The modification of stone to form a tool requires considerable skill, but needs little heat or other technological development. The production of metal from ore (a process known as smelting) involves the careful manipulation of fire, together with other chemical and physical measures, such as the control of oxygen and the addition of carbon. The first metals to be worked were copper and gold. In its physical characteristics, gold is halfway between stone and metal. It occurs in streams as a tiny shiny grain or pebble and can be worked without heat. Copper can be smelted from its ore at reasonably low temperatures, but is quite soft. Copper axes are only a slight improvement on stone. But when about 10 per cent zinc is added to it, the resulting alloy, bronze, is very much harder and stronger. Bronze tools are usually cast using stone or clay moulds. Iron requires much higher temperatures to smelt from its ore and is very much harder than bronze. It is shaped into tools and weapons by repeated beating on an anvil and reheating, a process known as ‘smithing’. The iron produced in a blacksmith’s shop is known as ‘wrought iron’. Cast iron, a hard alloy of iron and carbon, although invented in China in the fifth century BC, was not introduced to Britain until the time of Henry VIII, when it was used to make cannons.f
If time cannot stand still, people cannot live alone. Like all mammals, we humans require communities in which to grow up and raise new generations. Contrary to popular opinion, there have never been any truly migratory people who wander the Earth completely at random: anthropologists have shown that even shifting communities follow well-established routes that obey a set of recognized boundaries. And boundaries denote landscapes. Human landscapes are all about dividing up terrain to avoid conflict and to make the tasks of daily life run smoothly. In the hunter-gatherer societies that existed in Britain before the introduction of farming in the Neolithic era (c. 4000 BC), the divisions would have been between the hunting grounds of neighbouring communities. Other important markers in the landscape would have been the places where animals could drink water or give birth to their young, at certain times of the year. These areas would have been respected, because it would have been in nobody’s interests to have hunted game to near extinction – as happened to the American bison by the late nineteenth century. By then, of course, the European-derived populations of the United States had lost all connection with their original hunting traditions. This explains why they completely failed to appreciate the irreversible harm they were causing. Their prehistoric precursors would not have made such elementary mistakes.
Ancient boundaries within landscapes were subtle and were not always marked in ways that can be identified by archaeology – even with its modern, sophisticated geophysical techniques. Certain trees, for example, could have been marked for special attention; piles of brushwood and bonfires could have been lit at certain times of the year. Such boundaries could have served practical purposes to do with hunting and farming, but they could also have marked out areas that were regarded as special in some way: maybe grounds that were set aside for burying the dead or neutral places where people from widely separated communities could come together without the risk of conflict. Such places were often on hills or close by lakes or rivers, where the shades of the ancestors and other forces in the spirit world were believed to reside. Only quite recently have we begun to realize that locations where shrines of the Bronze Age were erected had been viewed as special for many millennia previously. A good example of this is the sacred spring at Blick Mead (c. 8000 BC), near the much later site of Stonehenge (2900 BC).g Some of the traditional paths and tracks of pre-farming landscapes would have survived into the Neolithic and later periods and it is very possible that many of the roads that we know were in existence prior to the Roman period – and are still in use today – have origins that extend back many millennia.
Owing to practical constraints, archaeologists usually work at quite a small, site-based scale: most prehistoric excavations will concentrate on a single monument, such as a burial mound (or barrow), a settlement or a hillfort. As a general rule, too, the older the site, the smaller the excavation. This usually reflects the fact that ancient sites rarely extend over large distances and the evidence they offer can often be very fragmentary. Post-Ice Age Mesolithic sites, for example, are famous for producing tens of thousands of tiny (smaller than fingernail-sized) flint flakes, known as microliths. To recover these, the soil has to be carefully sieved – rendering a large dig impossible. But in certain circumstances it is now possible to work on a larger, landscape scale – even on quite early sites. And these are the projects that have produced the most extraordinary advances in our knowledge of prehistoric Britain, since the late 1960s and early 1970s.
When you examine how past communities adapted to, and often changed, the landscape around them, you can gain an appreciation of the power of long-term communal action: marshes can be drained, forests felled and field systems established. But these changes are not always predictable and no two communities will necessarily adapt to similar surroundings in the same way. Just like today, there seems to be no limit to the creative independence of people in the past. Some theoretical prehistorians believe that it can be possible to predict what you will discover in the ground, provided you have a thorough understanding of the climate, the environment and the population of a given region at a particular period in the past. But in my experience such predictions always fall well short of reality – and yes, they can focus one’s attention, but they can also provide intellectual blinkers that prevent one from seeing a broader and more interesting picture. Reconstructing, through patient survey and meticulous excavation, a picture of the way that communities and regional economies changed as they gained a measure of control over their surroundings is essentially a creative process. Good archaeology requires imagination. Analysis on its own is never enough. So I hope that the Scenes that follow will provide food for thought and will dispel the myth that people in the past lived lives that were simpler and somehow less rich than ours. Nothing could be further from the truth.
