Module 1 Ancient Britain

Lecture 1 Prehistoric Britain (1 h.)

1. Introduction

Prehistoric Britain was a period in the human occupation of Great Britain that extended throughout prehistory, ending with the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43.

In fact Britain has been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years. None of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain had any written language, so their history, culture and way of life are known only through archaeological finds.

The first written record of Britain and its inhabitants was by the Greek navigator Pytheas, who explored the coastal region of Britain around 325 BC. Ancient Britons were however involved in extensive trade and cultural links with the rest of Europe from the Neolithic, or the last part of the Stone Age, onwards, especially in exporting tin which was in abundant supply (its importance will later be clear).

Located at the fringes of Europe, Britain received foreign technological and cultural achievements much later than mainland areas did during prehistory. The story of ancient Britain is traditionally seen as one of successive waves of settlers from the continent, bringing with them new cultures and technologies. More recent archaeological theories have questioned this migrationist interpretation and argue for a more complex relationship between Britain and the continent. Many of the changes in British society demonstrated in the archaeological record are now suggested to be the effects of the native inhabitants adopting foreign customs rather than being subsumed by an invading population.

2. Palaeolithic

Palaeolithic Britain is the period from almost 750,000 years ago until around 10,000 years ago. This huge length of time saw many changes in the environment, encompassing several glacial and interglacial periods which greatly affected human settlement in the region. Providing dating for this distant period of time is difficult and contentious. The inhabitants of the region at this time were bands of hunter-gatherers who roamed all over northern Europe following herds of animals.

2.1 Lower Palaeolithic

All we have to take as some evidence is bones and flint tools found in coastal deposits. There is evidence that Homo erectus was present in what is now Britain around 700,000 years ago.

At this time, southern and eastern Britain was linked to continental Europe by a wide land bridge allowing humans to move freely. The current position of the English Channel was a large river (The Bytham River), it used to run through the English Midlands until around 450,000 years ago, flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that would later become the Thames and Seine. That was the route first visitors took to arrive at what was then a peninsula of the Eurasian continent. Archaeologists have found a string of early sites located close to the route of this now lost watercourse which indicate that it was exploited as the earliest route west into Britain.

Best known Lower Palaeolithic archaeological site is Boxgrove in Sussex. It illustrates archaic Homo species called Homo heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago. Numerous flint tools called Acheulean and remains of animals were found at the site. They shared the area with a wide variety of animals whose bones have been found there, including lions, bears, rhinos and giant deer. They drove elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to more easily kill them.

The extreme cold of the following glaciation is likely to have driven humans out of Britain altogether and the region does not appear to have been occupied again until the next warmer period. It lasted for about 60,000 years (from around 420,000 until 360,000 years ago) and saw the Clactonian flint tool industry develop at sites such as Barnfield Pit in Kent. This period has produced a rich and widespread distribution of sites by Palaeolithic standards although uncertainty over the relationship between the Clactonian and Acheulean industries is still unresolved.

A further period of cooling lasted about 120,000 years (until around 240,000 years ago) and saw Levallois flint tools introduced, possibly by humans arriving from Africa. It was much more advanced. The process of making these tools has been reconstructed and we can see that it was a sophisticated technique producing fine tools with sharp edges. This flint technology permitted more efficient hunting and therefore made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain during this ice age. However, there is little evidence of human occupation during the subsequent interglacial between around 180,000 and 70,000 years ago. Just vice versa! The point is that meltwaters from the previous glaciation cut Britain off from the continent for the first time during this period which may explain the lack of activity.

Further prehistoric life in Britain can be shown with the help of the references provided by arcaeologists describing a well-known site called Creswell Crags. Creswell Crags is a limestone gorge in the North East of the County of Derbyshire, in the East Midlands of England near the villages of Creswell and Whitwell. The cliffs of the ravine contain several caves that were occupied during the last ice age by Neanderthals, between around 43,000 and 10,000 years ago.

About 120,000 years ago we could have seen the warm summer sun shining down on a group of hippopotami wallowing in the muddy stream. Trampled trees and shrubs must have been littering the valley and a small herd of straight tusked elephants passing through the gorge. There’d have been a bear taking shade beneath a tree away from the cliff edge and a fox hunting for small mammals to eat.