The ancient population of Britain.

Archeologists working in Norfolk in the early 21st century discovered stone tools that suggest the presence of humans in Britain from about 800,000 to 1 million years ago. These startling discoveries underlined the extent to which archeological research is responsible for any knowledge of Britain before the Roman conquest (begun AD 43). Britain’s ancient history is thus lacking in detail, for archeology can rarely identify personalities, motives, or exact dates or present more than a general overview. All that is available is a picture of successive cultures and some knowledge of economic development. But even in Roman times Britain lay on the periphery of the civilized world, and Roman historians, for the most part, provide for that period only a framework into which the results of archeological research can be fitted. Britain truly emerged into the light of history only after the Saxon settlements in the 5th century AD. 

Until late in the Mesolithic Period, Britain formed part of the continental landmass and was easily accessible to migrating hunters. The cutting of the land bridge, c. 6000–5000 BCE, had important effects: migration became more difficult and remained for long impossible to large numbers. Thus, Britain developed insular characteristics, absorbing and adapting rather than fully participating in successive continental cultures. And within the island geography worked to a similar end; the fertile southeast was more receptive of influence from the adjacent continent than were the less-accessible hill areas of the west and north. Yet in certain periods the use of sea routes brought these too within the ambit of the continent. 

From the end of the Ice Age (c. 11,000 BCE), there was a gradual amelioration of climate leading to the replacement of tundra by forest and of reindeer hunting by that of red deer and elk. Valuable insight on contemporary conditions was gained by the excavation of a lakeside settlement at Star Carr, North Yorkshire, which was occupied for about 20 successive winters by hunting people in the 8th millennium BCE. 

Pre-Roman Britain 

Neolithic Period

A major change occurred c. 4000 BCE with the introduction of agriculture by Neolithic immigrants from the coasts of western and possibly northwestern Europe. They were pastoralists as well as tillers of the soil. Tools were commonly of flint won by mining, but axes of volcanic rock were also traded by prospectors exploiting distant outcrops. The dead were buried in communal graves of two main kinds: in the west, tombs were built out of stone and concealed under mounds of rubble; in the stoneless eastern areas the dead were buried under long barrows (mounds of earth), which normally contained timber structures. Other evidence of religion comes from enclosures (e.g., Windmill Hill, Wiltshire), which are now believed to have been centers of ritual and of seasonal tribal feasting. From them developed, late in the 3rd millennium, more clearly ceremonial ditch-enclosed earthworks known as henge monuments. Some, like Durrington Walls, Wiltshire, are of great size and enclose subsidiary timber circles. British Neolithic culture thus developed its own individuality.