Lecture 1 Ancient Britain

1.1. Prehistoric Britain

A million years ago, the whole of northwestern Europe, including Britain, was in the grip of the last Ice Age. During this period, the ice advanced and retreated several times across the land. Britain was joined to Europe by a land bridge.

Archaeologists think that the earliest ancestors of modern human beings may have entered Britain overland from Europe more than half a million years ago. These hominids belonged to the Old Stone Age. They used stone tools and may have discovered how to control fire. They travelled as hunters, following herds of migrating wild animals. The earliest known settlements in Britain date from about 250,000 B.C. They include a site at Clacton, Essex, where stone choppers have been found.

About 70,000 BC, the last of the severe glaciations began, and for much of this period, no hominids lived in Britain. Those who did venture into Britain during short mild spells dwelt in caves. These hominids included the earliest modern human beings.

About 12,000 B.C., the last Ice Age was ending, and the climate had begun to improve. People still dwelt in caves and hunted for food. Cheddar in Somerset and Creswell Crags in Derbyshire have produced many interesting finds from this period. These finds include Britain's only surviving works of Paleolithic art. One such find, the Dancing Man of Creswell Crags, is a puzzling engraving on a piece of bone. It is said to resemble a masked male dancer.

          1.2. The Pre-Celtic Period

By about 8000 B.C., Britain at last emerged from the Ice Age. Over the next 5,000 years, the improving climate changed the environment. The slowly rising temperature caused the ice sheets to melt and raised the level of the sea. Britain lost its land link with the rest of Europe after the formation of the English Channel and the North Sea about 5000 B.C.

Some historians refer to the original population as the Scots and Picts with whom newcomers started merging. The Picts inhabited mainly Scotland and the Scots lived in what we know as Ireland [or ‘Scotia’].

Britain attracted new settlers during this period. They hunted and fished, and their culture was more advanced than that of the Paleolithic Period. Archaeologists call these settlers Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) people. One group of these settlers migrated from Denmark not long after 8000 B.C. Their most famous remains are at a settlement at Star Carr, North Yorkshire.

Mesolithic people made such tools as saws and mattocks. Mesolithic hunters domesticated the dog The people of this time also cleared a few areas of forest by fire, and some experts think they used the clearings for herding deer and other game.

Shortly before 4000 B.C., scattered tribes of people travelled to Britain from the mainland of western Europe. These people brought the settled and highly organized culture of the Neolithic (New Stone Age) Period with them. They were mainly farmers and village traders. They cleared large areas of woodland and made fields for planting crops and farming livestock. They also made and traded in Britain's earliest pottery.

The Neolithic people appear to be the first in Britain to have put up buildings of stone and wood. They also built the first roads—wooden trackways across marshy areas such as the Somerset Levels.

Neolithic people buried their dead in communal chambered tombs built of stone. These tombs belong to the class of huge monuments of stone called megaliths. Megalithic monuments also include vast circles of standing stones. The best known of these, Stonehenge was probably begun about 2700 B.C. and completed by Bronze Age builders.

Between 3000 B.C. and 2500 B.C., people began using metal in Britain. New immigrants arrived in the country. One group came about 1700 BC from the Rhine-land and the Netherlands (an Alpine race), and mixed with another from Spain and Portugal (the Iberian people who came here earlier - around 2400 BC). The newcomers were skilled in the use of copper and gold. Unlike the slim, long-headed people of Neolithic Britain, they were stocky and round-headed. Archaeologists refer to the new settlers as the Beaker Folk, because of the distinctive beaker-shaped pottery vessels they buried with their dead.

The Beaker Folk tended to live in isolated round houses, not in villages. They usually buried their dead singly under round barrows.

By about 1400 B.C., Bronze Age people had completed Stonehenge and had built a larger monument at Avebury, in Wiltshire. They also built stone circles in many other places.

Archaeologists know little of life in the Bronze Age, but many experts think that the use of the wheel and the plough began in Britain during this period.