4,500 Years Ago to 325BC: High Culture & Tribalism

The dominant form of cultural centre was, however, the henge which is found all over Britain from Scotland to Wessex and which is generally regarded as a local development of the causewayed enclosure. These were in use right through the neolithic and into the subsequent bronze and iron ages.

The Thornborough Henges Complex - three henges can be identified (For Source - see Note 1)

In the later two ages (from roughly 3,000 years ago) we see the rise of the hill fort which is a European-wide phenomenon and definitely has defensive characteristics which henges do not. The hill forts are believed to indicate significant population increase - most iron age settlements were of about 50 people but the hill forts could have populations of up to 1,000 and, as we move into the Roman period, the oppida that derived from them and were situated primarily within the trading zone between 'Celts' and Romans could reach 10,000 persons (though these would tend to develop more readily on the European Continent).

Maiden Castle - Photographed in 1935 from the air (For Source - see Note 2)

If Stonehenge appears to decline in importance during the iron age, another ritual centre of European importance emerged 3,500 years ago during the neolithic at Flag Fen near Peterborough. It lasted for nearly a millennium as the (so far as we can know anything about the period)) primary bronze age site. The site is still under archaeological investigation but is significant because the ritual structures seem to have involved the importation of material (wood in this case) from a distance, much as we have seen in the Stonehenge case. This is hard to interpret but the labour involved suggests a form of conspicuous consumption based on concentrated wealth and a strong belief system.

This is the point at which history arrives. After nine and a half thousand years of development that can only be studied through the archaeological record and with much speculation based on modern anthropological analogies, a text finally refers to the Pretanic Islands. Around 325BC, a Massilian (Marseilles) trader and explorer Pytheas allegedly circumnavigated Britain and reached the polar ice of the Arctic (he undoubtedly visited Britain, though probably not Ireland, whatever the other claims). He described the islands and something of its iron age culture in a now lost work, although the reference has remained on the record because of the respect in which the text was held in the Ancient World. Interestingly, Catalyst, the left wing think tank with which we were once involved in as co-founders, suggested in 1999 using the term Pretanic once again to help get the United Kingdom out of the log jam of post-imperial British identity. The idea did not capture the imagination of the Blairite Government.

Notes

(1)  "Thornborough Henge" by Tony Newbould. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thornborough_Henge.jpg#/media/File:Thornborough_Henge.jpg

(2) "Aerial photograph of Maiden Castle, 1935" by Major George Allen (1891–1940) - Ashmolean Museum. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_photograph_of_Maiden_Castle,_1935.jpg#/media/File:Aerial_photograph_of_Maiden_Castle,_1935.jpg