Britain 3000 BC E-Book

Rodney Castleden

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Were prehistoric people like us? How did they live, what did they think and how did they see their world? 3000 BC was a moment of great significance in the British Isles: Avebury, Stonehenge and many other major monuments were at vital stages in their construction and use, and writing – often regarded as the ultimate hallmark of civilisation – made its first appearance in Europe. In this revised and updated edition of Britain 3000 BC, Rodney Castleden uses the evidence of archaeological investigations to recreate the society, customs, economy, religion and ritual of Britain 5000 years ago, and to reveal the lost world of prehistoric people. From the well-built stone houses of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands to the more primitive wooden huts of Honington in Suffolk, Castleden enters the dwellings and lifestyles of neolithic communities and delves into the nature of their society, their trading networks and positive obsession with death. Britain 3000 BC will be fascinating reading for everyone who is interested in prehistory, archaeology and the magnificent monuments our ancient ancestors left behind.

Leseprobe

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Wilmington Giant: The Quest for a Lost Myth (1983)

The Stonehenge People (1987)

The Knossos Labyrinth: A New View of the ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos (1990)

Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (1991)

Book of British Dates (1991)

Neolithic Britain: New Stone Age Sites in England, Scotland and Wales (1992)

The Making of Stonehenge (1993)

World History: A Chronological Dictionary of Dates (1994)

The Cerne Giant (1996)

Knossos, Temple of the Goddess (1997)

Atlantis Destroyed (1998)

Ancient British Hill Figures (1999)

King Arthur: The Truth Behind the Legend (2000)

History of World Events (2003)

Mycenaeans (2005)

The Attack on Troy (2006)

The Sussex Coast: Land, Sea and the Geography of Hope (2013)

The Seaford Axe Hoard (2018)

Ancient Seaford: Ice Age to Norman Conquest (2019)

History of Seaford: Worlds of Wonders (2023)

Front cover illustration: The Callanish Stones at sunset. (istockphoto.com/Swen_Stroop)

First published 2003

First published in paperback 2004

This updated paperback edition first published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Rodney Castleden, 2003, 2004, 2024

The right of Rodney Castleden to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 559 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword by Penelope Lively

Acknowledgements

Preface

One Introduction: the creative surge

Two Britain: a newly formed island

Three House and home: the human habitat

Four New food sources

Five A land without leaders

Six Ways and means

Seven The touchstones

Eight The tombs: castles of eternity

Nine Lines and circles drawn on the landscape

Ten Language, arts and crafts

Eleven People like us?

Notes

Bibliography

FOREWORD

The world of the neolithic is with us still. Its creations are features of the landscape that challenge us whenever we see them: Stonehenge, the Orkney stone circles, the houses are Skara Brae, round barrows and long barrows and the mysterious etchings of aerial photography. These sites are here and now, a part of the intricate tapestry of time and industry that is the landscape of today, but they are also then – they are a coded message from another age. Anyone who responds to them wants to decode the message; we are, after all, ourselves the descendants of the megalith builders, these inscrutable, short-lived, manipulative people.

My own early apprehension of a distant past came when I was far from this country. I grew up in Egypt. I have a compelling memory of being taken to visit a place in the desert where archaeologists were excavating what I now know to have been a pre-dynastic burial site. I was shown a shallow depression in the sand in which lay the faint impression of a curled skeleton – fragile bones, the fan of ribs, an eggshell skull. This had once been a person; this person had lived thousands of years ago. I glimpsed time, and continuity, and was awed; I think I was about seven. All my life, I have been intensely interested in the complexities of past landscapes, and hence in archaeology; perhaps that was a seminal moment. The neolithic has always seemed especially emotive, ever since I first saw the Orkney sites and felt their extraordinary resonance – emphatic statements against the green slabs of the islands and the grey sea.

Our response to the enigmatic survivals of ancient societies is a need to deconstruct. We ask questions of the monuments; all this tantalising visible evidence that someone has been here before us is provocative. Landscape is not just scenery; it is a narrative. And one in which the people of the stone age wrote an early chapter. Rodney Castleden analyses the way in which neolithic people interacted with their physical world, and then expressed this complex and imaginative relationship in their own constructions. We can never have more than a glimmer of how the neolithic mind worked, but attention to this intense connection that they felt with their backdrop does give some insight into a distant ancestry. We notice our surroundings; they lived in some kind of significant communion with theirs. The Britain evoked by this book is recognisable in its basic structure. The rivers and the coast are there, much as we know them, and the contours. And, of course, the resources (birds, beasts, vegetation, timber – though far more of all of these than today) and soil and many kinds of stone. The rest is conjured up from the known evidence, a fascinating exploration of a land covered in the wildwood, amidst which the scatter of monuments that we know today would have stood out in pristine splendour, an assertion of human presence. For this is a place that is peopled, with all that implies – the long process of landscape manipulation has begun.

