Halls of the Dead

Exciting news on the Today programme this morning! (If you're an archaeologist, that is!)
A team digging on Dorstone Hill, near Peterchurch, at the site of two Neolithic long barrows, has found something immensely interesting underneath them. Two long timber halls, with wattle and daub walls, were built on the site before the barrows - and then they were deliberately burned down. The archaeologist talking on the Today programme this morning said that this was believed to be a display of conspicuous consumption - "look at all the effort we've put into building these halls - and now we're going to destroy them!" He went on to say that this may have been a way of fixing the halls in the collective memory of the people who witnessed the destruction. Rather than allowing them to slowly decay over a long period, they would be remembered at their best and most magnificent.
The long barrows were then built on the remains of the halls, and they remained a landmark for thousands of years. The bigger of the two is 70m long, and the smaller one is 30m long. They were used for communal burials for a community. A thousand years after they were built, a flint axe and a flint knife, probably from Yorkshire, were deposited in one of the barrows, and there was also a cremation burial in the mound.
The dig is a joint effort between Herefordshire Council and the University of Manchester, and shows what a wealth of information about the distant past remains to be uncovered in Herefordshire.
So it's rather ironic that the County Council want to cut the post of Chief Archaeologist of the county altogether.