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

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.