They were young, they were tough and strong, they were craftsmen. We cannot know how they thought, but we can have some idea of how they may have looked, where they went, what they did. As they moved about the place, they ‘rustled, clinked and clattered’, slung about with the necessary equipment for daily life – for making arrows, sharpening flints, repairing clothing. An Orcadian stone age family would have had a dresser in the home, on which to display choice household goods. But against these homely practicalities can be set that other, inaccessible aspect of their psyche which impelled them to build the megaliths, to drive great cursus monuments miles long across the landscape, to bury their dead in conspicuous earthworks. Rodney Castleden calls the monuments mnemonic devices, and likens them to the cathedrals of our own age, in which each feature has a meaning and a reference for those who can read the place. They tethered the people of the stone age not only to the landscapes in which they existed but also to their own pasts. Like us, they needed to relate to those who came before; in the prehistoric world, constructions took the place of the written word.

They must have been given to ritual, perhaps to the point of obsession. The cursus and the stone circle echo the two basic forms of primitive dance, the processional and the round dance. In a time when life expectation was brief, death was a commonplace; many of the monuments are references to death – burial places. But they are also about continuity, about the turning of the world – even if that was a concept unknown to their builders. And, knowing this, it is impossible not to think of the great neolithic landscapes – the Wiltshire sites, Orkney – as places that reverberate still with lost sounds and sights, with song and dance, with chanting and enacting.

That said, I have no time for mystical responses to landscape. The value of Britain 3000 BC is that it enables the reader to arrive at a more informed understanding of those many places in this country from which the stone age sends out a signal. Any landscape is meaningless until you can read its codes; it is simply an assemblage of hill and valley, field and road, assorted lumps and bumps in the ground. Only when you know that this is an iron age hill-fort, those are ridges of medieval ploughing, that distortion of a hilltop is a neolithic long barrow, can you start to imagine your way into these half-vanished worlds.

Penelope Lively

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people helped me to write this book, some consciously, when I approached them for advice, others quite unconsciously, when they made some observation about the past or present that set off a train of thought. Some of the most influential are now dead, which makes it all the more important to acknowledge the debt.

The late Sir Harry Godwin back in 1980 gave me a useful firsthand perspective on the revolution in prehistory brought about by radiocarbon dating and pollen analysis, and encouraged me to develop a new synthesis. The first great exponent of the British neolithic, Stuart Piggott, made encouraging comments about my earlier writings. His ‘successor’, Colin Renfrew, was kind enough to discuss the Orkney tombs with me when we met, by chance, in the rain as he emerged, like the White Rabbit, from one of them. The composer Sir Michael Tippett was a great encourager; he felt I had given him an ancestry in the people of the barrows.

I am grateful to the staff at the Sackler Library, formerly the Ashmolean Library, Oxford, for their help; Alison Fraser for her thoughts on prehistoric ailments and advice on relevant literature; John and Celia Clarke for their hospitality during my reading weeks in Oxford; Rupert Harding for his invaluable detailed advice at the planning stage of the project; Christopher Feeney, my editor at Sutton Publishing; and Mick Sharp for being willing to let me use some his wonderful images of neolithic sites.

I am glad to have this opportunity to thank some of the writers whose ideas have influenced me over the last twenty years; names such as Colin Renfrew, Ros Cleal, Richard Bradley, Alex Gibson, Aubrey Burl, Tim Darvill, Chris Scarre and Francis Pryor spring immediately to mind. There are also the correspondents who have written to me with their responses to my writings on various subjects, encouraging me, correcting me and supplying me with all manner of stimulating ideas and useful updates about sites. It may be invidious to name names, but I would like to mention some: Nigel Rose, John Miller, John Darrah, Don Klipstein, Laurence Nowry and, more than any other, Aubrey Burl.

PREFACE

The first edition of this account of neolithic people, culture and landscape in Britain was written in 2003, in the wake of a surge of discoveries made by archaeologists especially during the previous two decades. This new edition covers the tremendous and unforeseen acceleration of progress in the twenty years that followed.

Major new discoveries have been made at many sites that were already known, including Stonehenge and Durrington Walls in Wessex, as well as new sites such as the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney. Alongside these new finds, new forensic techniques have been developed, and these have enabled archaeologists to develop a clearer picture of the way people lived, even including how far they travelled, which for a long time was a matter of speculation and seemed set to remain so.

The neolithic lasted a long time – one thousand, five hundred years – as long as from the arrival of the first Anglo-Saxons to the present. It seemed from an early stage in the project that a sharper image would emerge if there was a focus on what was happening at a particular moment. 3000 BC, in the middle of the neolithic, was a pivotal moment when big changes were under way. The so-called neolithic revolution, the introduction of farming, had begun in 4100 BC and it brought with it the building of monuments, though it was only in 3000 BC that stone circles, the distinctive hallmark of British prehistory, appeared. It was then that the first stone circle, a ring of bluestones, was built at Stonehenge. It was made of fairly small stones, but they were brought a long distance, from Wales. It took another 500 years for the huge sarsen stones from Avebury to arrive and be built into the massive central stone setting. To understand what was happening in Britain in 3000 BC, it will be necessary to look back to 4100 BC to see how things started, and forward to 2500 BC to see how they developed.