*
There is a general perception that life in Britain before the coming of the Romans changed very little, if at all. People in prehistory are still seen as somehow primitive, and waiting to be ‘civilized’ by armies of incoming Roman soldiers and administrators. But when the three Roman invasions happened (two by Caesar in 55 and 54 BC and the final conquest by the Emperor Claudius, in AD 43), the Roman army, then the most efficient fighting machine on Earth, developed a good deal of respect for British military resistance.
By the late first century BC, many upper-class or elite Britons, and this applied most particularly in the south and east, were adopting Roman patterns of dress; we can tell this from the bronze brooches they wore. As we do today, they were also enjoying Mediterranean wine, food and olive oil; again, we know this from the pestle and mortar fragments from their kitchens and from pieces of ceramic amphorae – the ancient equivalents of large bottles or small casks. The first coins were minted in Britain several decades before the Claudian invasion. I strongly suspect that many educated Britons in the south would have spoken Latin fluently and would have visited the mainland of Europe frequently. There would probably have been daily ferry crossings of the English Channel.
Late Iron Age Britain was very different from the same place almost ten thousand years previously, following the final retreat of the last Ice Age; indeed, it was another world. Apart from the fact that Britain had yet to become an island, which finally happened around 6000 BC, the population was still very small and people lived off the land by hunting and gathering their food. During the ten millennia of post-Ice Age prehistory, the population of what was to become the British Isles rose from a handful of settlers who migrated north, following the retreating ice, to something around three million at the time of the Roman conquest. It was that steady, but relentless, increase in population that helped to inspire and fuel the growth of distinctly British cultures. Social and economic change would not have been as fast as it is t
oday, but I think people would have been aware of it, especially in the later Bronze and the Iron Ages – from about 1000 BC. And that is why prehistorians have subdivided the three technology-based Ages of Stone, Bronze and Iron into Early, Middle and Late subphases. This chronology varies widely across the globe and is constantly being modified and improved.
Chronology forms the skeleton of prehistory. In the past it was estimated by the occurrence, for example, of later prehistoric tools on well-dated ancient Greek or Roman sites. But otherwise the dates were essentially a matter of informed guesswork. All of that changed in the 1950s and 1960s with the development, in 1949, of the technique of radiocarbon dating by the American physical chemist Willard F. Libby. Today there are many other techniques of science-based dating, some of which can be astonishingly accurate – if bark is present, tree-ring dating (or dendrochronology) can provide dates to the nearest three months. For example, the waterlogged circle of Bronze Age timbers known as ‘Seahenge’, from Holme-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, is known to have been constructed between April and June in the year 2049 BC.
Accurate dates are only a part of the story. Yes, they provide a reliable framework for the events of prehistory and allow us to weave them into a coherent story. They can even provide us with clues as to how people lived. If, for example, you know that a house was only occupied for a short time, you can make some accurate observations about what went on in various parts of the building; but if it was lived in by many families over several generations, the accumulation of debris makes it almost impossible to work out who did what, when and where. In prehistory, too much information can cause as many problems as a lack of it.
Radiocarbon dating was one of the earlier science-based innovations that helped to transform prehistory – and there have been many more since. There have also been huge advances in the way we can find and map ancient sites, from the ground, from the air and even from satellites. The study of genetics and DNA is causing us to revise many long and sometimes fondly held views about invasions and migrations. They help us answer the question: was it the movement of people or the spread of new ideas that brought us innovations such as farming, or the technology of metalworking? Often the answers turn out to be far from simple, or indeed predictable. As in life, questions often lead to further questions, rather than simple answers.
So prehistory is in a state of flux. Everything seems to be changing. Personally, I think that’s something to be welcomed. In the early part of my career, in the 1960s and 1970s, some of the textbooks we used had been written before the war. There was a stultifying orthodoxy about accepted interpretations of European prehistory. But even then, a few iconoclasts had started to probe the foundations of the accepted wisdom, which believed that following the spread of farming from the Near East, everything new in Europe had to originate from that part of the world. During my student reading I would come across the Latin catchphrase ‘Ex oriente lux’ (‘Out of the East, light’), again and again. Prehistoric people in western Europe were seen as being incapable of thinking for themselves. But then radiocarbon dates showed that the notion of progress invariably drifting from east to west was a myth. Sometimes ideas and innovations spread in the other direction. So the theoretical structure that had underpinned European prehistory for the first half of the twentieth century came crashing to the ground.
