10,000 to 4,500 Years Ago: The Beginnings

History strictly starts when things are written down yet nothing is written down about the British Isles until overseas invaders and traders start noticing the place. What we know about the past before that comes from things dug out of the ground and then theorised about.

Of course, 'history' in the prehistorical sense of what we can tell from the dug up things and from the theory never actually starts as such, or at least, if it started, it started with the Big Bang. Who knows if that was indeed a start or just another event succeeding events of which we can know nothing.

A good place for us to start though is when the British Isles becomes a number of islands disconnected from the Continent of Europe. Although using boats means that no island so close to a continent is isolated, nevertheless, the relatively large size of the main two islands and the gap between them and Europe of just over twenty miles at its narrowest point (the Strait of Dover) means that a distinctive culture of set of cultures was bound to appear.

You can tell about past climates from geology. When glaciers melt, they leave behind them a till of sands and gravels. Hot deserts can leave behind rocks coloured red from iron deposits. Hot climates evaporate sea water and leave behind them salts. Thus it is that we know that ten thousand years ago our last set of glaciers, part of a series that may yet return despite 'climate change', started to recede with a warming climate. The sea (though still below levels today and still permitting a land connection until eight thousand five hundred years ago) started to rise rapidly (comparatively).

(Source: Wikipedia)

To the right is a hypothetical map of what the area might have looked like at ten thousand years ago with the North Sea area now generally given the name of Doggerland.

One of the central sites of British civilisation is Stonehenge and it is roughly as early as this that the site has several pine 'totem poles' that served some purpose, presumably ritual, for hunter-gatherers (termed Mesolithic). There is no necessary link to the later ritual use of the site.

Doggerland was flooded and the British Isles finally separated from the Continent around eight and half thousand years ago or at least only a few centuries later. Agriculture, no doubt as a form of 'slash and burn' clearing the forest which dominated the countryside, began around six thousand eight hundred years ago. This begins the Neolithic - the period of predominantly settled agriculture.

The primary tool of the Neolithic was flint. We know of around 14 flint mines of which the earliest, possibly the earliest in Europe, is found (to our current knowledge) on the South Downs above Worthing in Sussex dated to around six thousand years ago. This industry would later evolve into (by the standards of the time) a major production effort at Grime's Grave in Norfolk from 5,000 years ago, at a site probably still producing flint into the Iron Age - flint would still be cheaper than bronze and iron during its earliest phase of development - although its major period of use was in its first millennium.

The first major fixed structures start appearing soon after this. An ancient causeway, the Sweet Track, appears across the Somerset Levels. It had been built over an even earlier timber track way. Traces of another earlier timber causeway have been found at Plumstead, making these the oldest timber trackways in Northern Europe. Underneath the Iron Age hill fort at Maiden Castle in Dorset, there is an 8 hectare neolithic causewayed enclosure on the eastern part of the hill that appears two or three hundred years after the timber trackways elsewhere so we have a culture emerging with sufficient organisation to create small settlements.

This brings us back to Stonehenge whose first (of several iterations) is an earth circle (see right) with an outer ditch made of chalk and standing on slightly sloping open grassland (built around 5,200
years ago). Archaeologists have estimated that 4,000 people may have met at mid-winter and mid-summer solstice dates, based on animal bones being consistently nine and fifteen months after spring birth. Isotope analysis has shown that some of the animals came from as far as the Scottish Highland suggesting island-wide trading networks at least and some sense of 'national' community at speculative most.

(Source - www.orkneyjar.com)

At the other end of the country, in Orkney,  a complex of neolithic settlements had developed even before Stonehenge I. One village of eight stone settlements at Skara Brae (see left) survives today as Europe's most complete neolithic village. Two other monumental sites close this early stage period for a fairly sophisticated farming, livestock and trading culture, Silbury Hill (see left below top), an artificial chalk mound that is the tallest prehistoric human made mound in Europe, was created around 3,700 BC and nearby Avebury was built around 3,600 years ago, both in the same general region of Stonehenge, Wiltshire. Avebury (see right below) is a henge (a ring bank with the ditch inside the bank rather than outside the monument which immediately suggests some use other than defence) that contains three stone circles.

(Source - Wikipedia)

(Source - www.stone-circles.org.uk)

Bringing all this together, we have, four and a half thousand years ago, a very advanced culture by the standards of the era that seems to be communicating across the whole island and has the resources to build settlements and monuments, some of which appear to exceed anything being done elsewhere in Europe at the time.