If we could travel back to 3000 BC, what kinds of people would we meet? How civilised – or how barbarous – would they be? How would they be dressed? It’s unlikely we would understand their language, but would we be able to understand what they were doing? Would we be surprised at the lives they led?

Radiocarbon conversion graph (after Stuiver and Pearson 1993).

I first stumbled on this foreign country while I was researching landscape processes in the Midlands, trying to unravel the biography of an obscure river valley and detect order in the wildness of its winter floods. At Ecton, near Northampton, I found a moongate that unexpectedly transported me from geography into archaeology and from the present into the past. Stepping down onto the floor of a gravel pit beside the river I found the sand bars the River Nene had laid down in its channel long before Stonehenge was dreamed of, the cobbles it had rolled along its bed in the summer snowmelts of twenty thousand years ago. Halfway up, between the upper layers of modern silt and the ice age sand bed below, was an old land surface where a score of trees had been felled or burnt down – they had certainly been charred by fire – and nearby a handful of neolithic knives. People had visited the riverbank five thousand years before, perhaps to collect river cobbles for tool-making, perhaps to clear a bit of woodland for a settlement site. This meeting with ancestors was a formative moment. Until then I had been using archaeology to follow through the story of the river, but from then on I pursued the elusive people of the new stone age for their own sake. The more I found out, the more fascinated I became, and the more I wanted to share what I had discovered. Out of that came four books: The Stonehenge People, The Making of Stonehenge, Neolithic Britain, and then this book.

Can we reach the year 3000 BC?

For fifty years we have been able to date bone, wood and other once-living materials using radiocarbon dating, and this has given a much clearer picture than before of the way things changed during the neolithic; for one thing, radiocarbon dating showed that the neolithic was two thousand rather than five hundred years long. But even with refinements to radiocarbon dating, which is still our main source for a neolithic chronology, it is difficult to give accurate calendar dates.

Raw radiocarbon dates come from the laboratory with a ‘health warning’; each is expressed as a range of dates, and we can be only 95 per cent certain that the true date lies within that range. The raw date then needs to be converted in the light of tree-ring dating, which counts backwards year by year from the present and enables us to check on the accuracy of radiocarbon dates. The conversion graph we use throws up further problems; because there are waves or ripples in the graph, a single raw date may convert to three different calibrated dates. The real, calendar, date is lost in the ripple among the three dates.

Unluckily for us, there is a ripple in the conversion graph around 3000 BC. Any event falling between the calendar dates 3100 and 2900 BC is likely to yield the raw (uncorrected) radiocarbon date of 4400 bp. Two hundred real calendar years of prehistory have been replaced by just one radiocarbon date. This may be why so many chamber tombs appear to have been built all at once. This is why the middle neolithic gives an impression of a period of stagnation ending in a sudden spasm of activity and change; the reality is more likely to have been a dynamic evolution – faster than before, but not a convulsion.

In the circumstances it is probably more realistic, for most purposes in this book, to look at the period 3200–2800 BC rather than try to pinpoint a particular date. Radiocarbon dating cannot find 3000 BC for us.

But before we write off the two centuries straddling 3000 BC as a ‘lost world’, a time zone we are forbidden to enter, we must remember that there are other dating methods. Tree-rings record variations in British weather year by year, every year, through that period and ice layers entombed in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets similarly show a continuous stored record of global atmospheric changes. Dendrochronology and ice cores show that those two centuries existed like any others, and in tree-rings from the Lancashire bogs we can find Britain 3000 BC exactly.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION:THE CREATIVE SURGE

Just five thousand years ago was the heyday of the new stone age in Britain. It was one of those rare highly charged moments in the development of the human race when many changes were under way, not just in Britain but elsewhere. It was that crucial landmark moment when civilisation began with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. Towns had been growing steadily in the Middle East for five hundred years, becoming fully fledged cities where architecture, sculpture, pottery and metal-working were achieved amid landscapes transformed by irrigation systems and agriculture. Great and imposing buildings had been created such as the White Temple of Uruk. An historic change happened in north Africa, where in 3100 BC a ruler of Upper Egypt became the first to unite into a single kingdom the whole of the Nile valley from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean, in effect creating Egypt itself. The first pyramids would follow 300 years later.

