Neolithic British Isles
Geographical range | Bronze Age Ireland |
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The
During the Mesolithic period, the inhabitants of the British Isles had been hunter-gatherers. Around 4000 BC, migrants began arriving from
The Neolithic also saw the construction of a wide variety of monuments in the landscape, many of which were
The Neolithic people in Europe were not literate and so they left behind no written record that modern historians can study. All that is known about this time period in Europe comes from
Historical overview
Late Mesolithic
The period that preceded the Neolithic in the British Isles is known by archaeologists as the Mesolithic. During the early part of that period, Britain was still attached by the landmass of Doggerland to the rest of Continental Europe. The archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone noted that during the Late Mesolithic, the British Isles were something of a "technological backwater" in European terms and were still living as a hunter-gatherer society though most of Southern Europe had already taken up agriculture and sedentary living.[2]
Early and Middle Neolithic: 4000–2900 BC
"The Neolithic period is one of remarkable changes in landscapes, societies and technologies, which changed a wild, forested world, to one of orderly agricultural production and settled communities on the brink of socially complex 'civilization'. It was a period that saw the arrival of new ideas and domesticated plants and animals, perhaps new communities, and the transformation of the native peoples of Britain. The Neolithic opened an entirely new episode in human history. It took place in Britain over a relatively short space of time, lasting in total only about 2000 years – in human terms little more than 80–100 generations."
— Archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone on the Neolithic in Britain (2001)[2]
Spread of Neolithic
Between 10,000 BC to 8,000 BC the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East gradually transformed hunter-gathering societies into settled agricultural societies.[3] Similar developments later occurred independently in Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, Africa, China and India.[4] It was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the Fertile Crescent, which stretched through what are now parts of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, areas that already had rich ecological variation, which was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Late Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic periods.[5]
Early signs of these hunter-gatherers beginning to harvest, manipulate and grow various food plants have been identified in the Mesolithic Natufian culture of the Levant, which showed signs that would later lead to the actual domestication and farming of crops. Archaeologists believe that the Levantine peoples subsequently developed agriculture in response to a rise in their population levels that could not be fed by the finite food resources that hunting and gathering could provide.[6] The time period in which this happened is still debated, with some evidence placing the development of agriculture as early as 12,500 BC.[7] The idea of agriculture subsequently spread from the Levant into Europe and was adopted by hunter-gathering societies in what is now Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and across the Mediterranean and eventually reached north-western Europe and the British Isles.[8]
The Neolithic in the British Isles
Until recently, archaeologists debated whether the Neolithic Revolution was brought to the British Isles through adoption by natives or by migrating groups of Continental Europeans who settled there.[8]
A 2019 study found that the Neolithic farmers of the British Isles had entered the region through a mass migration c. 4100 BC. They were closely related to Neolithic peoples of Iberia, which implies that they were descended from agriculturalists who had moved westwards from the Balkans along the Mediterranean coast. The arrival of farming populations led to the almost-complete replacement of the native Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the British Isles, who did not experience a genetic resurgence in the succeeding centuries.[9]
The 2003 discovery of the
Late Neolithic: 3000–2500 BC
End of the Neolithic
"After over a thousand years of early farming, a way of life based on ancestral tombs, forest clearance and settlement expansion came to an end. This was a time of important social changes."
