As part of my Dancing in Caves research I've been fortunate to have been put in touch with archaeologist Dr Miles Russell, who shared with me some information about Neolithic Flint Mine Grimes Graves in Norfolk.
I'd like to share with you this blog post that Miles wrote after spending some time underground at the site as part of a filming session:
http://archaeospeak.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/mine-al...
"A long dark tunnel stretches before us. Slowly and with awe, one of the excavators creeps into the gallery, candle in hand, noticing everything, and careful to disturb nothing. He is acutely conscious that he is the first human being to enter this underground workshop for some four thousand years. Suddenly he catches sight of a row of holes cleanly punched in the chalk wall while on the floor close by is a pick made from the antler of a red deer; the holes look as if they had only been made yesterday, fresh and clean-cut, with the chalk burred a little at the lip by the pressure of the pick. Progress along the gallery is far from easy. One must crawl on elbows and stomach, trailing useless legs over hard and angular pieces of chalk, one’s fingers spluttered with candle grease. It is warm, and the silence is intensified by the tiny, far-away song of the mosquitoes who have found their way through the chinks in the chalk to this subterranean place of repose." (Elliot Curwen, writing in the 1930s about the discovery of a freshly exposed gallery at Harrow Hill in Sussex)