On the other side of Europe, in the British Isles, a cultural revolution manifested itself in a flurry of large-scale monument-building. A great stone tomb was built at Newgrange; a square setting of stones, the first in a succession of ever-larger monuments, was raised at Avebury to surround and commemorate an ancestral house; two large timber enclosures were built close by at West Kennet; the first stone circle was raised at Stonehenge.1 Ten thousand years ago the last cold stage ended, the point where dramatic and rapid environmental changes finally shook the human race out of its palaeolithic habit and into a phase of cultural development without parallel in its rapidity and variety. This was not associated with any genetic or racial evolution – the people were physically the same as before – it seems that the drama of major climatic and environmental changes stimulated a human race that was just ready to make huge cultural steps forward. There had been earlier interglacials, maybe twenty or more, but none of them saw the human race develop as fast as it grew during the major climatic change that opened this present warm stage. 3000 BC was the halfway point between the end of the last cold stage and today.

Archaeologists are used to digging from the earth pieces of bone, stone and pottery and wood and seeing with their mind’s eye the living reality of the long-gone past. Non-specialist onlookers, on the other hand, are often disappointed with the visible finds, which are incomplete, dirty and damaged, and look divorced from any living human endeavour. Only occasionally is something uncovered that grips us all with its immediacy. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb was such a moment. When I started researching the neolithic, I hoped that peat extraction in the Somerset Levels would one day uncover the preserved body of a neolithic hunter who had lost his footing on one of the narrow slippery wooden trackways crossing the reed-beds. Then we would be able to see what neolithic clothes were like, and how neolithic people themselves actually looked. So far no neolithic bog body has been discovered, though the Somerset peat has yielded quite a few neolithic artefacts. It was many years later that my wish came nearly true: a well-preserved neolithic man was found, not in Somerset but in the Alps, preserved by freezing. Now it is possible to meet the withered gaze of a neolithic person who died in 3200 BC, establishing a sense of kinship that bridges the five thousand years separating Them from Us. ‘Oetzi’ has made a huge impact on us. My hope is that we can develop that sense of rapport with the time when the Iceman lived.

A problem is that in becoming ‘familiar’ with an individual, past or present, we may lose sight of larger-scale social, political and economic processes. We may lose sight of the culture. Initially, archaeologists studying Oetzi’s remains assumed he had been caught out by the sudden onset of bad weather while on a seasonal visit to high alpine pastures or on a routine hunting expedition. Now it seems more likely that he was an exile, an outcast, possibly a man chased out of his village for committing some offence, fatally wounded and driven up into the mountains to die. In other words what happened to him was not routine at all. It is often difficult to assess how far an individual event in the past is representative.

I once worked with Les Sandham, who was a generation older than me. He told me how as a young bandsman in the Second World War he was captured by the Japanese and like other prisoners suffered badly at the hands of his captors on the Burma Railway. I also had a neighbour, Bob Bartholomew, who served in the Royal Navy at the same time in the same war and, by chance, saw no hostile action; he had a wonderful time on what was for him a five-year world cruise. Two personal histories of the same period, the same conflict. Which of the two men had the experience that more meaningfully represents the 1940s? Historians wisely draw back from this sort of question, from individual anecdote, in order to see the larger processes at work – and prehistorians do the same. Yet in doing so they may lose something important, the sense of sharing an experience with the people of the past, and that special sense of ownership of the past that most of us need.

I spread before you, not the cloths of heaven of W.B. Yeats, but a panorama of the past. Along the way I also hope to offer some glimpses of moments in other people’s lives, long lost. How else can we tell whether life was different for them? Or whether they were in some significant way a different sort of people?

CHAPTER TWO

BRITAIN: A NEWLY FORMED ISLAND

Ten thousand years ago the glaciers that had for thousands of years covered the mountains of Wales and Scotland melted away. Temperatures rose steeply and small bands of hunter-gatherers became established on the lowlands and round the coasts.1 Not that the coasts of 8000 BC would be recognisable today. Huge volumes of ocean water were still locked up in land-ice in Canada, and the level of the sea was still 100ft (30m) lower than it is today. A huge area of what is now shallow sea off the south and east coasts of England was exposed as a dry treeless plain.2

People and animals were able to walk to and fro between Britain and the European mainland, crossing the exposed and dried-out floor of the English Channel and southern North Sea, until as late as 5000 BC. Only then did Britain become an island. To the east, like stepping stones between the Netherlands and Norfolk, an archipelago of five small islands remained, together with one large island in the middle of the North Sea, later submerged to form the Dogger Bank. The fast-rising sea had swamped those stepping stones by 3000 BC, making a North Sea coastline recognisably like today’s. The sea crept in like a slow but relentless rising tide, drowning many of the hunter-gatherers’ settlements – which is one reason why we know relatively little of the background to the neolithic transformation.3

When the neolithic began, in 4100 BC, the first farmers must have ferried their livestock and seed to Britain by water across the Channel or the southern North Sea.4

In 3000 BC the climate reached its optimum. In the English Midlands summers reached their warmest ever (17.4˚C on average) and winters their mildest ever (5.0˚C);5 both summer and winter temperatures were to drop by at least one degree by 2000 BC. It was the warmest it would get – a degree warmer than today. There were even so big contrasts in weather from year to year, just as there are now.6