— Archaeologist and prehistorian Mike Parker Pearson on the Late Neolithic in Britain (2005)[10]
From the
Characteristics
Agriculture
The Neolithic is largely categorised by the introduction of
There is no doubt that domesticated animals and plants had to be carried by boat from the continent of Europe to the British Isles. There are a number of options. Groups of pioneers could have set off from the continent in one-off small-scale invasions. Or people might have arrived after a long-term and eclectic mixture of contacts down the continental coast from Denmark to France. Or gatherer-hunters might have traveled by boat to the continent and brought back the animals and plants as the result of slowly developing exchange contacts. There is no answer to this puzzle, which is all the more intriguing since the earliest evidence for farming in the British Isles comes from Ireland and probably the Isle of Man, and not from southern Britain.[16]
The reason for switching from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle has been widely debated by archaeologists and anthropologists. Ethnographic studies of farming societies who use basic stone tools and crops have shown that it is a much more labour-intensive way of life than that of hunter-gatherers. It would have involved deforesting an area, digging and tilling the soil, storing seeds, and then guarding the growing crops from other animal species before eventually harvesting them. In the cases of grains, the crop produced then has to be processed to make it edible, including grinding, milling and cooking. All of that involves far more preparation and work than either hunting or gathering.[4]
Deforestation
The Neolithic agriculturalists
Between 4300 and 3250 BCE, there was a widespread decline in the number of
Meanwhile, from around 3500 to 3300 BCE, many of those deforested areas began to see reforestation and mass tree regrowth, indicating that human activity had retreated from those areas.[19]
Settlement
Around the period between 3500 and 3300 BC, agricultural communities had begun centring themselves upon the most productive areas, where the soils were more fertile, namely around the
The Neolithic houses of the British Isles were typically rectangular and made out of wood and so none had survived to this day. Nonetheless, foundations of such buildings have been found in the archaeological record although they are rare and have usually been uncovered only when they were in the vicinity of the more substantial Neolithic stone monuments.[20]
Monumental architecture
Chambered tombs
The Early and the Middle Neolithic also saw the construction of large
As the historian Ronald Hutton related, "There is no doubt that these great tombs, far more impressive than would be required of mere repositories for bones, were the centres of ritual activity in the early Neolithic: they were shrines as well as mausoleums. For some reason, the success of farming and the veneration of ancestral and more recent bones had become bound up together in the minds of the people".[22]
Although there are disputed radiocarbon dates indicating that the chambered tomb at Carrowmore in Ireland dates to circa 5000 BCE, the majority of such monuments in the British Isles appear to have been built between 4000 and 3200 BC, a time period that the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson notes means that tomb building was "a relatively short-lived fashion in archaeological terms".[21] Amongst the most notable of these chambered tombs are those clustered around the Brú na Bóinne complex in County Meath, eastern Ireland: they include Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, the first of which was built between 3100 and 2900 BCE.[23]
Stone circles
The Late Neolithic also saw the construction of megalithic stone circles.
Society and culture
Stone technology
The stone or
Settlement
Neolithic Britons were capable of building a variety of different wooden constructions. For instance, in the marshland of the Somerset Levels in south-western Britain, a wooden trackway was built in the winter of 3807 BC and connected the Polden Hills with Westhay Mears, a length which ran for over a kilometre.[25]
Diet
Being agriculturalists, the Neolithic peoples of the British Isles grew
There is also evidence that
Religion
As the archaeologist John C. Barrett noted, "There never was a single body of beliefs which characterise 'neolithic religion'... The variety of practices attested by [the various Neolithic] monuments cannot be explained as the expression of a single, underlying cultural idea".[27]
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Carved stone ball from Towie, Scotland, c. 3200 BC
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Folkton Drums, England, c. 2600 BC
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Burton Agnes drum, England, c. 3000 BC
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Macehead, Wales, 3000–2500 BC
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Stone armring and callaïs jewellery
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Engraved 'calendar stone' at Knowth
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Carved stone balls, Scotland
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Jade axe, England, c. 3000 BC
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Chiselled granite basin, Newgrange
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Stone bowl, Knowth
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Carved stone from Newgrange
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The 'Westray Wife' from Orkney
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Polished stone macehead, England, c. 2900 BC
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Macehead from Knowth
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Inscribed symbols from Skara Brae
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Neolithic house reconstruction at Butser Farm
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Neolithic house, 3800 BC, reconstruction at Butser Farm
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Knap of Howar, Orkney, Scotland, 3700–2800 BC
Antiquarian and archaeological investigations
17th and 18th centuries
It was in the 17th century AD that scholarly investigation into the surviving Neolithic monuments first began in the British Isles, but at the time, these
The first to do so was the antiquary and writer John Aubrey (1626–1697), who had been born into a wealthy gentry family before he went on to study at Trinity College, Oxford, until his education was disrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil War between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces. He recorded his accounts of the megalithic monuments in a book, the Monumenta Britannica, but it remained unpublished.[28]
Nonetheless, Aubrey's work was picked up by another antiquarian in the following century, William Stukeley (1687–1765), who had studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before he became a professional doctor.