Of course, prehistorians have been rebuilding it ever since. Even now, fifty years later, the process of reconstructing that mental structure is still incomplete. Sometimes we seem to be making progress, then some fresh revelation causes timbers to crack and a newly built part of the structure collapses before our eyes. Yes, we live in very uncertain times, but it’s a creative uncertainty and that’s a huge improvement on the unwavering complacency of earlier decades. I’m sure all of my colleagues would agree that today is a very stimulating time to be a prehistorian. Indeed, there are moments when everything and anything seems possible.
Table showing the dates and principal events of British prehistory
Age
From
To
Notes
Old Stone Age
(or Palaeolithic)
1,000,000
years ago
12,000 BC
Period ends with the close of the last Ice Age.
Middle Stone Age
(or Mesolithic)
12,000 BC
4000 BC
From the end of the Ice Age to the arrival of farming.
New Stone Age
(or Neolithic)
4000 BC
2600 BC
The age of early farming. The first barrows and ceremonial centres.
Early Neolithic
4000 BC
3700 BC
First farmers and earliest communal tombs.
Middle Neolithic
3700 BC
3000 BC
Main use of long barrows and causewayed enclosures.
Late Neolithic
3000 BC
2600 BC
Henges and passage tombs. Larger settlements. First field systems.
Early Bronze Age
2600 BC
1500 BC
The Age of Stonehenge. The period starts with two or so centuries of using copper. Bronze arrived later. Round barrows. Flat axes and daggers. Seagoing ships.
Middle Bronze Age
1500 BC
1200 BC
‘Domestic Revolution’. Round barrows and henges cease to be used. Rapiers and palstaves.
Late Bronze Age
1200 BC
750 BC
Population expanding. Settlements increasing. Field systems growing. First hillforts.
Early Iron Age
750 BC
450 BC
First smelting of iron. Big increase in pottery production. More standardized round-houses. Rapid expansion of hillforts.
Middle Iron Age
450 BC
150 BC
Distinctive styles of heavier pottery. Population, farms and settlements rapidly expanding. Fewer, larger hillforts.
Late Iron Age
150 BC
AD 43
Decline of hillforts. First coins and wheel-made pottery. Larger, town-like settlements and ports/trading stations.
Roman Period
AD 43
AD 410
A blend of British and Roman lifestyles, now known as Romano-British culture.
Today there is a growing tendency to view the past through a series of isolated windows that focus on specific events. There are many reasons for this, including the sheer quantity of historical information revealed by recent historical and archaeological research. However, I believe a broader approach is needed if we are to understand all the implications of this new work.
Many of these often difficult questions can best be approached by taking a long view. For example, the immediate cause of the First World War may have been the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo in June 1914, but that was only a tiny part of a complex, multilayered story involving not just political leaders but underlying international tensions and ultimately the rise and spread of industrialism and the need for more democracy and greater social justice. Archaeologists are used to taking long views of the past, largely because the evidence we work with tends to be less specific and, of course, precise dating is very much harder. So we are good at detecting how, for example, prehistoric houses evolved over the millennia and the way that isolated settlements slowly grew into villages and eventually into towns. This broad-brush view of prehistory makes excellent sense and helps to explain how the peoples and societies of Britain developed in the millennia prior to the Roman conquest of AD 43. But it also draws our attention away from the people behind the changes. Sadly, we know very few names, as these were pre-literate societies, but we do know that many people lived full and healthy lives: evidence for malnourishment is rare in prehistoric graves – people often survived into their fifties
, and some into their sixties and seventies. The fine detail revealed in many modern excavations allows us to reconstruct moments in the distant past, even if we are not sure of their precise date. So we know, for example, how an Iron Age house was arranged and where people would have cooked, eaten and slept. Then sometimes new finds help us to learn even more. It’s these unexpected discoveries that can bring a place to life and transform a muddy site into a vivid Scene.
a ‘Prehistory’ refers to the story of human cultural and economic life before the introduction of writing, and with it written records. It varies across the globe. In Australia, for example, prehistory ends with the arrival of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century. In Britain, the Romans introduced writing when they invaded in AD 43.
b These are usually managed by local authorities and are known as Historic Environment Records (or HERs).
c Scenes 1 and 2, respectively.
d In many books, the less religiously specific term ‘Before Common Era’ (BCE) is used instead of BC, and CE (‘Common Era’) rather than AD.
e We will see this in Scenes 10 and 11 when we discuss the Fengate Bronze Age droveways.
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 2