The sea by then had risen to within 13ft (4m), perhaps even 6ft, of its present level.7 In south-east England the rising sea created a ragged submergent coastline with many headlands and islands, such as Sheppey, Thanet, Wight and Selsey, separated from one another by winding estuaries, inlets, backwaters and broad shallow bays. Subsequent wave action has eroded away many of the headlands, trimmed back the islands and silted up the estuaries, inlets, bays and creeks to make the coastline smoother and straighter. Flooded river mouths that were long fingers of the sea in the neolithic have silted to become broad floodplains (such as the Arun, Adur, Sussex Ouse and the Stour in Kent), while shallow bays have become expanses of alluvial plain: Pevensey Levels and the Romney and Walland Marshes.8 Along the coast of the Fens, Firth of Forth and Somerset Levels there were large areas of marshland with reed-beds. The reeds were both a refuge for wildfowl and a valuable resource in themselves – for roof thatch.

The unresistant cliffs of glacial sediment that stretch along the North Sea coast from Holderness south to Suffolk stood significantly further to the east in 3000 BC. In many places the coastline is still retreating by around 6ft per year, and in some, like Covehithe, by nearly 20ft. The mid-neolithic coastline of eastern England probably lay 3 miles or more to the east of the present shore.

Christchurch harbour. The rising sea drowned the Avon valley to make a perfect natural harbour.

The west coast of Britain is made of more resistant rocks and rates of both erosion and silting have been much slower. The main changes there have been caused by the land rising as a result of glacial unloading. Although the ice caps covering Wales and Scotland melted away long ago, the recovery still continues. In Scotland the coastal flooding caused by rising sea level reached a maximum in 3000 BC, creating a drowned coastline. Since then the rising land, freed of the weight of the ice, has outstripped the rising sea, so the Highland coastline has emerged from the sea and the neolithic coastline is stranded inland, but there are many local variations. Loch Lomond was a sea-loch in 3500 BC, but by 3000 BC the rising land level had cut it off from the sea, turning it into a huge freshwater lake. Loch Sheil remained a sea-loch for a time and did not become a lake until 2200 BC.9

Timeline: environment and culture.

1.   Long-term average temperatures for central England, derived from various sources.

2.   Mainly from the work of Mike Baillie.

3.   The names for cultural phases are by no means definitive. Others could be proposed, but they underline the growing dissatisfaction with the names on the first column.

Watersmeet.

Then, as now, the people of Britain were living in an environment that was changing and new. The forces of nature were gradually wearing away hills and mountains and building up valley floors, but in most places these changes were imperceptibly slow. Over most of Britain, especially inland, the land surface was very close to its present shape, within a metre. The broad features of the landscape, the shapes of the hills and vales, the views and the lines of intervisibility would have been just as they are today. We live in very much the same landscape as the builders of Stonehenge.

Large-scale climatic and ecological shifts were nevertheless under way. Britain shared in a continent-wide change in vegetation. This was partly the result of human impact, partly the result of external causes. There were several big volcanic eruptions, at least nine in the twenty-eight years beginning in 3201 BC, and those are likely to have brought on serious environmental changes.10 Water levels in African lakes dropped abruptly, which led on to other disastrous ecological changes in Africa.11 By 3000 BC there was a huge drop in methane levels in the atmosphere (about 8 percent), which resulted from a reduction in the tropical wetlands. It is not clear if this was a result of the eruption sequence or, as has been suggested, the collapse of the system of ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean, which also led to a large-scale expansion of the Sahara.12 Environmental systems around the world were in upheaval. It looks as though a spate of major volcanic eruptions was directly responsible for ecological problems in Britain, in the shape of three phases of impeded tree growth, in 3200–3191, 3183–3176 and 3172–3161 BC. Around 3193 tree growth came to a virtual standstill.13

THE WILDWOOD

The wildwood that covered Britain was nevertheless still the richest ecological resource imaginable. The hunter-gatherers had colonised a meagre subarctic tundra. A few birch trees crept in and then, as the climate warmed, a few pine trees, then an open pine wood. By 4000 BC woodlands covered much of Britain with a leafy canopy at about 15m, except for a few patches of grassland in infertile areas like the Norfolk Breckland. By 3000 BC the woodlands had reached their most complete development, but even then the clearance had begun.14 Wherever there were settlements, the woodland was cleared to make space for houses and create grazing for livestock. The early neolithic was dominated by pastoral not arable farming.

Mountains rising above 1600ft (500m) peeped out above the sea of trees, the summits of Snowdonia, the Pennines, Cumbria, the Cheviots and the Scottish Highlands were bald, bleak and bare. Some landscapes now windswept and treeless, like Shetland, were then wooded. Coastal wetlands like the Fens were covered with pine, oak and yew woods.15 Orkney seems never to have been wooded, though specimens of yew, oak and hawthorn grew there, providing a skimpy supply of firewood; dried seaweed was probably the main fuel.16 When the great tomb of Maes Howe was raised in 2900 BC, it was built on heathland; only later was the surrounding land turned over to agriculture.17

The wildwood was richly varied. In the highlands generally, the sessile oak dominated. Along the Great Glen and on the mountains on either side lay the already ancient Caledonian Forest, a relic of the pine forest that had briefly covered Britain in older, colder times. The birchwoods in Caithness were similarly left over from a colder past. Blanket bog had begun to develop on the Welsh mountains, but only in small areas; it did not dominate the moorland landscape as it later would.

