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As is usual on the South Downs, this area contains several features of interest to the Archaeologist. Of the scatter of burial mounds in the area, the most striking are a large round barrow on Hindover Hill and a selection on Alfriston Down just above Alfriston to the west.

The diagram above shows the archaeological features of Alfriston Down. The brown line is the trackway that leads up the Down whilst the long black line is a Cross-Dyke feature. The small dots are round barrows and the other two larger features are Neolithic long and oval barrows. The long barrow, called Long Burgh, is 180 feet long, aligned N.E. to S.W. and has unfortunately been mutilated on the N.E. side by a track and robbed. Apparently the barrow was opened in 1767 and a skeleton and an urn were found. The smaller oval barrow was recorded in 1934 as being 2 metres high though heavy ploughing reduced it in size so much that in 1974, the barrow was the focus of a rescue excavation. At only 24 metres long, it is one of the smallest neolithic barrows in Sussex, in a different class to what is normally accepted as a Long Barrow. Excavation revealed two pits aligned axially under the mound, one of which contained the crouched skeleton of a young woman. Antler picks and other animal bones were found on the old land surface and in the flanking ditches, possible related to the burial ritual. A large quantity of worked flint was found scattered on the mound and clumped in the ditches, which were found to have been dug in seperate stages. Two bones from the oval barrow were carbon-dated. The first, a piece of antler showing signs of wear and probably used to excavate the barrows ditches, was dated to 2360 BCE, roughly the end of the Neolithic. One of the leg bones of the buried woman was dated to 640BCE, which has led to the suggestion that the burial is an intrusive one, though the barrow sections did not show this. This would leave the barrow without an internment, though this is not necessarily a problem as a similar oval barrow excavated near West Marden in West Sussex had no internment, though in both cases, a burial in the mound above the old land surface would have been lost to the plough. Remnants of thirteen postholes were found at the two ends of the barrows, possible represtenting a facade, entrance or the remains of some mortuary enclosure.

Further along the South Downs Way which passes by the two neolithic mounds, the long 'Cross Dyke' type earthwork crosses the path, perhaps marking some boundary long forgotten. The dyke has its bank on the east side and excavations, while far from conclusive, suggest that it is Late Bronze Age and broadly contemporary with a round barrow excavated just to the east. Pottery found in the barrow next to it was broadly similar to some found at the Late Bronze Age site on Itford Hill to the west, though that was not all that was found. Interestingly, the barrow had no ditch carved into the chalk, being constructed purely of soil and turves. The barrow was reused in Saxon times when a single burial was added to the single primary burial from the Bronze Age.

Going back to the edge of the Downs at Winton, just north of Alfriston, there are two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and further to the north and on the other side of the River Cuckmere are two earthworks which are probably the remains of fortifications which at one time protected the watery road into the Weald to the north. The major Saxon burial ground containing over 150 burials was found in 1912 on the north edge of the village in the grounds of a house called the 'Sanctuary' in Winton Street.