19th century
The term "Neolithic" was first coined by the archaeologist John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, in his 1865 book Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. He used it to refer to the final stage of the Stone Age and defined this period purely on the technology of the time, when humans had begun using polished stone tools but not yet started making metal tools.[29] Lubbock's terminology was adopted by other archaeologists, but as they gained a greater understanding of later prehistory, it came to cover a wider set of characteristics. By the 20th century, when figures like V. Gordon Childe were working on the British Neolithic, the term "Neolithic" had been broadened to "include sedentary village life, cereal agriculture, stock rearing, and ceramics, all assumed characteristic of immigrant agriculturalists".[30]
20th and 21st centuries
In the 1960s, a number of British and American archaeologists began taking a new approach to their discipline by emphasising their belief that through the rigorous use of the scientific method, they could obtain objective knowledge about the human past. In doing so, they forged the theoretical school of processual archaeology. The processual archaeologists took a particular interest in the ecological impact on human society, and in doing so, the definition of "Neolithic" was "narrowed again to refer just to the agricultural mode of subsistence".[30]
In the late 1980s, processualism began to come under increasing criticism by a new wave of archaeologists, who believed in the innate subjectivity of the discipline. The figures forged the new theoretical school of post-processual archaeology, and a number of post-processualists turned their attention to the Neolithic British Isles. They interpreted the Neolithic as an ideological phenomenon that was adopted by British, Irish and Manx society and led to them creating new forms of material-culture, such as the megalithic funerary and ceremonial monuments.[30]
Gallery
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Reconstructed house interior at Skara Brae
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Maen Ceti (arthur stone) burial site, Gower, Wales.
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Bryn Celli Ddu, Wales
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Part of the Sweet Track oak causeway, England, c. 3800 BC
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Reconstruction of the Sweet Track
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Knowth interior passage
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Reconstructed buildings at Stonehenge
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Model of a Neolithic house, Ireland
References
- ^ Adkins, Adkins and Leitch 2008. p. 37-38.
- ^ a b Malone 2001. p. 11.
- ^ Graeme, Barker (2009). The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers?. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ a b Malone 2001. p. 18.
- ^ Malone 2001. p. 20.
- ^ Malone 2001. pp. 20–21.
- ^ World's oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) 2018
- ^ a b Malone 2001. p. 22.
- PMID 30988490.
- ^ Pearson 2005. p. 57.
- ^ Köljing, Cecilia (2018-02-21). "Ancient DNA reveals impact of the "Beaker Phenomenon" on prehistoric Europeans". University of Gothenburg. Archived from the original on 2019-05-23.
- ^ The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe (2017)
- ^ Barras, Colin (27 March 2019). "Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA". New Scientist.
- ^ Pearson 2005. p. 17-19.
- ^ Rowley-Conwy, Peter (2011), "Westward Ho! The Spread of Agriculturalism from Central Europe to the Atlantic," Current Anthropology, Vol. 51, No. S4, pp. S442-S443. Downloaded from JSTOR.
- ^ Pearson 2005. pp. 13–14.
- ^ a b Pearson 2005. pp. 16–17.
- ^ Pearson 2005. p. 32.
- ^ a b Pearson 2005. pp. 56–57.
- ^ Pearson 2005. p. 41.
- ^ a b Pearson 2005. p. 34.
- ^ a b Hutton 1991. p. 21.
- ^ "PlanetQuest: The History of Astronomy – Newgrange".
- ^ Pearson 2005. p. 27.
- ^ Pearson 2005. p. 09-10.
- ^ a b Pearson 2005. p. 33.
- ^ Barrett 1994. p. 50.
- ^ a b Malone 2001. p. 23.
- ^ Lubbock 1865. p. 2-3.
- ^ a b c Rowley-Conwy 2004. p. S83.
Bibliography
Academic and popular books
- Adkins, Roy; Adkins, Lesley & Leitch, Victoria (2008). The Handbook of British Archaeology (Second Edition). London: Constable.
- Barrett, John C. (1994). Fragments from Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900-1200 BC. Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, U.S.: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-18954-1.
- Bradley, Richard (2007). The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-61270-8.
- ISBN 978-0-631-17288-8.
- Lubbock, John (1865). Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. London: Williams and Norgate.
- ISBN 0-7524-1442-9.
- ISBN 0-7134-8849-2.
- Williams, Mike (2010). Prehistoric Belief: Shamans, Trance and the Afterlife. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. ISBN 978-0-7524-4921-0.
Academic papers and articles
- Richards, Colin (1996). "Monuments as Landscape: creating the centre of the world in late Neolithic Orkney". World Archaeology. 28 (2): 190–208. JSTOR 125070.
- Rowley-Conwy, Peter (2004). "How the West Was Lost: A Reconsideration of Agricultural Origins in Britain, Ireland and Southern Scandinavia" (PDF). Current Anthropology. 45: S83–S113. doi:10.1086/422083.
- Thomas, Julian (2003). "Thoughts on the 'Repacked' Neolithic Revolution". Antiquity. 77 (295): 67–74. S2CID 161274102.
- Watson, Aaron (2001). "Composing Avebury". World Archaeology. 33 (2): 296–314. S2CID 219609029.
External links
Media related to Neolithic British Isles at Wikimedia Commons