The wildwood is often described as an oakwood, but over large areas of poorly drained lowland, such as the Lowlands of Scotland and the waterlogged clay areas of the English Midlands, the wet-loving alder was dominant. Alders grew in East Anglia and south-east England too, but there warmth-loving lime was dominant. In the West Country mixed oak forest covered everything except the high moors where only cotton-grass and sphagnum moss grew on blanket-peat.18 In the Fens great bog-oaks were drawn up like rhubarb in the forests with their 30m canopies, to make abnormally tall, straight oak trunks – forest giants such as are seen nowhere today, and ideal for making timber circles.

Remnant of the ancient Caledonian Black Forest at Glenlyon (Jean Williamson/Mick Sharp).

When an old tree died or blew down in a gale, sunlight reached the otherwise dark forest floor to make a small woodland glade where low-growing plants could flourish: scabious, cuckoo-flower, bugle. This was important in maintaining biodiversity because, apart from these clearings, the forest covered large swathes of landscape. In the English Midlands even the river floodplains were wooded. The Nene floodplain at Wellingborough had a covering of alder, oak and hazel woodland in 3000 BC; clearings were opened up later, either by deliberate tree-felling or by windthrow, and here more grasses and herbs grew, with bracken dominant.19 Peat dating from 3000 BC at Narborough Bog on the River Soar shows a floodplain partially cleared of its woodland cover, and herbs and bracken on the increase.20

But Britain was never completely covered by forest from coast to coast. Natural processes, such as attack by disease, insects or storms, generated clearings all over the place. Then there was man-made fire. The idea of a primeval forest was borrowed from North America, where early white settlers thought they were encountering a virgin wilderness, but they were mistaken; the native peoples had been altering the forest for thousands of years by setting fire to it. Fire was a way of keeping ground open for travel, of improving hunting by stimulating grass growth and flushing out game, of clearing sites for camps and famously of communicating with people a long way off. Probably fire was used in some or all of these ways in Britain too.21 Some of the Nene floodplain woodland was burnt down. The tree trunks were left where they fell, perhaps in an accidental firing.

The forest was a rich food source for hunter-gatherers. They could collect acorns, barberries and blackberries, sloes, crab-apples and hazelnuts, and there were many plants they might collect for food too, such as knotgrass and chickweed. There was plenty of meat on the hoof: red deer, roe deer and the fearsome aurochs, the wild cattle roaming through the forest and grazing in the glades.22 The site of the Stonehenge car park, where a totem pole was raised as early as 8000 BC, may have been an artificial clearing purposely designed to lure deer by the people living not far away in the ancient hunter-gatherer settlement at Blick Mead near Amesbury. The clearing with its (eventual) line of successive totem poles was a place being made special, and it marked the beginning of the long story of Stonehenge.23 The impact of the hunter-gatherers on the environment appears to have been small, but in some areas they may have set fire to the forest,24 perhaps to flush out game, perhaps to create clearings for grazing or settlement. They may have turned part of the Black Mountains in Wales from woodland to moorland as early as 5000 BC.

The hunter-gatherers harvested the air, catching cranes, storks, lapwings, guillemots and flightless great auks. They harvested the sea, where they caught seals, whales, dolphins and many kinds of fish. The only animal the hunter-gatherers domesticated was the dog, invaluable as a hunting animal in the forest where prey could more easily be scented than seen. We often forget that the hunting and gathering way of life continued unabated through the neolithic. Red deer were especially valued for their antlers, which could be used for picks and mallets, sleeves for axe-heads and handles for tools. A cache of antler fragments found at Fletton near Peterborough included several short lengths that were carefully smoothed and used as tool-handles. It is surprising how comfortable and fit-to-purpose they are to grip.

There were wild horses, wild boar, wild cats, badgers, foxes, polecats, pine martens, red squirrels, brown hares, beavers, field voles, bank voles, water voles, wood mice, yellow-necked mice, common shrews, moles, bats, common toads, frogs and grass snakes. Relatively few remains of birds have survived, but enough to give an idea of the range of the wildlife that teemed in and over the wildwood and in the marshes beyond: Bitterns, curlews, eagles, buzzards, falcons, carrion crows, blackbirds, jackdaws, thrushes and starlings. Along the coasts there were cormorants, shags, skuas, great auks, guillemots, gannets, whooper swans, ducks and sea-eagles.25

The wildwood. Main tree species. 1 – montane grassland; 2 – birch wood; 3 – pine wood; 4 – hazel wood; 5 – alder wood; 6 – oak wood; 7 – elm wood; 8 – lime wood.

