finds - 71 early Bronze Age flint arrowheads plus a piece of decorated Bronze Age pot and three possible fire sites from 2000BC. He told the County Times: “It’s an extremely exciting site. The arrowheads are some of the finest examples of what you can do with a piece of stone. They’ve all survived remarkably intact. “It’s very unusual to be able to find evidence of Bronze Age occupation, particularly where we are on the South Coast. This area was thought to have been heavily wooded and not occupied. This could be a very important site in understanding how they used the landscape in the Bronze Age period.” He explained that it had been previously thought that Bronze Age people only lived up on the Downs but recent discoveries, including a dig near Sainsbury’s at Pulborough, were making archaeologists think again in this respect. “It seems there’s far much more going on in this area during the Bronze Age period than we have previously known about.”