The site had been badly damaged by ploughing by the time of Drewett's excavation, which limited his ability to draw conclusions from finds in the ploughsoil.

Offham Hill is a causewayed enclosure,[1] a form of earthwork that was built in northwestern Europe, including the southern British Isles, in the early Neolithic.

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.

[8] The construction of these enclosures was rapid, implying significant organization, as substantial labour would have been required for clearing the land, preparing trees for use as posts or palisades, and digging the ditches.

[9] Over seventy causewayed enclosures have been identified in the British Isles,[5] and they are one of the most common types of early Neolithic site in western Europe.

[11] A subsequent summary of research, by Historic England, considered that Drewett's plan of the site did not show how close to perfectly circular the enclosure was, and that it was very possible that the circuit had originally been complete.

Many of these smaller enclosures are in the upper Thames Valley, near rivers, and of the others, those at higher elevations, like Offham Hill, often have a second causewayed ditch surrounding the first.

[15] There are two round barrows about 50 m (160 ft) south of the site; Drewett records that these are all that remains of a larger group that has been destroyed by development.

Curwen replied that while it was clearly an "ancient concentric-ringed enclosure with at least two ditches", the site was too overgrown to say more than that, though he felt it was "not convincingly Neolithic".

[16] In 1964, David Thomson, a member of the Sussex Archaeological Society, examined the earthworks on Offham Hill and suggested to the archaeologist Eric Holden that it might be a Neolithic causewayed enclosure.

In 1972 the Archaeology Division of the Ordnance Survey inspected the site, and identified four possible causeways, but commented that excavation would be needed in order to be certain.

Drewett comments in his account of the dig that the site was so damaged by ploughing that any finds within the ploughsoil would have no meaningful context, so the top layer of soil was removed using earth-moving equipment.

He drew another plan after excavating half the site down to the chalk, showing ditches that were in fairly close agreement with the first drawing.

The ditches were of varying depth; none were deeper than 80 cm (2.6 ft), and most were shallow enough that burrows and tree roots had disturbed their contents.

The other human bone finds, which included teeth, parts of mandibles, a fibula, a phalanx, and a rib fragment, could not be definitely identified as burials.

[14] Offham Hill was one of the sites included in Gathering Time, a project funded by English Heritage and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to reanalyse the radiocarbon dates of nearly 40 causewayed enclosures, using Bayesian analysis.