Large areas of the wildwood remained undisturbed.26 Even though there were gaps and clearings, it was still more continuous than it would ever be again. The great stone monuments that for most of us define the neolithic were often built in small woodland clearings. Several of the Welsh tombs were built either in small grassy clearings or actually in woodland.27 To neolithic people the forest must have seemed endless both in space and time, smothering their world like a great green ocean. It was still the primary source of fulfilment, providing shelter, food, medicine, protection, raw materials, folklore and mythology. Wood fuelled the cooking fires, expanding the variety of food. Wood lit up the evening darkness, lengthening the day, making a leisured social time for conversation, story-telling and song. Wood warmed the chill night air and made surviving winter possible.28

Bryn Gwyn stone circle, Anglesey.

Some woodlands were carefully managed. In Somerset a great shallow bay had filled with silt, peat and water to form the Somerset Levels, a flat expanse of fen woodlands with stands of birch, alder and willow were coppiced to generate a supply of straight, flexible osiers to make baskets and hurdles, and long straight rods for building houses and making elaborate trackways across the marsh. The oldest built roadway in Europe, the Sweet Track, just over a mile long, connecting two of the marsh islands, was already immemorially old, disintegrated and sunk in the swamp.29

Mount Caburn in Sussex was covered with lime forest in 4000 BC, managed perhaps by pollarding in 3800 BC, with cereals grown in clearings on the lower slopes from 3750 to 3450 BC. After that the forest regenerated, but this time by yew trees, and the Caburn yew wood was maintained on into the bronze age.30

Evidence for forest clearance came to light in Norfolk in the 1940s.with Harry Godwin’s pioneering work on pollen analysis, and since then other areas have added more detail to the picture.31 From the Lake District comes evidence of forest clearance in the form of soil erosion, which was under way by 3000 in several of the Lakeland valleys.32 An area of forest intended for cultivation was cleared by felling or burning, the exposed soil hoed and sown with seeds. After a few years under cultivation the clearing was turned over to pasture for a while before the forest was allowed to reclaim it.33 In the Wye valley there were at least two episodes of cereal cultivation followed by soil exhaustion. This happened within a twenty-year period and was part of a longer sequence by which open conditions were gradually established; the whole process probably went on for hundreds if years.34

Several sites in the Thames valley tell the same story of woodland clearance. The lime wood on Hampstead Heath was cleared in successive phases in the neolithic, eventually to be replaced by a holly wood.35 The lime and elm forest extended down on to the lower valley sides near the Thames at Egham, giving way to alder woodland on the wetter parts of the floodplain near Runnymede, where small sun-warmed clearings may have been man-made or resulted from wind-throw.36 Forest fallow farming opened small temporary clearings like wounds, creating a mosaic of secondary woodland in various stages of healing. Agriculture was subtle, discreetly folded into the older woodland-dependent way of life, supplementing it with new foods, and only gradually changing it with new tasks and new imperatives. Woodland ecosystems were modified but not destroyed. By 3000 BC many of the clearings had been left to grow back; the widespread woodland regeneration at this time37 might suggest an economic implosion of some kind – a dark age.38

Some areas of forest were cleared specifically to make way for monuments. The swathe of open country required for the Dorset Cursus, an 8-mile-long processional way marked by chalk banks and ditches, was created by clearing a huge corridor of pasture passing through the virgin forest.

The marked decline in elm pollen around 3200 BC is often quoted as evidence for human modification of the woodland, but the elm decline affected the whole of northern Europe at the same time, including northern Norway, then uninhabited, and this makes human interference an impossibility.39 The arrival of Dutch elm disease in the UK in the 1970s alerted archaeologists to an alternative mechanism. Maureen Girling’s 1980s discovery of wing cases of the elm bark beetle (Scolytus scolytus) immediately below the elm decline in a soil sample from Hampstead Heath seemed to clinch elm disease as the likeliest explanation.40 Meanwhile, it is certainly unsafe to see the elm decline as a marker for the beginning of agriculture.41

In the past the neolithic revolution has often been represented as a conquest of the forest. The truth is that agriculture, at a very small scale, was bolted onto a well-established hunter-gatherer culture. The forest continued to be very important to people, both economically and spiritually. The very early flint mines in the South Downs (4100 BC) were quarried in woodland.42 In some areas, like Avebury in the middle neolithic, forest clearance was large in scale, but woodland was never far away, always in view, always a physical and psychological presence in the human landscape.43

Evidence of extensive clearance comes from snail shells under the long barrows in southern England. In other areas, like the Cheviot Hills, the clearance was smaller in scale, with cereal cultivation on valley floors, pastures higher up, while all around lay the encircling forest teeming with wild resources. Bald, treeless mountain tops rose out of the forest, bare, stark and conspicuous.44

It was the forest that gave the landscape its visible seasonal variation. The architectural framework of boughs, branches and interlacing twigs was wholly visible in winter, the skeletal trees letting light through to ground level, possibly making travel easier by improving visibility. It is possible that much of the work on building Stonehenge took place in winter, when it was easier for ‘guest workers’ travelling from afar to navigate the trackways. More of the sky became visible too, by day and night, with the moon shining and stars twinkling among the bare black branches. In summer the forest was clothed in a dense mass of foliage that cut off distant views and much of the sky, and focused attention on the local; in effect by reducing visibility foliage reduced the scale of the landscape. It also created an infinite variety of diffuse and intensely localised lighting effects. Clearings would have become significant meeting places to which people as well as wild animals would naturally gravitate.

