Great Wilbraham is a causewayed enclosure,[3] a form of earthwork that was built in northwestern Europe, including the southern British Isles, in the early Neolithic period.

[11] There is also evidence that they played a role in funeral rites: material such as food, pottery, and human remains was deliberately deposited in the ditches.

[11] The construction of these enclosures would have required substantial labour for clearing the land, preparing trees for use as posts or palisades, and digging the ditches, and would probably have been planned for some time in advance, as they were built in a single operation.

[12] Over seventy causewayed enclosures have been identified in the British Isles,[8] and they are one of the most common types of an early Neolithic site in Western Europe.

[1] Most causewayed enclosures are oval-shaped, but the two circuits at Great Wilbraham are almost perfectly circular, though many of the ditch sections (between the gaps) are themselves straight lines.

[15] Many enclosures were built on valley floors, usually positioned not far above the high water mark of the river, and Great Wilbraham fits this pattern.

[2] A prehistoric henge was tentatively identified in an adjacent field in the 1970s, but a more recent review considered it to be a naturally disturbed area of gravel.

"Total archaeology" is an approach which attempts to integrate information from "all of the disciplines capable of bringing understanding" to a site;[27] accordingly, Clarke planned to include interdisciplinary analyses and an evaluation of the surrounding landscape and environment in the project.

[16] Clarke assumed that the site was a settlement, despite the uncertainty about the function of causewayed enclosures, and did not mention the possibility of ritual uses in an application he made to the British Museum for funding for the 1976 season.

Finds mentioned in the proposal included bones of cattle, sheep, pig, deer and wolf; worked wood; seeds; pottery sherds; and flints.

[34][35] Although excavation by spits is considered an unsound approach,[35] the work was in other ways advanced for its time: for example, a computer program was written to render the contour topography of the site in a 3D perspective.

[38] The trench at the east side of the site (GW II in the diagram) was U-shaped, with two 45 m-long (148 ft) arms, connected at the southwestern end.

[39] For all three trenches, the initial soil removal was done by machine until the base of the ploughsoil was reached, and the spoil heaps were examined for finds.

Items included a flint axe (which had been lost by the time the archive was reviewed in 2006), scrapers, blades, arrowheads, and hammerstones.

[57] A dog was apparently present at the enclosure during the Neolithic occupation, as one of the cattle bones showed clear signs of gnawing.

The banded form of this species is thought to be more common in grassland than woodland, implying that the area around the site had been cleared at the time the shells were deposited in the ditches.

The lowest (and hence oldest) sample, from the peat, was dated to 7940–7580 BC, a period in the early Mesolithic when birch and pine predominated.

[59][60] The upper sample was dated to 2440–2030 BC, at the boundary between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, when woodland was declining and being replaced by agricultural land.