The forest had a mythic presence in the neolithic imagination. Maybe isolated great trees regularly formed natural foci for ceremonial landscapes. The row of totem poles erected at Stonehenge in the mesolithic is thought by some to have been rooted in the veneration of a living tree standing in the westernmost of the line of pits,45 but it is usually an impossible task to reconstruct alignments with trees, or even distant clearings, that have long-since vanished.

The forest was one of the great prehistoric landscape archetypes – the forest labyrinth – taking its place in the human heart alongside the glacial wasteland and the primordial sea.46 It embodied the cyclicity of the seasons and was full of ready-made metaphors of the life cycle and the wheel of human fortune. From earliest times the forest was a universal presence in European folklore and myth, sometimes as a great mother, a place of tranquillity and refuge, safety and protection, sometimes as a threatening demonic wilderness full of dangerous predators and hobgoblins, but always as a place of adventure and quest, full of danger and delight. Above all the forest was an enduring and ever-present symbol of the immutable realm of the grandmothers and grandfathers, of the immeasurable ancestral past and the unforeseeable future.47

CHAPTER THREE

HOUSE AND HOME:THE HUMAN HABITAT

DISAPPEARING BUILDINGS

Few would expect houses built by neolithic people to have survived as part of the visible landscape. Most of us are deeply impressed when we see an intact Roman building, like the Pantheon in Rome, or a Saxon building, like Brixworth Church in Northamptonshire, still standing after one-and-a-half or two thousand years. We would not expect any building to last five thousand years. All of us have seen in the landscape the evidence of the process of disappearance, sometimes imperceptibly slow, sometimes rapid. An abbey ruined at the time of the Reformation may continue to disintegrate very gradually, while an urban redevelopment scheme may lead, almost overnight, to the demolition of a clutch of 200-year-old shops to make way for a new superstore. Sometimes houses are rebuilt on the same spot, sometimes a whole village is abandoned. We walk across fields or moors, through villages or down city streets unaware that we are walking through the invisible walls and doors of other people’s houses, treading on their invisible hearths and beds and their long-gone prized possessions.

With that process of disappearance in mind, it is amazing that in a country as densely populated as Britain the plans at least of over a score of neolithic houses have somehow survived. Understandably, they have attracted a lot of interest from archaeologists because they allow us to see something we could not have expected to see – the detail of the daily lives of neolithic people, where they sat warming their hands before the fire and told stories, where they slept, made love and reared their young, and something of what it must have been like to live at that time.

HEBRIDEAN AND ORCADIAN HOUSES

Perhaps we should begin somewhere geographically remote, to travel a long way is to travel through time – another neolithic idea. Loch Olabhat is on the western edge of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Here, at Eilean Domhnuill, we can see the footings of an early settlement on a tiny man-made island called a crannog. For several centuries, beginning in 3500 BC, a small community lived on that island, rebuilding their homes and sheds several times, within a timber and wattle palisade probably built to keep the wind out. They reached the island from the lake shore by walking over a wooden footbridge 130ft (40m) long. In the first phase two houses about twenty by 13ft stood side by side. Archaeologists were able to make out their bases from stone footings which supported light timber-frame structures. They were often modified, possibly because of damage by the weather. The people who lived on Eilean Domhnuill had stone querns to grind grain and used a lot of pottery. They may have avoided taking livestock onto the island because of lack of space, or because it would not have been easy to guide animals safely over the long bridge.

Some of the important sites in 3000 BC.

This was probably but one of a string of occupation sites they used; there would have been others along the coast, the inhabitants staying in each of them for a time as their foraging activities took them across the landscape. This semi-nomadic behaviour is suggested by the way their chamber tombs are scattered.1

Loch Olabhat. A reconstruction of one of the phases of the neolithic crannog (developed from Parker Pearson 1993).

In the Orkney islands extraordinary developments were taking place in monument-building. Two well-made drystone semi-detached houses still stand at Knap of Howar on the shore of the island of Papa Westray. They were so well made and well preserved that for a long time they were thought to be iron age, but Anna Ritchie’s excavation and the radiocarbon dates she obtained showed that they were not only neolithic but the earliest buildings in the Orkneys, dating to 3500–2700 BC. They were rebuilt repeatedly on the same spot through that long period, so the remains we see today are those of the last phase, built around 2800 BC